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I went to Poland and Ukraine this past summer to learn about my roots. My great grandparents left the Lviv region in the 1890s — but on my trip there I picked up some very contemporary lessons on the struggle of the Ohlone, the native people of what we call the Bay Area. I live in Oakland — but to the Ohlone, it is called Chochenyo.

In Krakow, I walked around Kazimierz, the Jewish district, and smiled at the sight of Yiddish and Hebrew on store signs across the neighborhood. Five synagogues, all of which miraculously made it through the Holocaust, still stand there, two of which hold regular services. There also is a JCC and a living and growing Jewish community of almost 400 people.

Despite that life, a sense of ghostliness started to hit me. I went on the “Jewish tour” and soon became aware that both the guide and the tourists were all non-Jews except for me. Every building had cement over the right side of the entrance where the mezuzahs used to be.

The Galicia Jewish Museum is run by awesome folks, but they were all non-Jews. The Jewish bookstore and restaurants are owned by non-Jews. Poles are selling yarmulkes as souvenirs and little Jewish figurines holding money. After hearing countless stories of how vibrant the Jewish community there had been in its pre-Holocaust heyday, I was confronted with how little of that life remains. I felt angry over the absence of my people.

As a Jew, it was a rough and challenging experience.

As a white person, it was exactly the experience I needed.

I am beginning to understand what it is like to have my culture appropriated, as so many Americans have understood for so long. I am learning from experience the pain of having my culture robbed from me before I was even born. In essence, I grew up not knowing where I came from.

I now have an inkling of the way the Ohlone may feel when we non-natives forget that there were Native Americans living here before us for untold generations.

Native people in the Bay Area continue to struggle to survive and seek justice for themselves. Ohlone people were stewards of this land before white people stole it, before we built our cities on top of their villages.

Today, they struggle to save their sacred sites, such as the West Berkeley Shellmound, an ancient burial site that is today a point of contention between the tribe and a real estate developer.

When I visited the site where 1,100 Jews, including members of my family, were collectively shot on April 7, 1943, in the village of Plebanivka, I was glad that there was a small monument the marked the spot. We deserve that and so much more. Don’t the Ohlone deserve the same?

Their struggle is similar to that of the Jewish activists I met in Lviv. They, too, are fighting to be remembered, to save Jewish cemeteries and memorials. They are struggling to stop the excavation of Jewish remains in the name of “development” in downtown Lviv in 2017.

Until a few months ago, I didn’t know that my ancestors had been shoe cobblers, carpenters, devout Hasidic Jews who spoke Yiddish and lived in the same shtetl-filled region for at least 150 years. I didn’t know that my people left during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; times were getting increasingly anti-Semitic, with more and more pogroms. So my great grandparents left and came to Brooklyn in the 1890s.

So much was lost, and my trip was just the beginning of reclaiming my history and my heritage. I came back with a commitment to reclaiming my full self. I came back with the understanding that I can’t have my full Jewish self until the erasure of cultures is stopped.

Just as I would have hoped that the villages of western Ukraine band together to protect every Jew around them, I promise I will band together with my community to support Ohlone efforts to stop the continued colonization of their sacred lands.

White colonizers robbed them of so much of their cultural heritage, and they are in danger of losing even more. This is what it means for me to fully claim my white Jewish self.