Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair

Hilary Giovale has devoted her life to understanding the erased history of her white ancestors and healing from the harms of whiteness. In Becoming a Good Relative, Giovale offers her transformative journey of grappling with ancestral memory to understand her inheritance of whiteness in a colonial paradigm. Her exploration of her Scottish and Irish ancestry, seeking parallels with Indigenous perspectives that honor the land and all beings, has led her to a profound understanding of the harms of settler-colonial perspectives. Through a narrative that weaves profound realizations about cultural amnesia and socioeconomic inequities. Giovale advocates for wealth redistribution, reparations, and truth-telling as necessary steps toward change.

What makes Giovale’s narrative particularly exceptional is the emphasis on humility. She shares her mistakes and how she has humbly made amends, a process that involves listening to Indigenous people, admitting missteps when interacting with cultures not her own, and asking for grace from the people she has unknowingly harmed. While Becoming a Good Relative is primarily written for white-identified readers, Giovale has essential lessons about untangling from whiteness for people of all identities. In one way or another, anyone living amid white supremacy internalizes its lessons: who and what is valued, how and why others are subjugated, and how we all are complicit in perpetuating injustice. Giovale invites readers to be more empathetic in our journeys of changing perspectives and embodying respectful relations.