Most of the ancient Indigenous cultures of Europe were interrupted by various forms of colonization. Some of our European ancestors were violently dispossessed of their land, land-based lifeways and languages. Industrialization has been spreading throughout the world since the 1700s, razing cultural and biological diversity.
Today, because of these histories, many white settlers feel culturally impoverished. We are aching for cultural vitality and connection with Mother Earth.
After years of reflection and conversation with white friends, I realized that some of us still carry aversion to our ancestors’ cultural practices that were vehemently prohibited and purposely erased. Other cultures sometimes seem more appealing or accessible to us. As privileged outsiders, we can easily feel entitled to take things out of context, mix them together, and jump from sampling one marginalized culture to another. The interplay of hungry Westerners, cultural commodification, and capitalism can further endanger marginalized cultures.
After centuries of hegemony, cultures that still have some or all their traditional knowledge are rare. At the same time, the insights they offer are critical, especially considering the urgency of the climate crisis. In some cases, traditional cultural practitioners and Elders willingly share their wisdom with those who are immersed in the Dream of the Modern World, to help us learn to protect Earth and all living beings by reclaiming our full humanity.
During my ongoing inquiry into White Peril and cultural sampling, I have done my best to examine my own assumptions and seek accountability. Not everyone would agree with the path I took, but I want to be transparent. The teachings I received from a variety of Indigenous cultures restored my capacity to be in sacred communication with Mother Earth. Without being prescriptive, they showed me how to begin making personal reparations to both African-American communities and Indigenous communities. They also led me on twisting, turning routes to ancestral memory.1 This taught me that both intact and severed Earth-based cultures are connected by a common root system, still thriving underground.
In her book Sacred Instructions, Penawahpskek author Sherri Mitchell writes about some traditional prophecies that have been shared by Wabanaki, Hopi, Mohawk, Anishinaabe, and Lakota peoples.2 Passed down through generations, these prophecies foretold the environmental damage that European colonialism has wrought on Turtle Island. They predicted a time in seven generations, when people of all identities would come together to bring healing to this land.3 They speak of our present time as a crossroads, when white people will at last humbly seek guidance from Indigenous relatives to re-member their balanced roles within the human family. Mitchell notes our responsibility not only to observe these prophecies, but to “actively participate in their unfolding.”4
How we do this is critically important.
After centuries of gorging on the poverty and power of hegemony, sometimes, we white settlers are starving for connection.
When we find it by bypassing our inner work or denying our White Peril, our presence can easily have unintended consequences. It is possible to harm the cultures we so admire by consciously or unconsciously co-opting their identity.
Indigenous ceremonies have been shamed and suppressed by religious institutions since Europeans first arrived on Turtle Island. They were criminalized by the United States government until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. Many Indigenous communities are just now beginning the arduous process of reclaiming their land, identity, ceremonies, and languages. I support their cultural recovery by respecting their privacy.
At the same time, some communities have invited outsiders into their ceremonies and shared them freely. I have often wondered how these families and communities decided to include white settlers.5 Because of their generosity, I experienced sophisticated and advanced spiritual technologies that have the capacity to turn even the oppressor into a relative.
As you build relationships, please know that settlers are not entitled to participate in Indigenous cultural practices or ceremonies. This can be uncomfortable for us to feel, and it is a reality we need to accept. If we are eventually invited, we must embody humility at every turn. Today, with awareness of how cultural sampling perpetuates harm, I avoid it. I’ve developed these guidelines to follow while learning from other cultures:
Ten Guidelines for White Settlers to Engage in Respectful Cross-Cultural Learning
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Prioritize relationships and move at the speed of trust. Begin by sharing food. Dedicate yourself to long-term relationships.
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Know the history of the people who host you. Be in service to healing the history. Take meaningful action in solidarity with their struggles and in support of their well-being.
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Respect cultural boundaries, even if you do not yet understand them.
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Be accountable to the communities that host you.
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Ask, “How (if at all) can I help?”6 Respond by sharing time, skills, networks, and resources as requested.
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Build respectful, reciprocal relationships with communities, including Elders and culture-bearers.
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Learn to speak a few words (or more) of the language.
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Do not teach or sell their practices. Instead, develop your own understanding about what other cultures are teaching you.
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Become grounded in who you really are instead of copying, appropriating, or over-identifying with other cultures.7
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Consider reconnecting with the practices of your own Earth-honoring ancestors.
My arc of learning to respectfully receive teachings from other cultures has been rewarding. At times, it has also been fraught. When challenges arise, I check myself, slow down, and return to this list. After centuries of exploitation and division, building bridges takes humility and commitment over time. I will always be grateful to those who took a leap of faith and included me.
Support
In the spring of 2015, I made an offering and prayed on the sacred mountain for my teacher to find me. Later that afternoon, I was invited to support an Indigenous fasting ceremony that was to take place a month later. With respect for the people and community that invited me, I have chosen not to reveal their names or location. I can tell you that they are dedicated to healing human relationships with Earth. They have given permission, input, and encouragement for this book to be written. To protect the well-being of the traditional culture, I’ve omitted details about the fasting ceremony. I made these choices to respect cultural privacy.8
Before I arrived at the ceremony, I wasn’t told much. But I was told that I would need to wear a long skirt, help out in the camp, and pray for the people who would be fasting. While supporting the ceremony, I watched people being placed, one by one, to sit alone in the high desert for several days. During this time, they stayed in the same place with two wool blankets and no food or Water. The ceremony required sobriety. No plant medicine or other substances were used. They were there to pray, listen, and receive instructions.
While they prayed, I cooked, cleaned, and sat in the dusty soil underneath juniper trees in the sweltering heat. Previously, I had endured car camping for only a day or two, with mixed results. And I’d camped for one night in the Achuar village. Now, I camped for six days with no running Water and no electricity. This was the longest I had ever gone without a shower and my cell phone was dead. As requested, I tried to stay focused on the people who were fasting by drinking Water on their behalf and praying for them. But it was as though I was wrestling with a rambunctious monkey inside myself throughout the entire ceremony. He bounced around the walls of my mind, arguing with everything he saw, trying to figure it out, and telling me how ludicrous it is for people to fast alone in the wilderness for multiple days.
When I first wit(h)nessed this ceremony, I saw people being left alone in what I thought of as “wilderness.” Years later, Diné Indigenous food systems scholar Lyla June Johnston explained how the word “wilderness” reinforces the concept that humans are separate from nature. Before Europeans arrived, there was no “wilderness” here—there were vast landscapes with diverse climates and geography that were highly managed by their Indigenous inhabitants. Using culturally advanced techniques, they cultivated food forests for millennia before the arrival of Europeans. As Lyla shared, portions of this land have now become “wilderness” because the extensive land management of the Original Peoples was and still is prohibited or encumbered by colonial settlement.9
One night during the fasting ceremony, a lightning storm lit the sky with tremendous power. Heavy rain deluged our camp. Cold winds rattled my tent, and I shivered in my sleeping bag. Jolted awake with a racing heart, I felt terrified for the people who were praying all alone. How could they endure this? None of them had tents. They were sitting alone in a lightning storm, soaked by cold rain. Tossing, turning, and worrying, I feared for their lives.
In the morning, I was still alarmed. Surely, I thought, it was time for us to go retrieve the people who had suffered all night. But the ceremony continued. The hot sun was already rising in the sky, evaporating the cold rain of the night before. I took a deep breath and resolved to pray even more.
After a couple more days, the people who had been fasting returned to camp. Silence permeated their presence. Their humanness shone in a way I had never seen people shine before. It was like watching a silent river moving regally across the land. They were sunburned, but not blistered. They were dusty, but radiant. They were full of palpable gratitude and love. Washing dishes, I observed them as they sat down to eat their first meal. The monkey stopped bouncing in my head and everything was quiet in my mind. A door was opening to something I didn’t know how to name.
NOTES
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On page 19 of Living in Indigenous Sovereignty, Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara shares a perspective that resonates with my own experience: “By attending Indigenous ceremonies, non-Indigenous people can learn the spiritual skills necessary to connect with their own ancestors and ancestral traditions.”
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Sherri Mitchell, Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), 215–25.
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On pages 226–27 Mitchell writes: We are not placeholders in time but guardians of the future. As such, we have the responsibility of dreaming the next seven generations into being. This dreaming is the work of our lives. It is what we were born to do. In order to complete this task, we must join our hearts and minds in a unified prayer.
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Mitchell, Sacred Instructions, 225–26.
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Please see Living in Indigenous Sovereignty, by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara with Gladys Rowe and The Gatherings, by Shirley N. Hager and Mawopiyane, for a variety of well-considered perspectives on white settlers’ participation in Indigenous ceremonies.
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This is a guiding question I learned from Lyla June Johnston in a Medicine Theory webinar (https://lylajune.wixsite.com/medicinetheory).
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In some cases, white settlers respectfully follow and practice an Indigenous culture’s ways with such commitment that they are accepted and “made a relative” in that culture.
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Cultural privacy is a concept I learned from a Bioneers Indigeneity webinar (https://bioneers.org/indigeneity-program/) with Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik). I’ve used it here with their permission.
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In a personal conversation with Lyla June Johnston, April of 2020, she said: “The human and natural worlds are now separate from each other, but they used to be enmeshed. The colonial mind deemed our cultures primitive, but in fact, they were incredibly advanced. We understood and leveraged complex ecological systems, and yet we never enslaved or overruled nature. To be humble with Creation does not mean being uncomfortable or dirty.”
Excerpted from Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair (second edition) by Courtesy Good Relative Press LLC. Apr 9, 2026,
The author returns all income she receives from book sales to the Decolonizing Wealth Project and Jubilee Justice.
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