We live in a culture that disconnects us from our roots. True belonging, to your people, is not profitable. It is far more lucrative to keep us fragmented, seeking a sense of home in things we can buy than in our own blood. Remembering who we are and where we come from is a radical refusal to remain numb.
Ancestor work is the intentional practice of turning toward our lineages with an open heart and compassionate curiosity. When we feed our hungry ghosts we transform patterns and claim the wisdom of our stories.
This is a creative, deeply personal container designed to help you reclaim and process what you have inherited — no matter how painful — to turn it into beauty.
Ancestor Work
May all our ancestors’ pain and beauty be metabolized into the art that is our lives.
Who is this work for?
Maybe a box of photos gathering dust in your basement brought you here…
or a suspicion of untold family stories
or a yearning for roots and belonging
or a dead end with traditional therapy
or a reoccurring dream…
This work is for anyone curious about who they are and where they come from. You do not have to already know a lot of information about your ancestors to begin. I’m excited to meet you wherever you are. An open mind and willingness to go to tender places helps this work be as meaningful as possible.
This cyanotype is of a photo of my great grandmother in drag in front of a laundromat in Chicago, holding her best friend (early 1900s). We know she was later institutionalized at Dunning, an infamous asylum.
How I arrived at this work
In middle school, I started scanning people’s family photos. Digitizing is monotonous labor, but sometimes I’d also get paid to create family photo albums with these newly digitized ancestors. Even though they weren’t my ancestors, I felt they were aware of me, thanking me for paying attention to them.
Around this time, I discovered the many shared traits and interests I had with my own maternal grandfather — who I never met in flesh. We both collected elephants and loved film photography. My mother never spoke of him, so of course I became deeply fascinated with how one could be so similar to someone they’d never met.
In Fall 2022, I spent two months with Aurora Levins Morales on her ancestral farm lands in Puerto Rico. What pulled me there was a need for deep rejuvenation and an honest hard look at wasn’t working in my life — ancestral patterns and addictions that kept me trapped in cycles of burnout, anxiety, and depression.
What can this work look like?
This work is customizable to your interests and needs. For example, I’ve supported people by:
facilitating group workshops
holding supportive emotional space
conducting genealogical research
digitizing family photos
designing family history / photo books
creating altars and writing rituals
I like to begin by exploring your intentions and goals. Our work can be in the emotional, spiritual realm, and/or I can bring it into form through creating physical objects.
Sessions may incorporate any of the following:
archive digging + research
deep listening + conversational, somatic guidance
creative writing / drawing prompts
working with dreams + archetypes
guided meditation, visualization, and movement
altar building
energy work
Sacred objects I can create for you and your loved ones:
Family history / photo books
Cyanotype collage portraits
Fabric pocket altars
How much does it cost?
To make this work accessible, all my rates are sliding scale.
Session: $40-100 per hour
Photo digitization: 25-50 cents per photo
Book design: $200-2,500 flat project fee (depending on length) + printing costs
Always happy to have a free call to see if this work is the right fit.
Off-grid in the mountains of PR, I had the slowness to reconnect with my body and the land. The more grounded I became, the quieter my mind — quiet enough to hear my ancestors speak through poetry. After my time with Aurora, I understood why there were so many stories intentionally buried by my people and why ancestral reconnection is one of the necessary steps towards healing our culture and planet.
So I started my own ancestral writing rituals, which led to the creation of two books, one devoted to each side of my lineage: True Image (maternal) and Family of Goofy Bodies (paternal). I’m excited to create containers for others to do this work because I know how lonely and heavy it can feel in a culture that doesn’t value it. The immensity of the cultural and ecological griefs we face now can only be held communally.
Testimonials
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Carolyn Williams
"A few years ago, I inherited dozens of family Memorial/Funeral cards from my older sister. She had been saving them for decades. They typically include a photo of the deceased and a brief biography. My sister passed these on to me, as well as some old family photos dating back to our grandparents. I wanted to create a family history photo book to pass onto my children and nieces and nephews.
Veronica thoughtfully organized the Funeral cards and corresponding family photos into a wonderful book tracing my family’s history and that of my mother and my father. Now I could send each person their own copy, including my sister.
As I told Veronica, not only has this photo book given me so much pleasure, but my sister, too. She passed away in 2017, and her copy of the photo book was given me to me as a keepsake. I could see that the spine of the book was pressed flat because she had read it so often. How happy that made me.
Veronica was careful and respectful of these treasures. Working with her was a gift!"
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Anonymous, Teacher
“Veronica has been an instrumental force in my journey to love, forgive, and fully inhabit the stories that have shaped me. I always leave our conversations feeling more connected and creative — knowing my ancestors are right here with me in this work.
I invited her to visit my classroom and facilitate a session on poetry as ancestral dialogue. She guided the children in a visualization practice, and we were both moved by how intuitively they responded — how deeply they learned, in just one class, to listen to their ancestors.
Veronica takes the time to know people’s stories well, and she treats them with care, curiosity, and respect. She understands this work is deeply personal and quietly revolutionary.”
FAQ
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Radical genealogy is the process of “connecting individual family histories to the broader histories of racism, colonialism, capitalism, traditional culture, and political resistance that shaped our ancestors’ lives.” We trace the stories of our lineage to “develop a renewed and rooted sense of self that can power our efforts for collective liberation.”
— David Dean, White Awake
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To heal the somatic transmission of trauma
“The answer to why so many of us have difficulties is because our ancestors spent centuries here under unrelentingly brutal conditions. Generation after generation, our bodies stored trauma and intense survival energy, and passed these on to our children and grandchildren. Most of us also passed down resilience and love, of course. But, as we saw with my grandmother—and as we see with so many other human beings—resilience and love aren’t sufficient to completely heal all trauma. Often, at least some of the trauma continues.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands
To find allies in the struggle for liberation
"Ancestors pass on habits of mind, wounds, and silences that come from the historical context they inhabited. But in the larger, more Indigenous view, they also pass on love and support from a place that is deeper than that history. Much of the world believes that once the old ones enter the Spirit World, they see with true vision. They recognize harm they've done and are appalled. No longer able to undo their mistakes, they look to their descendants to clean up after them. And ancestors can offer us energy to powerfully assist in this."
— Louise Dunlap, Inherited Silences
To locate ourselves in history
“Mapping the specificity of our ethnicity also reveals hidden relationships. Questions about our place within the megastructures of racism become intimate and carry personality…it becomes possible to see the choices we make right now as extensions of those inherited ones, and to choose more courageously as a result.
The past is a powerful resource with which to explain and justify the present and create agendas for the future. Therefore it is only in the context of social movements against oppression that psychological trauma can be examined.”
To decompose white supremacy
"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."
To grieve and make beauty
“We’ve got to feed our ancestors’ ghosts, so that the ghosts aren’t eating us or the people around us… We’ve got to begin to grieve. Now, grief doesn’t mean sitting around weeping every day. Rather, grief means using the gifts you’ve been given by the spirits to make beauty.
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BA from Grinnell College in Narrative Studies (coursework in English, History, Studio Art, Sociology, and American Studies)
2-month embodied writing apprenticeship in Puerto Rico with Aurora Levins Morales focused on ancestral research
Wounding of Whiteness workshop with Tema Okun
What our Bones Know: An Introduction to Embodied Ancestral Inquiry with Wildbody Somatics
Colonialism, Cultural Healing, and the Dead course with Ancestral Medicine
Animism, Ancestors, and Psychedelics course with Ancestral Medicine
Radical Genealogy Training with White Awake
Physical theater apprenticeship with the Hinterlands
Reiki I/II Training and years of studying the Chakra system
Years of space holding, personal ritual, writing, and reconnection with my ancestors
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This is by no means a complete list, just a beginning and window into the work of other’s I’ve encountered and appreciated.
Readings
Saving the Indigenous Soul by Martín Prechtel
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals by Aurora Levins Morales
Roots Deeper than Whiteness by David Dean
Inherited Silence by Louise Dunlap
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts by Resmaa Menakem
generational trauma and knowing who your real enemy is by Susan Raffo
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