On her grandfather’s porch, Cindy felt drawn to explore her family’s history. Tracing her roots from Europe to America, she uncovered stories of migration, loss, and connection. Through essays and photography, ANCESTRAL LANDSCAPES offers guidance and grace for anyone seeking to understand their place in the world.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61153-713-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61153-708-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61153-709-3
Large Print ISBN: 978-1-61153-710-9
Releasing October 28, 2025
330 pages
Awards, Accolades, and Coverage
“In this captivating memoir, Cindy seeks and finds her ancestors’ footprints within their European homelands as well as the lands they eventually occupied on Turtle Island. With candor, honesty, and empathy, she explores the stories of her family, herself, and the Indigenous Peoples her ancestors displaced. Her exploration illuminates the legacies of settler colonialism that are often silenced, ignored, and erased. Ancestral Landscapes shows us how the past actively shapes our relationships with land, water, food, climate, and each other throughout our lifetimes and in future generations.”
—Hilary Giovale, author of the award-winning book Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair
“Ancestral Landscapes is a flowing tributary arriving at “whatever edge of liberation we can get ourselves.” Cindy Waszak Geary offers a delicate but purposeful lens for excavating what it means to arrive in any homeland, to arrive in any homeplace unraveling the sacredness of boundaries inside the liminal spaces of researcher, historian, documentarian, activist, lineage, and inhabitant. . . . Geary offers us the gift of understanding that we are all nothing more than the echoes of our ancestors when we humbly howl and whisper their names or that the soles of our feet understand that the history of a land is never separate from the social or political histories of that place, any place.”
—Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate
“Ancestral Landscapes brilliantly dissolves the notion that people with diverse European ancestry can not reconnect with their homelands. … Through graceful prose and haunting photographs, Geary wrestles with the impact these routes have had, not only on our country, but also on her family and herself.”
—Nora Murphy, author of White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir
“A lyrical, honest, searching account that invites each of us to consider diverse landscapes and people as well as our own place in history.”
—Kate H. Rademacher, author of Reclaiming Rest: The Promise of Sabbath, Solitude, and Stillness in a Restless World
“A needed story of claiming ancestral accountability with both honesty and compassion. Ancestral Landscapes tutors us in the essential self-understandings that can emerge when Euro-Americans turn to genealogy to grapple with the settler colonialism of their ancestors.”
—Mary Watkins, liberation psychologist and author of White Work and Reparative Genealogy: Reckoning with Ancestral Debt as a Path to Racial Reparations
“An intimately self-reflective memoir of a woman who, in discovering her ancestral past, gained life-changing insights about identity and belonging.”
—Nadia Dean, author, Demand of Blood
