Reckoning and Reparations
Reckoning is a practice of turning towards what we have been conditioned to turn away from. For white anti-racist practitioners, reckoning is often cyclical and ongoing.
A white supremacist system actively resists such reckoning, just as it vilifies the idea of reparations. The realities of Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery are not past tense; systemic racism continues to shape life expectancy rates, disparities of every kind, media stereotypes, location of polluting facilities, criminalization and exploitation of communities.
We are now witnessing an overt war on teaching and facing our racial history.
Reparations can take a multitude of forms, and involves both internal and external work. The more we come into brave awareness of how white supremacy has shaped this country, the more we free up our agency to act, to reflect, to repair, to grapple and to heal in our communities, psyches, and families. Repair can be hyper-local, small or large, on the levels of an individual, family, community, state-wide or national.
This page welcomes stories of reckoning and reparations with a deep focus on material accountability, examination of inheritances, and the transformation of ancestral legacies. This space exists to lift up topics of reckoning, reparations and wealth redistribution from different inroads, social positions and historic relationships.
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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 the Summer 2026, as they wade through the muck and beauty of ancestral retrieval & reckoning—offering a vulnerable window into this accountability poetic practice as a commitment to ourselves, each other, our BIPOC kin, our future lineages, and to staying on the hook, in our writing and in our lives, wherever we go and whoever we are with.
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 harms.
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 the potential role of the helping professions in this pedagogy, while outlining the psychosocial work for "white" folks to honestly address their ancestral legacies and debts.
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, and transformation and how white denial has left a hole for white supremacy and authoritarianism to fill.
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.
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 with First Nations, the effects of colonialism on all peoples, legacy burdens, uncolonizing the psyche, and healing pathways going forward.
"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 to destroy more than 55 Cherokee towns. I tell the story, unknown to me until recently, as an act of resistance to counteract the current local narrative that this campaign was an act of heroism, critical to settler victory over the British in the Revolutionary War.
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.
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 nature's regenerative cycles. By soundly acknowledging my family's and settler society's indebtedness to Native people and their occupied homelands, I add my voice to the growing movement to unravel and reweave the tattered fabric of this country– one thread, one family story, at a time.
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 nation in its 250th year.
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 impact other’s lives too.
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 others, that have created and deepened the racial wealth gap throughout time. Throughout the episode their tangible connection to each other and to their purpose provide a living example of direct, interpersonal reparations.