"UNRESOLVED ANCESTRAL TRAUMA CONTRIBUTES TO
AND PERPETUATES SUPREMACY WITHIN WHITE BODIES
The postures we embody as white people — superiority, domination, appeasement, and numbing —
are protecting our underlying, untouched wounds.
We all come from people who once had healing and ritual practices, connected and reciprocal relationships with the land, and a rooted sense of collective belonging. As white people, we often lack the knowledge of who we are descended from or have been told partial truths about their lives. Tracing our ancestry in an embodied way offers us an opportunity to feel into how our people became severed from their ways of life and learned to inflict supremacy and domination onto others.
The feelings of fear, defensiveness, anger, and shame we carry around race tell a story about who we come from and what happened to them.
Most of us were never told these stories, but they live on in our bodies." — Marika Heinrichs