Overview: This co-authored piece offers an overview of the foundational practices and apprenticeships orienting the Re-Calling Our Ancestors team’s framework of ritual inquiry in ancestral recovery, truth-telling, and collective repair.

Note: In this co-authored piece, we often utilized a first-person voice to tell this story. This is a common writing convention for us at Re-Calling Our Ancestors. As settlers who have been taught to emphasize our uniqueness, part of our work together is exploring nuances of “I” and “we” — what truly is individual and what is collective? While some of the particularities in this piece may be the story of one of us, the trajectory of our experiences and the writing of this piece were shared.

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While it may be a gift or a burden, a heritage is always a responsibility. Something to be dwelled with — to be honored and acknowledged, even if not always avowed — placing us in relationship, perhaps under obligation, to those who have come before as well as those who will follow after.

— Thom Van Dooren

When my friend Geneva forwarded me the call for the Re-Calling Our Ancestors (“ROA”) Monthlong, with its image of a wide moon hanging low at dusk, my body gave a soft and urgent yes. As a poet, I had been writing privately about whiteness for years, desperate for my poems—which is to say, my inner voices, my interior lands—to feel less like shame spirals. I had just emerged from an MFA program centered around environmental writing, a program in which we learned, in a piecemeal fashion, about neoliberalism, empire, and the devastating impacts of colonization on Native communities and the living land. Surrounded by monocropped corn and industrial hog farms on a land nearly cleared of its Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples, I was beginning to ask what it meant to return to reciprocal relationship with our ecosystems—what it meant to be good kin. I had an inkling that whiteness might play more than a peripheral role in answering. 

When I registered for the ROA Monthlong, I was hungry for connection around ancestral questions that were too big for one person; a large part of me was also showing up to be a “good white person” doing the work I believed myself saddled with. I came with a body full of shame and little dignity in sight, intellectually armed, and wielding a high, nervous energy, anxious about saying the right thing, checking my video for the appropriate postures. Soon, we would soothe away much of this perfectionism and control. And I would learn that, in community, in relationship, the work I thought myself burdened with—the work of ancestral recovery and reckoning with white supremacy—is not only possible work, but vital: life-affirming.

Before I stepped into the ROA room, I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know what “ancestral recovery” even meant. I knew to follow the clear yes rising from my body, the chills blooming up my nape. I knew it was time. As October crept in, I could feel it on the wind. 

What is ancestral recovery, and why now?

Who could we be — and what could be possible — with a renewed relationship to our past? 

Re-Calling Our Ancestors is founded from this question. We believe in mobilizing white folks towards lasting and accountable reparative action through cultural renewal and rehabilitation. As scholars and practitioners like Elaine Enns, Ched Myers, and Mary Watkins have pointed out, we know that for white people, understanding histories and ongoing impacts of colonization and imperialism are essential to make sense of the present moment, do our part to stop oppression and exploitation, and redress historical harms.  

When our team began Re-Calling Our Ancestors, the US was still feeling the immediate reverberations of COVID, the end of the Trump administration, and the stark violence of ongoing state murders of Black people, leading to global uprisings in the aftermath of the cold-hearted killing of George Floyd. We had been asked and encouraged by People of the Global Majority in our networks and communities to convene among white and white-passing folks—in caucus with each other and our lineages—to further the efforts in our communities towards cross-cultural and multi-racial healing.

The name we chose came both from the verb recalling, as in the sense of remembering or bringing back, and the process of issuing a recall when something doesn’t work, as we worked to recall what was harmful in the legacies of our ancestors. Our hope was to forge a community in service of reparations, repair, and re-imagining a world of flourishing—by creating space for white and white-passing folks to process the traumas of colonization carried within our own bodies and lineages, in spaces that would not cause further harm to Black and Brown bodies. We were particularly interested in gathering white folks involved in rites of passage, nature connection, circle practitioners, and other healing modalities carrying similar legacies of cultural appropriation as part of their inheritance. Our interracial work in these fields had taught us that when we as white anti-racists strengthen our own resilience and relationships—individually and collectively—through ancestral practices and cultural reclamation, we have far more to offer multi-racial movements for justice.

In moving toward more just futures, it is straightforward to see how Indigenous communities can orient their paths forward rooted in the ancestral and cultural lineage of their people, drawing on (culturally specific) Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) to make sense of the world. How this applies to white-dominant settler communities is less straightforward. Yet as the original inheritors of modernity and those most buffered from its impacts, white settlers and European-descended peoples have particular roles to play in bringing forth futures beyond colonial frames. For settler populations, and those whose ancestral lineages have been disconnected from IWOK for centuries, envisioning futures of possibility can seem nearly impossible. As Mark Jameson puts it, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” 

Given this crisis of imagination, building our capacities to imagine otherwise is essential to carrying our communities beyond capital-colonial imaginations. Ancestral recovery is itself a practice of imagining otherwise. It’s a strange paradox that by stretching ourselves back into the past, we find our capacity grows to stretch ourselves into futures of new possibilities. Ancestral recovery is a collection of practices that help us reach backwards, through a sense of lineage and inheritance that is often severed, complex, and/or ambivalent—individually and collectively—in order to imagine and grow communities of belonging that exist beyond capitalism, white supremacy, and colonial oppression. 

Our work asks: what are the specific roles of white and white-assimilated people, within this global, consciousness-shifting work? What practices promote both healing and accountability for descendants of those who first envisioned the colonial dream we are currently living in—in ways that encourage us to take up these tasks, even at personal risk, as a critical element of broader societal shifts toward peace? 

Practices of Ancestral Recovery

At Re-Calling Our Ancestors, we begin by re-orienting towards practices rooted in cycles of the earth and cosmos. This is strategic, itself part of the work of ancestral recovery and repair; we pace ourselves and our study in alignment with ancestral cycles themselves. 

Specifically, we orient ourselves to the cycles of the Moon. While we acknowledge a diversity of cultural, ecological, and cosmological practices in our multi-cultural space of white and white passing folks, we focus on the Lunar cycle as a technology of time to support and guide our experience. Each phase of the Moon is a station on our curricular spiral:

We have learned that to “re-call our ancestors” is to engage a lifelong relationship with history and futurity. We hold it not as a singular, linear process, but rather a collection of interrelated,  ongoing practices of relating to our beloved dead and their ongoing legacies, to the lands and times that we inhabit, and to the purposes that we endeavor to fulfill. We experience that such practices necessitate iterative cycles. To re-call our ancestors is to spiral—to tend transformation and entertain futures through consistent, exploratory, deepening cycles of engagement. There are many timescales and timelines for our work of dismantling the systems of oppression in ourselves, our lineages, and in the world around us. We acknowledge and celebrate the necessity of ongoing ancestral reckoning.

Here are the core forms in which our work of ancestral recovery takes shape:

Study
Exploring historical legacies, learning and unlearning

We believe that intellectual understanding and critical analysis is a key element in our efforts to dismantle white supremacy. As we tend to the lineages of our ancestors and their relationship to whiteness, we need a framework of historical context to understand their processes of assimilation. We need to consciously understand what was lost, what was sacrificed, and who was impacted as our ancestors were enlisted into whiteness. 

Altarwork
Clearing and crafting a dedicated space for ancestors

Our work is centered on tending active and dynamic relationships with our beloved dead, whether those are ancestors of blood and family lines, ancestors of places and ecologies, ancestors of purpose and spirit. We invite our fellow travelers into deepening with their lineages: connection with particular lines and stories, awareness of ancestral presence in one’s day-to-day, and transformation of the inheritances that have been left to each of us. We have found the creation of an altar, and ongoing practices of altarwork, to be a profound gateway to support deepening relationships. Altars areportals that bring awareness of ancestral accompaniment.

Ancestral altars are culturally specific, aesthetically varied, and personally significant. We understand that there is not a single approach to engaging ancestors through altars. We invite participants into the question: How do you want to bring your people along with you in your learnings and unlearnings?  They may include photos or artifacts, fresh flowers or food, bowls of water or candles. We invite them to evolve their altars over the course of the mooncycle, as we move from station to station on the spiral. 

Somatic Practice
Situating ourselves in sensation to repattern embodied experience

As many of us know and science is increasingly pointing to, systems of white-supremacy, legacies of cultural assimilation, wisdom of our ancestral traditions, and so much more live in the composition, experience, and capacities of our embodiment. Re-Calling Our Ancestors is guided by the political strategy and cultural prayer that our somatic selves can be remade for the sake of flourishing—the neural circuitry, the postural dispositions, and the felt sense of our corporeal experience can be the site of transformation. How we inhabit our bodies can be how we work towards collective liberation.

In particular, we recognize that a critical element of white anti-racism and ancestral recovery is working with the bodily imprinting we’ve inherited from our ancestors, their assimilation into whiteness, and the ways they navigated systems of hierarchy and oppression. The legacies and lineages we descend from are enfleshed in us: the survival mechanisms, the cultural norms, the traumatic memories and vicarious traumas, the moral injuries, the addictive patterns, the patterns of resilience, and more. When we turn towards our ancestors, we turn towards all of these embodied legacies. We invite in grief, rage, terror, shame, dissociation. These are deep reservoirs. We explore together how to take small sips at a rate that we can ingest and metabolize, holding these deep legacies while also holding presence to the daily impact of imperial, state violence on our own bodies and those of so many of our kinfolk.

An important evolution in social justice work over the last decades has been the increasing recognition of the physical imprints of systems of oppression on our bodies and nervous systems. Powerful frameworks and modalities of work have evolved to support folks in unwinding these impacts. Additionally, we each carry particular ancestral wisdom and cultural practices for tending, resourcing, and healing our bodies. At Re-Calling Our Ancestors, we are especially grateful to the lineages of Somatic Abolitionism, generative somatics, Body-Mind Centering, Fierce Allies, and SomaSource for the contributions they’ve made to our team’s individual and collective practice. 

From these lineages we draw upon practices of resourcing. This is the first station of our spiral and the one to which we always return, even as we keep moving. We recognize that within the community we create, there are different bodies with different needs, creating space for folks to find that which nourishes and supports them.  

Earth-Intimacy
Inviting alliance with the more-than-human world 

We believe that reconnection with the more-than-human world is crucial to our work as white and white-passing people. Foundational to the logic of whiteness is a renunciation of animate and earth-cherishing traditions. Whiteness engenders false stories of separation, disconnection, and superiority, while the natural world exemplifies a clear truth of interrelationship. Ultimately, the core of what we are recalling together is our interdependence and kinship with all life. In so doing, we invite accompaniment from intelligences far greater than those curated by the myths of whiteness; we invite partnership with the place(s) we find ourselves. How each of us engages is unique, depending on location, ability, and access. 

We acknowledge that in doing so, for most of us (if not all), the lands that we inhabit, visit and live with are the traditional and contemporary homelands of Indigenous Peoples who have survived attempted genocide, invisibilization strategies and gaslighting. We know our attempts at Earth Intimacy fall short if we do not acknowledge the Peoples whose blood and bones are in the land, and reckon with how to be in relationship with this history and present reality. As we invite in deeper partnership with beings of earth, water, and sky, we do so in solidarity with movements for land back, for reparations, for climate justice, and for abolition. The forces of colonization, enslavement, and structural oppression are deeply entwined with the manipulation and management of lands and waters. As part of addressing and remediating these harmful forces, we seek to engage with the land as collaborator and kin – sensing into the linkages between the movements led by People of the Global Majority, the personal historical legacies we carry, and our own relationship with the lands and waters and all of the stories they carry. We understand and follow these ‘landlines,’ as author Elaine Enns calls them, as a modality of ancestral reckoning and repair. 

Ancestral Recovery: A Series of Apprenticeships

In addition to the Lunar-based pedagogical framework and bodies of practice described above, we also hold the work of ancestral recovery as a series of apprenticeships. To apprentice to something is to study with a master. At Re-Calling Our Ancestors, the masters we learn from are not people, but the forces themselves. 

Apprenticing to Relationship

To honor the importance of our practice communities and relationships in ancestral recovery, one of our central curricular components at Re-Calling Our Ancestors is the Chevruta. Historically, this term often refers to a companion within the context of yeshiva – your study buddy in school. Importantly, in Jewish tradition, textual learning— and specifically Talmudic learning — is always done in chevruta, never alone. We think of chevruta as a radical commitment to humility, interdependence, and collaborative world-building; a necessary ancestral precedent for us as white-assimilated folks in the dominant culture of ‘individualism.’ 

In chevruta, we are always responsible for one another. When we try to practice ancestral recovery individually, we can reflexively excuse ourselves for our complicity, offering ourselves offramps from the discomfort of acknowledging our roles in upholding white supremacy. When we do this work collectively, we hold each other accountable. 

We also do this work within resistance lineages of race-traitors and resistors. Disconnecting us from ancestors of resistance is one of the many strategies of white supremacy, one which ensures our complacency and complicity in whiteness. To be disconnected from ancestors and trancestors of resistance not only demoralizes us, but inhibits our strategies: we need precedents and examples of political struggle, in addition to cultural perseverance. Remembering our ancestors of resistance disrupts the historical process of assimilation and the assumed desirability and inevitability of whiteness, rejecting the notion that whiteness is something we should aspire towards. 

Culture is not something we do alone; together, we co-create an embodied possibility of anti-racist culture. We collude to coax these systems from our bodies, our work, our behaviors, our lineages. This collusion is one face of collective liberation. After all, building culture means being claimed in and by relationship—being claimed by our ancestors, traditions, our current social contexts, and our future descendants. Our opportunity and responsibility to the present moment is about negotiating those claims made on us: How do we relate to being claimed by whiteness? Rather than upholding systems of whiteness, how do we claim alternative histories and liberated futures within ourselves and our communities?

Apprenticing to Complexity

White anti-racist ancestral recovery work is inherently cross-cultural. As white and white-assimilated people, we come from a multiplicity of traditions, belief systems, and ways of orienting to the world—many of which were stolen, destroyed, lost, and forgotten. Some of these ways were traded for comfort, security, and the numbing sameness of whiteness; some of them we continue to ignore, invisibilize, and pathologize in one another. To undo the homogenization of white supremacist culture, our work in white caucus is to begin to meet each other as members of particular ancestral lineages, engaging in intra- and cross-cultural exchange and dialogue.

In doing so, we acknowledge that there is no static, pure, unchanging cultural past to resuscitate. Ancestral recovery is not about time travel, singularity, or purity; as writer and somatics facilitator Prentis Hemphill reminds us, “There’s no magical return… we’re not all going to return to an unblemished time in history.”

Likewise, there is no unblemished, magical culture to return to; the very conception of a fixed, delineated cultural, ethnic, and racial lineage is a product of white supremacist race science. Our ancestries are inherently symbiotic and dynamic. Our ancestries are also morally ambiguous and full of contradiction. The cultural heritages we long for are not pristine, not uncomplicated by histories of patriarchy, ableism, imperialism, and other forms of domination. If there is not a singular and static cultural past we are reviving—let alone a morally upstanding one—the question becomes: How are we working creatively with the materials of the past? How are we interpreting the past? And what is our agenda?

In her essay “Claiming Bad Kin,” Alexis Shotwell suggests that the task is “one of situating ourselves in relation to whiteness in ways that do not disavow or evade its past and present, while simultaneously working toward a future in which more beings than just white children have any kind of future at all.” Becoming a race traitor while not disavowing or erasing the histories and relationships we come from means turning towards, not away from, the relationships we claim and are claimed by, integrating them so that we may move forward without passing down the harm they’ve caused.  

Cultural recovery means showing up to the contradictory, the unknown, and the morally ambiguous realities of our lineages and inheritances—apprenticing precisely to the type of complexity that systems of oppression seek to deny and obscure into binary notions of good or bad, right and wrong.

Apprenticing to Discomfort

Facing the long-winded and ongoing history of white supremacy is painful, clunky, and uncomfortable. In the face of that risk, white supremacy offers numbness as protection. 

Thanks in large part to the powerful works of Black and Brown somatic therapists and practitioners like Prentice Hemphill, Resmaa Menakem, and J. Miakoda Taylor, we have come to understand that recovering from numbness starts with allowing in the discomfort. Turning towards the unruly nuances of our lineages and the ways they move in our bodies today requires skills that the dominant systems have systematically kept from us. As we turn towards the questions, practices, and reckonings ancestral recovery stokes, resourcing ourselves in this work serves not as avoidance, but a practice in widening our capacity for feeling discomfort without shutting down, lashing out, or collapsing. 

Much of the violence and aggression in our nation and world right now feeds on white discomfort. Many white folks are understandably uncomfortable with the conditions and the promise of America that this nation has not fully delivered, and this discomfort is exploited daily to further consolidate wealth and power into the hands of a small group of elites. Since the codification of race into law in the 17th century, race has been wielded as a weapon  by those in power to keep those with common interest apart. But the safety, security, and thriving of our kin of color has never been a threat. Meanwhile, their suffering is most assuredly a threat to our humanity. 

Learning to metabolize our discomfort is not a new age, touchy feely task; this is at the core of unlearning whiteness and learning how to dismantle systems of oppression, redistribute resources, risk, and security, and repair what has been/is being torn or broken. Apprenticing to discomfort means being honest about what happened and what is happening today, and holding each other in our dignity as we do so.

Apprenticing to Futurity

As we build communities of practice in service of mutual care and communal reckoning, the work of bridging white anti-racist work with that of ancestral recovery requires an apprenticeship to futurity, anti-apocalypse, and survival. We are challenging ourselves to awaken from the trance of white supremacy; to break the spell and cast it off.

To do so, our practices root in de-assimilation: letting go of the trappings of whiteness, divesting from its safety and security, and re-aligning ourselves as the descendants of peoples who knew how to be in right relationship with the lands and beings around them, as imperfectly as they did. De-assimilation doesn’t mean taking on wholesale the lives or traditions of our ancestors, who lived in lands far removed from where we find ourselves today; rather, it is a recognition that our strength comes from deepening into the multiplicities of where, who, and what we come from. This reach backward includes locating the future our ancestors dreamed for us, orienting to how their dreams brought us here, today, and casting off that which no longer serves us or the greater good. 

Through that process, we make space for seeding a future for our descendants beyond capital-colonial dreams—a chance to deepen our capacity to imagine de-assimilated futures that do not subsist on the exploitation of Black and Brown bodies, over-extraction from the land for profit, or ongoing genocides and ecocides. In the lineage of Black futurism, Indigenous futurism, and queer futurism, ancestral retrieval for white and white-assimilated people is a practice of imaging what else may be possible: of reconnecting with earth-cherishing and communally-rooted lineages in a practice of what we may once again root toward.

De-assimilation and futurity are not aspirational. While they are imaginal, they are also present now, here, in the small and ordinary acts of refusal, community building, and cultural renewal we practice daily. After all, “the elders teach that prophecy is not a predestined event in and of itself,” writes Orland Bishop, “but that human beings are walking in the world as prophecies of what they can create. We live on a threshold between what is and what could be if we decide for it.”

Futurity is available to us now. Futurity is alive in us now. We practice it in our Chevrutas, in relationship, and in our own bodies. Practicing together invokes an anti-racist future, and shows us what could be, if we choose it: thick community, clear purpose, and communal and personal grounding within the ongoing chaos of collapse. Our practice communities offer a ritual moment to connect with the lineages at our back and the lineages ahead of us; they offer a ritual opportunity to witness and call forth communal imagination, by bringing the future into the present moment. 

At the end of each Re-Calling Our Ancestors monthlong, we invite each other to make a commitment—any commitment related to this work of ancestral recovery and reckoning—scaled to a size we can keep. In the face of modernity, white supremacy, and capitalist realities both within our practice room and outside of it, these commitments are the stones forging our tangible path to liberated futures. Our commitments invoke the futures we see taking shape in the space together: flickering, hazy, or there-then-gone, but unmistakable. As empire continues to bear down around us, sounding a reverberating no to all flourishing, our commitments form a collective yes to what we know is possible—our collective yes to Life. 

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It’s been three years now since I stepped into the Re-Calling Our Ancestors community and slowly learned how to reroute my ancestral shame into radical, accountable love. I still have more questions than answers about who my ancestors were, what stories they lived, what songs they sang. Though the genealogist in me, the record keeper, the colonial taxonomer, wants to get it all right—my beloved dead’s names, travel itineraries, the exact harms they caused, and the debts they wracked up—I remember that the how matters more than the what. While I work to hear their stories, remember their songs, acknowledge their resistances, mourn the lands they disrupted in their settling, and mourn the peoples they directly and indirectly harmed in doing so, I recognize that turning toward each other—in practice, in apprenticeship, in collective undoing and collaborative imagining—is the only next step forward. 

Learn more about Re-Calling Our Ancestors, or reach out at outreach@recallingourancestors.org.

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