In 1982, she graduated from Alabama School of Fine Arts, where she was in the theater department and was interested in being in a rock band. When Hale was a teenager, she got a voice-over spot at a local radio station, being paid $35 just to talk.

as a child and grew up in Alabama, mainly in Birmingham and Montgomery. Hale has a paternal half-sister, Carren Dujela, who works at the University of Victoria. She would later call for support to free her father, who had advanced cancer, after he was imprisoned for refusing to sign an injunction to stay away from Muskrat Falls in 2017. She later told Tom Bissell of The New Yorker that her biological father, James Learning, was an outdoorsman who was also a prominent NunatuKavut elder and environmental activist.

Her mother was what she called 'a wandering master's degree pursuer' and her stepfather was a microbiologist.