Call for Submissions
Ancestral Ground: Healing Whiteness and Cultivating Regenerative Futures
Are you a person with European heritage involved in racial justice and ancestral recovery work? We would love to hear from you!
Welcome to Ancestral Ground! This project is dedicated to lifting up diverse practices of ancestral reconnection with an explicit anti-racist and liberatory lens undertaken by U.S. practitioners with European ancestry. We are excited to connect with you.
Healing harmful legacies and recovering a healthy connection to one’s ancestors can support white people to show up with greater humanity in the present and shape just, viable futures. There is immense interest in genealogical research and the rediscovery of ancestral and cultural heritage for people of European descent. However, that unearthed knowledge is not inherently emancipatory or in service to healing the harms of white supremacy. Further, many people with mixed ancestry, whose lineages include both European settlers and those who were colonized or enslaved, face the complex task of grappling with the legacies of whiteness.
There is a growing movement of anti-racist ancestral work across the country which Ancestral Ground seeks to amplify, bridge and illuminate.
This website is a digital community garden to grow connections within the vibrant landscape of ancestral reconnection, reckoning and repair. It is a place to share different approaches, methods and paths of engagement that bridge the political, ecological, cultural and spiritual dimensions of white anti-racism.
We invite submissions in all genres: poetry, essays, creative non-fiction, speculative fiction, subversive genealogy, recipes, rituals, visual arts, video, music, theater pieces and beyond that shed light on the many dimensions of reconnecting with ancestral roots and how it relates to healing intergenerational trauma, engaging in reparations, transforming extractive ways of being and taking anti-racist action rooted in love.
Submissions are welcome from individuals, groups and organizations and will be considered on a rolling basis until ____. You can expect a response from us by___. If your submission is accepted, your piece will be featured on the Ancestral Ground website. Any material published remains owned by the contributor and will be licensed under creative commons license #—
1. ANTI-RACISM and SOLIDARITY
Ancestral recovery work has been booming in U.S. culture for some time. Yet, somehow the resources we are spending on genealogy tests and searches have not led to overwhelming growth in our anti-racism spaces. This section examines how ancestral recovery is essential to anti-racist movements for a just and livable future, and how grounding genealogical work in anti-racist practice is necessary to support liberation. What practices exist for politicized healing and the formation of multiracial solidarity?
Ancestral reconnection and repair supports healing the core wounds of whiteness: disconnection from self, from body, from BIPOC folks, from other white relatives, from more-than-human kin, from land and spirit. This section lifts up diverse approaches to healing intergenerational trauma, explicitly tying it to the historical construction of whiteness and the collective liberation work of racial justice. How can recovering the broken connections with our cultural and ancestral roots support inhabiting the present more fully?
As whiteness is a social and political construct, people of European descent may hail from families who arrived to the United States as Ashkenazi Jewish, Sicilian, Irish, or bearing other ethnic and national identities – often fleeing war and oppression – to wind up, two generations later, as “white people”. Some carry the lineage of both enslaver and enslaved, colonizer and colonized, embodying within themselves the contradictions and unresolved traumas of history. This section explores and interrogates stories of immigration and solidarity and challenges the amnesia of being white-bodied.
We don’t think ourselves into a different way of acting, but act our way into a different way of being through regular practices and rituals. Pieces in this section illuminate a range of embodied, spiritual, ecological and imaginal practices for ancestral connection and reciprocity that are unearthed, reclaimed and reinvented. This includes practices of grief, listening to the Earth, altar building, connecting through myth and folktales, historical reckoning and repair, working with earth elements, using song, dance and drumming, and more.
We invite pieces that explore connection and responsibility to place, the implications for descendants of colonial settlers, and the transformative power of pilgrimage and returning to ancestral homelands. This includes reflections on “deep time ancestors” of particular lands and ways to deepen in relationship with more-than-human kin and “plantcestors.” How do we recognize and heal symptoms of uprootedness, patterns of displacement, and longing to belong to place and land within the contexts of migration, colonization and climate change?
This section engages with the topics of reparations and wealth distribution from different inroads, positionalities and historic relationships. Deep focus on material accountability, examination of inheritances, and the transformation of ancestral legacies toward possibilities of livable, just futures. Our hope is that visitors to the site will gain an expanded, holistic sense of what reparative work can encompass, which includes practices of accountability and profound re-humanization. We invite pieces that grapple with inheritances of stolen land, contradictions of land stewardship, and highlights connections to the current Land Back movement.
This section is dedicated to the relationship between ancestral recovery and anti-racist parenting. In this work, we seek to rehydrate buried seeds, restore, recover, and reclaim the best of what our ancestors left to us — while also reckoning with the harms they may have caused. We invite stories and reflections on how we can consciously tend to future generations as parents, caregivers and allies. What does this look like in the context of everyday life? How might we live in ways that will allow us to become good ancestors? What traditions and practices can support this journey?
WHO are we?
Our team is composed of organizers, facilitators, cultural workers, and artists committed to building and supporting movements for racial, economic, climate and environmental justice.
“Why do I write? Because my ancestors have asked me to. I believe that stories and relationships can create meaningful change. And as a white settler, I am aware that there is work to do that is uniquely ours.”
– Hilary Giovale
Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing and Repair