Reckoning and Reparations
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Reparative Genealogy & the Racial Wealth Gap: Remembering Us podcast
Briayna Cuffie and Lotte Lieb Dula coined the term Reparative Genealogy, a practice of researching family lineage to understand each of our direct connections to slavery, and how to work toward repair. Through Briayna and Lotte’s stories we can plainly see the ongoing obstructions for some, and indisputable benefits for…
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Legacy
This poem describes the way my interest in historical and genealogical research informs my deep commitment to anti-racism action, including my support of Reparation Generation. I share this poem as often as I can. I’m pleased to find that, especially when I read it aloud, the experience it describes can…
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our origins as a nation are right here
This is a brief story published in a local paper that I wrote in reflection about the repair work my family was engaged in this year in Webster Groves, MO. This piece reflects on how the stories we tell matter, and what it means to tell the story of our…
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ReStorying Boca: Reckoning with Ancestral Debt Along the Truckee River
This story explores the entrepreneurial history of my great-great-grandfather in the ghost town of Boca at the turn of the 20th century, and traces this legacy to today’s ecological crisis. During a visit to Boca, along the Truckee River, I examine the hidden costs of an economic system divorced from…
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Shame Into Action
How do we transmute our shame into action? In this brilliant and heartfelt conversation, organizer Justine Epstein explores the role of wealth redistribution and ancestral reckoning in our current climate.
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Entanglement
“Entanglement” describes my reckoning with a story of a genocidal military campaign against the Cherokee people in North Carolina in the early months after the Declaration of Independence was signed. I am entangled in this story by my connection to land this 2400 man militia marched over on its way…
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The Gift of Life
Situated in Ontario, Canada, my personal essay is a narrative on epigenetic and ancestral memory, deep connections to First Nations, Ojibway values such as kindness and reciprocity, the clash of worldviews between the Settler Society and First Nations, the unresolved ambiguity of living on stolen lands, social justice and allyship…
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absolutely nothing gets you off the hook
This is a poem about me grappling with the layers of feeling that have come up as I’ve looked into my lineage, and our nation’s history with slavery, genocide, and witch hunts.
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Mennonite Humble No More
In this piece, I examine the stories I learned about my ancestry growing up versus what I have since uncovered as an adult and hold the both/and of a legacy of revolutionaries and oppressors. I talk about the importance of acceptance and acknowledgement as first steps towards apology, restitutions, repair,…
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A Pedagogy for the White Nonpoor in the United States: Returning Stolen and Excess Wealth, Land, and Resources to the Common Good
This article addresses the psychosocial tasks for nonpoor “white” people that are part of the return of excess and stolen wealth and privilege, a return that opens possibilities for mutual accompaniment and solidarity for the sake of justice and peace. This work seeks to contribute to the pedagogy of the nonpoor and…
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Reparations as a Sacred Practice of Healing
This brief reflection considers reparations as an act of tikkun (a principle in Judaism meaning to repair or make whole), not only for those harmed by centuries of genocide and enslavement in what is now called the US, but for soul repair of the white-bodied perpetrators and beneficiaries of those…
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Letters of Retrieval, of Reckon
Zoë and Geneva strongly believe in, and practice, writing as a tool to process, disrupt, unpack, and compost our colonial inheritances of whiteness, supremacy, and dominance, and as a necessary internal and collective process towards accountability and reparations. This piece is an excerpted letter exchange between Zoë and Geneva from…