About Ancestral Ground

What do we mean by “ancestral ground”?

When we speak of the ground, we mean the life-supporting foundations of roots and lineage. This includes our blood, bodies, homelands and ecologies that contain inherited patterns of survival, trauma, courage and joy. Ground can also be a verb – to ground – that invites us to root back down into earth-honoring lifeways and to understand the systemic roots of separation and supremacy in the U.S.

Ancestral Ground is an inquiry, an invitation, and a commitment to understand the soil we are rooted in: its toxic silences, destructive layers, veins of liberation and aquifers of collective memory. Ancestral reckoning invites us to tend to our roots. It is the *bioremediation of colonial soil: dissolving amnesia, transmuting trauma, and transforming inheritances. From the process of turning toward what has been forgotten or severed, by digesting and reckoning with the past, something more whole and resilient can emerge in our bodies and our cultures.

Ancestral Ground is committed to:

Making visible the existing bridge between ancestral recovery work and anti-racism
Fostering transformative relationships of solidarity.
Creating an apothecary with robust resources and pathways for ancestral healing, repair and reconnection with land, community, body and spirit.
Contributing to the coherence, connectivity and relational field in this anti-supremacist ancestral movement.

Who can we be today to change the conditions of our world for the better, to right the wrongs of the past in the present, and to find the way to the future, so we can become good ancestors to the world to come?

– Ream

*Bio/Mycoremediation: Oyster Mushrooms

Across the Ancestral Ground site, you’ll see oyster mushrooms spreading their mycelium and sprouting their fruiting bodies. Oyster mushrooms are kin to the work of Ancestral Ground— they alchemize decay and turn what has been toxic into nourishment and life. Oyster mushrooms exemplify how nature heals not by domination but by integration. Their mycelial networks act as underground connectors and communicators between species, growing in the thick of rot and waste. As decomposers, they don’t simply extract toxins—they metabolize and transform them into nutrients.

This echoes our invitation to compost the cultural and familial trauma of white supremacy— not to deny or look away from it, but to transmute the grief and shame and unconscionable violence of white supremacist histories into fertile soil and solidarity. This website invites those with European ancestry to sit with the uncomfortable, the buried, the broken—and to engage in the slow, relational work of healing. Like the bioremediating properties of oyster mushrooms, we hope to metabolize the toxic legacies of whiteness—supremacy, erasure, disconnection— and transform them into pathways of reconnection, repair, and responsibility.

As we engage in the work of ancestral truth-telling and collective healing, we look to the oyster mushroom as a symbol of regeneration and a powerful guide for composting harm into life-giving futures.

Our team

We are a collective of educators, facilitators, organizers, researchers and authors with decades of collective experience in anti-racism/anti-oppression/J.E.D.I. (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion), climate justice, human rights and being humans in apocalyptic times. We give a deep bow of gratitude, admiration and mad love to our teachers and those too-numerous-to-name here whose legacies have inspired us: the freedom fighters, border-crossers, boundary-busters, healers, organizers, visionaries, iconoclasts and changemakers.

Aryeh Shell

Aryeh is a climate, gender, and racial justice activist, facilitator, curriculum designer, artist, gardener and community weaver—descended from people of Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. She co-founded the Thrive Network and the Herstories Project and her work flows from the roots of popular education, somatics, deep ecology and The Work that Reconnects, guided by a devotion to Earth, ancestral healing and building beloved community.

Ellen Tuzzolo

Ellen Tuzzolo is a white, queer mama, of Sicilian, Southern Italian and Irish ancestry, who is most fired up by undermining systems of oppression and breaking down barriers that prevent people from caring for themselves, each other, and the earth. Ellen is a facilitator, educator and organizer devoted to racial, environmental and gender justice, and has been part of supporting the growth of thousands of people in building their anti-racism practice.

Zara Zimbardo

Zara is an interdisciplinary cross-pollinator, adult educator, anti-racism facilitator, writer, bodyworker, and equity consultant. She co-founded the White Noise Collective, an anti-racist feminist organization. Her work is dedicated to unlearning colonial worldviews, fostering community dialogue, deepening somatic awareness and creating spaces that use play, embodiment and critical thinking to care for the diverse worlds we inhabit. Zara is descended from Polish, Italian and Scottish settlers who rooted in California during the Gold Rush and Sicilians who found home in New York.

Jeff Conant

A long time climate and global justice organizer, educator and campaigner, Jeff is the author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health, and A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency, and translator of Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine, as well as other publications. As a descendant of Ashkenazi Jews who were forced to flee the pogroms in Eastern Europe 100 years ago, Jeff stands opposed to the weaponization of antisemitism to further drive hate and oppression. As a descendant of English settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony currently dwelling on unceded lands of the Pokumtuk Confederacy, Jeff is involved in efforts to re-story the early years of New England’s settlement and envision a future of right relations with the land and histories of the region.

Hunter Rook

Hunter Rook is a crafty white Southern trans human who lives on the West Coast amongst pine trees and ospreys. He loves reconnecting with ancestral skills such as music making, archery, whittling, basketry, fiberworks, blacksmithing, leather crafting, pottery, fire tending, and foraging for food and medicine as part of a modern animist spiritual practice. He has illustrated several books, and co-authored The GENDER Book. He lives on an intergenerational sheep ranch in Northern Pomo land, near the Ocean. Hunter enjoys long walks in the woods with his husky mutt when he isn’t doing his day job, which is making websites for cool projects like this one. Learn more at rowdyferretdesign.com.