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Humans have used money wrongfully. We’ve made money more important than human life. We’ve allowed it to divide us. That is a sin. We forget that we humans made money up out of thin air, as a concept, a tool for a complex society, a placeholder for aspects of human relations. We forget that we gave money its meaning and its power.
At every gathering of Natives I attend, there are elders who as children experienced being ripped away from their families and homes and being forced to submit to indoctrination in white boarding schools. The horrors are that fresh.
Internalized oppression limits us just as much as the oppression coming from someone else. It limits the thoughts we can think, the dreams we can dream, the actions we can take, the futures we can create. It is an aspect of trauma we must
heal from, in order to stop the cycles of division, exploitation, and hurt.
According to those who work to heal abusers, the point of recognizing the victimization of perpetrators is not to excuse, forgive, or in any way diminish the destructiveness of their actions, but rather to develop an accurate understanding of how oppression works, how it is sustained and recreated over generations, how to end it.
Ours is a society that does not do grief well or easily, and what is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. But mourning is painful and we resist giving way to it, distract ourselves with put-on toughness out of pride. . . . What is so dreadful is that to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without
tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it.2
Engaging these uncomfortable feelings opens space for different ways of interacting with diverse people and projects.
It creates possibilities for healing to happen on all sides.
A genuine apology focuses on the feelings of the other rather than on how the one who is apologizing is going to benefit in the end. It seeks to acknowledge full responsibility for an act, and does not use self-serving language to justify the behavior of the person asking forgiveness. A sincere apology does not seek to erase what was done. No amount of words can undo past wrongs. Nothing can ever reverse injustices committed against others. But an apology pronounced in the context of horrible acts has the potential for transformation.
“I’ve had this wonderful, privileged, lucky life in so many ways, so I shouldn’t be the one saying, ‘Here’s how to solve the problem.’ The people who are experiencing it should say that. What you need to do is get really humble, and listen, and learn. . . . Transformational change will always require challenging conversations about ‘us’—not a monologue about helping ‘them.’”1
There’s a tendency to want to always be right, to want to always have the answer, to want to always convince others of your righteousness.
what if philanthropy asked a community what it is most proud of and how it could support that?
You do not need to jump in and say, “Me too!” This just moves the focus away from the other person and back to yourself.
Replace advice with openness and curiosity.
Relationships create resilience; transactions don’t.
You’re trying to pass a test and at the same time you’re judging someone else’s presentation to see if they’re good enough for you. Relating, on the other hand, is about authenticity and vulnerability. You let yourself be seen for who you are and you accept the other person for who they are.
Mutual trust, respect, and appreciation deepen a relationship. We commit to supporting the success of the other person. We develop a sense that we are in this together.
What if the question became “How can everyone be powerful?” rather than “How can everyone have equal power?”
In fact, what if funders no longer assumed that disadvantaged communities and individuals needed to be empowered at all? What if we acknowledged how powerful they inherently are? The irony of a project of empowerment is that it requires victims: if you need someone to give up power and make space for you, then you are a victim of the power dynamic. Transcending the Drama Triangle roles of perpetrator, victim, and savior involves everyone being allocated with agency and responsibility.
This means that some of the usual suspects, the white saviors, will have to give up their seats. They’ll have to step back, rather than just make a token seat open next to them.
when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
“You don’t have to always be the final vote on the strategy, pace, timing, tone and approach. Put another way, it means you have to learn how to share political imagination, power, and work without having to always be in charge. . . . You have to be willing to
trust leaders of color who have the track record, integrity, and vision to get things done.”10
We must go beyond representation to sharing ownership and full inclusion.
The Potlatch Fund is named for the potlatch ceremonies common among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who had such an abundance of natural resources that they began a practice of ceremonially giving it all away—redistributing wealth.
Decolonizing wealth is, at its essence, about closing the racial wealth gap.
Above all, we’re talking about how all these—and many other events and policies and cultural practices—have worked together to keep wealth and well-being disproportionately concentrated in white communities.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.6
Reparations are the ultimate way to build power in exploited communities.
What if we could liberate money to be used as a tool of love?
Esse quam videri, a Latin phrase meaning “to be, rather than to seem.”
“We must really love people, not just do good for how it looks.”
When you’re being something, it infuses who you are and your contemplation into it. You connect with the things that resonate with your being, and your life is a testament to that. That was the way I was raised, to be rather than to seem, which is the state motto of North Carolina.”2
There was an infrastructure of giving.
It’s an Indigenous way that cuts across continents, the original way of being and giving.”4
you may not know what to do, but you better show up.
We expect certain kinds of people to make sacrifices. Apparently we reserve the term altruism for the privileged, fortunate, entitled people for whom self-sacrifice is a stretch, is unexpected.
ing—the word comes from the Latin root alter, “other.” Altruism also is a linear concept: it moves in one direction, from the Have to the Have Not, a one-way flow of resources. Altruism is the poster child for white saviors.
The Native worldview shifts the focus from altruism to reciprocity.
Reciprocity is based on our fundamental interconnection—there is no Other, no Us vs. The...
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Reciprocity is the sense that I’m going to give to you because I know you would do the same for me. No one is just a giver or just a taker; we...
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a gift is always tied to a relationship.
The supposed selflessness of pure altruism doesn’t exist.
The Native way is to bring the oppressor into our circle of healing. Healing cannot occur unless everyone is part of the process. Let it begin.
