Breaking Down White Settler Colonialism - with author Hilary Giovale

Breaking Down Patriarchy

Amy McPhie Allebest

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amy is joined by author and organizer Hilary Giovale to discuss her book, Becoming A Good Relative, and have a transparent conversation about whiteness, white guilt, and finding the difference between appreciation and appropriation on our journeys toward healing and decolonization.

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Hilary Giovale is a mother, writer, and community organizer who holds a Master’s Degree in Good and Sustainable Communities. She has taught improvisational dance and has served on the boards of philanthropic, human rights, and environmental organizations. Descended from the Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe, she is a ninth-generation American settler. For most of her life these origins were obscured by whiteness.

After learning more about her ancestors’ history, Hilary began emerging from a fog of amnesia, denial, and fragmentation. For the first time, she could see a painful reality: her family’s occupation of this land has harmed Indigenous and African peoples, cultures, lands, and lifeways. With this realization, her life changed. Divesting from settler colonialism and whiteness, she seeks to follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of healing, mutual liberation, and equitable futures. She is the author of Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair (Green Writers Press, October 2024).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best. I would like to begin today's
0:06.5	episode with a land acknowledgement. I'm speaking to you today from the ancestral homelands of the Ute,
0:13.9	Eastern Shoshone, and Tupinogas peoples. I recognize that the Ute, Eastern Shoshone, and
0:20.0	Timponogas cared for this land since time immemorial, and I thank them for that stewardship.
0:26.5	I also acknowledge that this is unseated territory, which means that it was never legally given to the United States.
0:33.6	It's essentially stolen land.
0:36.8	Listeners, have you heard land acknowledgments like this before?
0:41.3	Do you know whose ancestral homeland you are on right now as you listen to this podcast?
0:46.7	How often do you think about that?
0:49.1	When you do think about it, what feelings come up?
0:52.5	In today's episode, we will be discussing the colonization of
0:56.5	native land and how white settlers can approach this very complicated and painful history. To guide us,
1:04.0	we'll be basing our conversation on the book, Becoming a Good Relative, Calling White Settlers
1:09.9	Towards Truth, Healing, and repair by Hillary
1:13.6	Giovali. And I'm thrilled to have the author here to talk with us today. Welcome, Hillary.
1:19.3	Oh, thank you so much for having me, Amy. I'm so glad to be with you.
1:23.2	Hillary Giovali is a mother, writer, and community organizer. A ninth generation American settler, she is descended from Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and indigenous people of ancient Europe.
1:35.7	As an active reparationist, her work is guided by intuition, love, and relationships.
1:42.4	I love that introduction for you, Hillary, And I'm wondering if you can tell us
1:47.5	about yourself a little bit more, like maybe back up to the beginning. And this time, I'd actually
1:53.2	love you to go back to the very, very beginning and tell us where your people are from. In your
1:58.4	introduction, we talked about your European ancestry, but you in the pro prolog, you introduced yourself with where your people are from and then you trace a line from them to you, which kind of leads to why you wrote this book.
	...

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