Resources

Organizations dedicated to anti-racist ancestral reconnection and repair:

SERVICES

Ancestors and Money Coaching with Morgan Curtis

Trauma-informed Genealogy with Shokai Sinclair

Courses with David Dean: Roots Deeper Than Whiteness, Before We Were White, Radical Genealogy, Foundations of Radical White Anti-Racism, Unbreakable Solidarity

Genealogy and Anti-Racism with Eve Bradford: Personalized guidance rooted in elemental intelligence and ancestral wisdom

Ancestral Reconnection and Healing with Erin Caitlin Sweeney: An antiracist and decolonial lens for people of European descent

Reparations

Upcoming courses, workshops and events:

TBD

EMAIL US at ancestralgroundproject [at] gmail [dot] com to share your upcoming event or offerings.

Essays & Articles

Roots Deeper Than Whiteness

by David Dean

Political educator David Dean finds that deepening his understanding of his own settler colonial ancestry helped turn debilitating shame into empowering solidarity and generate the emotional strength and political analysis necessary to challenge both white supremacy and the economic system it serves.

Embracing Rootedness and Radical Genealogy

by Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales’ book Medicine Stories is foundational to the work of ancestral reckoning and cultural healing. In this short excerpt, she coins the term raícism—from raíces or roots— to name the practice of rooting ourselves in the real, concrete histories of our families and our ethnic communities. “One of the rewards of discovering exactly who our people have been—and how and with whom they have lived—is the possibility of unimagined kinship.”

it always starts with the land

by Susan Raffo

Living in Dakota homeland south of Minneapolis, Cultural worker Susan Raffo asks, “What does it mean to do healing work, to do any kind of change work when the land below your feet still carries stories that are not finished?”

The Vast and Beautiful World of Indigenous Europe

By Lyla June Johnston

Artist, organizer and visionary Lyla June Johnston, with “an Indian for a mother and a cowboy for a father,” confronts the difficult truths of her lineage, and comes to embrace her wholeness. “Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves. Our task is to remember that we are those beautiful Earth People.”

A Bronze Statue of My Ancestor: Reflections on Reparations

by Jeff Conant

Campaigner, author and educator Jeff Conant unpacks the history of an ancestor who settled Salem Massachusetts – an English colonist often represented as a peace maker – and asks, “what kind of peace do you propagate when, in the midst of an epidemic that your own people brought, you settle uninvited in someone else’s territory and proceed to make it your own?”

Our collective inheritance: Claiming white kin on the other side of righteousness

by Marika Heinrichs

“Whiteness is a tradeoff; humanity and interconnection for material resources and power —but with a gaping void at the centre that can never be satiated. What has to have happened to a people for them to make such a trade?”

In this short essay, writer and somatic practitioner Marika Heinrichs wrestles with the question, “What traumas have led white people to abandon interdependence in favor of control?”

Podcasts

Ancestral Reconnection for White Folks

with Jardana Peacock & Kelly Germaine-Strickland

Trauma-informed conversations exploring how white-bodied people can engage ancestral healing as a path toward accountability and belonging – naming grief over cultural loss and
erasure, the violence embedded in whiteness, and the potential for reconnection to lineage as a foundation for anti-racist practice.

Settler Colonialism, the Loss of Lineage, Collective Trauma & Ancestral Healing

Lindsey Lockett with Dr. Daniel Foor

Nuanced dialogues that examine how settler colonialism fractures lineage and identity for both colonized and colonizer, and how ancestral healing – through grief, ritual, and reconnection – can support cultural repair and transformation.

A Guide to Ancestral Healing & Embodiment

with Marika Heinrichs

An embodied approach to ancestral work that emphasizes relational
presence, somatic awareness, and direct experience – inviting practitioners to move beyond intellectual understanding into lived connection with lineage, body, and the more-than-human world.

Antiracist Genealogical Research (For Everyone)

with Darla Antoine

A powerful reframe of genealogy as a justice practice, inviting people to investigate their ancestry with honesty and care – uncovering both harm and resilience, and using that knowledge to inform ethical action and deeper relational responsibility.

Re-membering our ancestral knowing with our plantcestors

Layla Feghali of River Rose Apothecary offers a poetic exploration of ancestral memory as something held not only in human biological lineage but in relationship with plants, inviting a
return to embodied knowing, sensory connection, and the living intelligence of land-based traditions.

Fair Folk

with Danica Boyce

A deeply researched and reverent podcast that archives and revives traditional European folk songs and earth-based practices as vessels of ancestral memory, spirituality, and cultural continuity.

Poetry, Performance & Video

The Fear Goes Deep: A Migration Story

Poem by Erin Caitlin Sweeney

A haunting and intimate poem that traces how fear, displacement, and survival imprint across generations and the power of love to heal these patterns.

Free Land

by Ariel Luckey

Weaving poetry, theater, dance and hip hop music in a compelling performance, Free Land challenges us to take an unflinching look at the truth buried in the land beneath our feet.

Amnesia

An interdisciplinary solo play by playwright and performer Ariel Luckey, reveals America’s forgotten immigrant roots and investigates the role of race at the border. The story juxtaposes Luckey’s Jewish great-great-grandfather’s escape from a Russian police raid in historic Kiev with a current I.C.E. raid in a Latino neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona.

Speaking Truth Project: Confronting Slavery, Pursuing Reconciliation

Video compilation of stories

A collective storytelling initiative that brings forward lived experiences of descendants of enslaved and enslavers, using truth-telling as a foundation for reckoning, healing, and the ongoing work of racial reconciliation.

Stories I Didn’t Know

In this hour-long documentary, Rita Davern examines an ugly reality at the heart of a Minnesota family legend. While her family members have proudly stated that their ancestors once owned Pike Island, the story of its acquisition is far less glorious than its profitability. Rita’s attempts to understand more leads her to face the complicated legacy of westward expansion in the United States.

What is means to cultivate Roots Deeper Than Whiteness

Short talk by David Dean

A reflective talk that challenges the identity of whiteness and invites a deeper rooting in ancestry and solidarity – offering a pathway toward grounded belonging and responsibility.

Books

Clinical psychologist Mary Watkins traces her family’s lineage from 1607 Jamestown through generations of slave ownership and racial violence in the American South. Blending personal narrative, historical research, and psychological insight, Watkins models a practice of “white work”—a form of reparative genealogy that confronts the silences and distortions in white family histories. With reflective questions at the end of each chapter, this book offers practical tools for readers ready to explore their own histories and take action toward racial justice.

Author Louise Dunlap inherited a beloved piece of land in California’s Napa Valley – and grapples with land’s unspoken story of violence and erasure, through the onslaught of colonization and the drought, development, and wildfires that she sees as consequences of the colonial mind. A powerful story that will awaken others to consider their own ancestors’ role in colonization and encourage them to begin reparations for the harmful actions of those who came before.

Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others?

Decolonial Dames of America

In this pocket-sized exploration of the repair work required of white descendants of colonial settlers and enslavers in North America, Morgan Curtis reimagines the “sacred obligation” of those whose genealogies are intimately tied with the founding of the United States.

A memoir and guide for descendants of white settlers to confront their role in racial injustice and ancestral harm through truth-telling and reparative action. Blending personal stories of the author’s transformational journey into decolonization, Indigenous teachings, and practical tools, Becoming a Good Relative encourages readers to move beyond guilt and denial toward reciprocity and repair.

In twelve essays, each dedicated to a tree significant to Minnesota, Murphy tells the story of the grove that, long before the Irish arrived, was home to three Native tribes: the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk. She notes devastating strategies employed by the U.S. government to wrest the land from the tribes, but also revisits iconic American tales that subtly continue to promote this displacement—the Thanksgiving story, the Paul Bunyan myth, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. In retrieving these stories, White Birch, Red Hawthorn uncovers lingering wounds of the past—and the possibility that, through connection to this suffering, healing can follow.

Zines & Resource Compilations

Genealogy and Anti-Racism: A Resource for White People

Compiled by Rev. Diane Kenaston

“White privilege is endemic to doing genealogy in the United States in the 21st century. So are there ways for white people to act as anti-racist allies while exploring our own white ancestry? This document attempts to address this question, starting with background information and moving to suggestions for action.”

At our backs and at our sides: reconnecting to our white antiracist ancestors

Zine with paintings + poetry by Leah Jo Carnine and Caroline Picker

“May we learn from their leadership, their humanity, their boldness, their imagination, their mistakes, their commitment, and their love. May they remind us how much we are never alone.”

Legal Tools for Land Return

by Janet Orsi

Legal “nuts and bolts” of land return. Created for people, especially land owners, who are feeling “animated toward repair, healing, and return of land to Indigenous and Black people.”

Good Relative resource compilation

by Hilary Giovale

Extensive, thoughtfully curated resources on themes that include: healing form whiteness, recovering European ancestral memory, Doctrine of Discovery, Indigenous perspectives, healing the legacies of slavery, reparations + land back, relating to water, and BIPOC-led work to follow and support.

Reparations: The Time is Now!

Coming to the Table Working Group

Powerful guide from Coming to the Table to address the issue of reparations in the United States. Its slogan is: “Taking America Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement” (TABLE). “Deeply rooted in history and communities across the color line, Coming to the Table is bringing people together for both communion and collaboration in racial healing and building a better future.”