Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

Far too often, they were searching for answers with their right hand to problems that they had created or contributed to with their left.

This is where we find expertise and solutions, too: close to the ground, close to experience. The communities who have direct experience of an issue are by far the best experts on it.

We are also all infected with what I call the “colonizer virus,” which urges us to divide, control, and exploit. Nowhere is the virus more symptomatic than in how we deal with wealth.

Philanthropy moves at a glacial pace. Epidemics and storms hit, communities go under water literally and metaphorically, Black and brown children get shot dead or lose their youth inside jail cells, families are separated across continents, women are abused and beaten and raped, all of Rome burns while we fiddle with another survey on strategies, another study on impact.

My central argument is that what ails philanthropy at its core is colonialism. Almost without exception, funders reinforce the colonial division of Us vs. Them, Haves vs. Have Nots, and mostly white saviors and white experts vs. poor, needy, urban, disadvantaged, marginalized, at-risk people (take your pick of euphemisms for people of color).

The statistics speak for themselves: 92 percent of foundation CEOs are white,3 89 percent of foundation boards are white,4 while only 7 to 8 percent of foundation funding goes specifically to people of color.5

But I say that those who would focus the blame on the system of capitalism or neoliberalism are obscuring the real root of the problem. As Malcolm X said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”11

Now, adding insult to injury, those who were stolen from or exploited to make that wealth—Indigenous people, people of African descent, and many other people of color—must apply for access to that wealth in the form of loans or grants; we must prove ourselves worthy. We are demeaned for our lack of resources, scrutinized, and often denied access after all.

Across American history and through the present day, the accumulation of wealth is steeped in trauma. The process of healing from that trauma is central to decolonization. Acknowledging our woundedness is key. This is not just for individuals; institutions can also engage in the Seven Steps to Healing:

All my relations—Mitakuye Oyasin, as the Lakota say, meaning we are all related, connected, not only to each other humans but to all the other living things and inanimate things and the planet, and also the Creator. The principle of All My Relations means that everyone is at home here. Everyone has a responsibility in making things right. Everyone has a role in the process of healing, regardless of whether they caused or received more harm. All our suffering is mutual. All our healing is mutual. All our thriving is mutual.

The boundaries of my body separate me from the rest of the universe. I’m on my own against the world. This terrifies me, and so I try to control everything outside myself, also known as the Other. I fear the Other, I must compete with the Other in order to meet my needs. I always need to act in my self-interest, and I blame the Other for everything that goes wrong.

Separation correlates with fear, scarcity, and blame, all of which arise when we think we’re not together in this thing called life. In the separation worldview, humans are divided from and set above nature, mind is separated from and elevated above body, and some humans are considered distinct from and valued above others—us vs. them—as opposed to seeing ourselves as part of a greater whole.

I use the term “white supremacy” instead of “racism” because it explicitly names who in the system benefits and—implicitly—who bears the burden.

Academics who study colonization distinguish between external or exploitation colonization—in which the focus is on extracting goods like tea, silk, or sugar, or resources like human labor, coltan, or oil, in order to increase the wealth and power of the colonizer—and internal colonization, which seeks to manage and control people inside the borders of the empire, using tools like schooling, policing, segregation, surveillance, and divestment.

And to be clear: settlers cannot be considered immigrants because immigrants are expected to obey the laws of the land when they arrive, while settlers make their own new laws of the land.

In healing we eradicate the colonizer virus from society: instead of divide, control, exploit, we embrace a new paradigm of connect, relate, belong.

Organizational design determines fundamental elements like how power is held and by whom, who makes decisions and how decisions are carried out, what the relationship of the organization is to resources, and what constitutes success, effectiveness, purpose, etc.

“It’s not hard to map the neocolonial DNA across our sector . . . the effect of concentrating power, hyper-professionalizing in a way that creates exclusivity, co-opting existing culture, forcing assimilation, leveraging local populations to obtain resources, and reinforcing larger systems of oppression,” write Stanford scholars Jess Rimington and Joanna Levitt Cea, who are cataloging the hallmarks of “colonized organizational design” in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.4

In their Dismantling Racism workbook, Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun identified other characteristics of white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, fear of open conflict, individualism, worship of unlimited growth, objectivity, and avoidance of discomfort.

How would they be different if they were based on principles like integration and interdependence, reciprocity and relationship?

By my fourth day, I had already begun to regret taking the job. . . . The truth is, I’ve never felt quite like I could bring my full self to the job. I never felt like I could speak freely. I feel like I have to play a role. I myself have become more conservative in how I operate. Not in my thinking, but how I move through the world. It’s almost like an expectation that you yourself get in line. Not even an expectation—it’s required. You have to assimilate in order to be able to move anything inside of a foundation. You have to drink the Kool-Aid and operate like they do, move like they do.6

His experience was echoed by an investigation commissioned by the Association of Black Foundation Executives (ABFE) that looked into a concerning trend: the inability of the philanthropic sector to hold on to Black employees. ABFE’s investigation culminated in a 2014 report called “The Exit Interview,” which found that many Black professionals left because they felt extra scrutinized and their expertise was not trusted.12

having a seat at the table is not the same as feeling free to speak in your own voice, to offer your own divergent ideas, to bring your full self to bear on the work.

Only 3 percent of philanthropic institutions are led by Black chief executives, with even more dismal representation for other races and ethnicities.16 Board leadership is even more demographically starved. “Fully 85 percent of foundation board members are white, while just 7 percent are African American and only 4 percent are Hispanic,” says Gara LaMarche, the president of the Democracy Alliance. “Nearly three-quarters of foundations have no written policy on board diversity.”17 Since joining the board of the Andrus Family Fund in 2017, I am one of only two Native Americans on a national private foundation board.

In philanthropy there have been dozens of initiatives on diversity, equity, and inclusion, often lumped together using the acronym DEI. The field has spent hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, on making these buzzwords the subject of conference topics, task forces, summits, surveys, reports, and trainings. Vu Le, a nonprofit leader who frequently writes and speaks about the sector, using humor to point out a lot of our stuck places and particular afflictions, describes the hot air:

How far can resilience stretch when there’s continuous re-traumatization—at what point do the psyche and the soul just shatter?