Ancestor Word List

ANCESTOR

Those who came before shaping present

WATCH

1. Coco — Lee Unkrich & Adrián Molina, 2017 · Film · Ancestor veneration and the Mexican Día de los Muertos tradition rendered with love.

2. Roots — Various, 1977 & 2016 · Series · The foundational narrative of African American ancestral history and its survival.

3. Sankofa — Haile Gerima, 1993 · Film · A Black woman is transported to slavery to confront the ancestors she has ignored.

4. The Tree of Life — Terrence Malick, 2011 · Film · A meditation on ancestry, origin, and the thread connecting generations.

5. The Return — Marcia Kimpton, 2021 · Documentary · African Americans journeying to Ghana to connect with ancestral roots.

6. Long Night’s Journey Into Day — Frances Reid & Deborah Hoffmann, 2000 · Documentary · South African Truth and Reconciliation as ancestral reckoning.

7. Motherland — Various, 2019 · Documentary · Tracing African American ancestry through DNA back to specific communities.

8. When They See Us — Ava DuVernay, 2019 · Series · The ancestors of the present; systemic injustice as inherited wound.

9. I Am Not Your Negro — Raoul Peck, 2016 · Documentary · James Baldwin as ancestor; his words living in the present tense.

10. Daughters of the Dust — Julie Dash, 1991 · Film · A Gullah family honoring ancestors before crossing into the mainland.

LISTEN

1. Afropop Worldwide — GPB · African music as ancestral memory kept alive through sound.

2. Finding Our Roots — Henry Louis Gates Jr., companion podcast · Tracing ancestry through genetics and history.

3. The Moth: Family stories — Various · Ancestors remembered through personal storytelling.

4. Ancestral Medicine Podcast — Daniel Foor · Healing relationships with ancestors as a spiritual practice.

5. Sounds of the Ancestors — Various · Indigenous music as a living link to those who came before.

6. On Being: Memory and ancestors — Krista Tippett · Spiritual and philosophical conversations about our relationship to the dead.

7. We Speak: Black oral history project — Various · Preserving ancestral voices and community memory.

8. Throughline — NPR · Every episode is an act of ancestor recovery; history as living inheritance.

9. 1619 Project — NYT · Tracing the ancestral wound of slavery through every dimension of American life.

10. StoryCorps: Legacy — Various · Recording the voices of elders before they become ancestors.

READ

1. The Warmth of Other Suns — Isabel Wilkerson · Ancestral migration as the defining story of Black American life.

2. Beloved — Toni Morrison · Ancestors who will not stay buried; the presence of the dead in living bodies.

3. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz · Recovering the ancestors erased by colonial history.

4. Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi · Eight generations of a Ghanaian family; ancestry as both wound and continuity.

5. The Known World — Edward P. Jones · Black slave owners and the complex moral inheritance of ancestry.

6. Roots — Alex Haley · The book that launched a generation’s search for African American ancestry.

7. Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison · A man searching for his ancestral name and the freedom it holds.

8. The Invention of Wings — Sue Monk Kidd · Two women across the slave/master divide; ancestry and its ethical weight.

9. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe · A man’s identity rooted in ancestral tradition confronting colonial erasure.

10. Becoming — Michelle Obama · Ancestry as foundation; how family history shapes who we become.