Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

people who control our institutions, we see that in 2016–2017: Congress: 90% white Governors: 96% white Top military advisers: 100% white President and vice president: 100% white Current POTUS cabinet: 91% white People who decide which TV shows we see: 93% white People who decide which books we read: 90% white

People who decide which news is covered: 85% white People who decide which music is produced: 95% white Teachers: 83% white Full-time college professors: 84% white . . .”6 Given that white people currently constitute only 60 percent of American citizens, you can see how far out of proportion those statistics are. Since the Trump election, the “whitelash” (per CNN commentator Van Jones) that followed our first Black president, and the resurrection of emboldened racism across the country, many of us feel this imbalance is only going to get worse. Vanessa Daniel, executive director of the Groundswell Fund, calls the dynamic “the hubris of white supremacist conquest and imperialism and its insatiable thirst for total dominance over nature, over people of color, over anyone who is not white, Christian, cisgender, male,

force that throughout history has eviscerated all in its path. . . .”7 Only rece...

In the United States today, there are 2.9 million Natives, or 0.9 percent of the population, and 5.2 million Natives mixed with other races, or 1.7 percent of the population.12 At 11 percent, our unemployment rate is almost double the national rate of 6.2 percent, while our median incomes are a third lower than the

national average.13 Our high school drop-out rates are nearly twice as high as the national average,14 while our youth are three and a half times more likely to commit suicide.15 According to U.S. Department of Justice records, one in three Native American women are raped in their lifetimes, a figure that is two and a half times greater than the average for all U.S. women. In 86 percent of cases of rape of Indigenous women and girls, the rapist is non-Native, which results in many crimes going uninvestigated by either U.S.

officials, because the jurisdiction is unclear.16 While Native American youth only make up 1.8 percent of the total youth population, they represent 3.6 percent of those detained, and once they are in the prison system, they are more likely to be placed in detention and less likely to get probation.17 Natives face special health challenges and disparities too, from having the highest rates of diabete...

personally experienced a traumatic event such as a great loss, or a violation or abuse, you know how it destroys your trust, your sense of safety, even your sense of who you are. In order to survive trauma, you react unconsciously to protect yourself, usually using an automatic survival strategy like dissociation, fight, flight, or appeasing. Often these self-protection and defense mechanisms

coloring your perception from then on of everyone you meet and everything that happens, especially if you are traumatized more than once. After a while, you have less and less choice in the matter; the protective stance hardens into a way of seeing and experiencing the world. It feels like the way you are: I’m just distant. I’m just unemotional. I’m just suspicious. I’m just small and unthreatening. I’m just mean and aggressive. You have blinders on about what is possible for yourself and for human interactions, and you don’t

know how much they limit the po...

almost every one of us alive on earth has experienced some kind of trauma. So chances are you know what I am talking about. But now imagine if you came from generations of people who were systematically and repeatedly violated in every possible way. Imagine that all your family and friends and community members regularly experienced...

criminalization, denigration, and murder, over hundreds of years. Imagine the trauma of this experience has been reinforced by government policies, economic systems, and social norms that have systematically denied your people access to safety, mobility, resources, food, education, dignity, and positive reflections of themselves. Repeated and ongoing violation, exploitation, and deprivation have a deep, lastin...

known as collective trauma, historic trauma, intergenerational trauma. The relatively new field of epigenetics studies how trauma that our ancestors experienced can literally be passed down, attached to our DNA. A...

Colonial, white supremacist organizational practices seem inevitable because they were so universally adopted over the next centuries, and they still govern the great majority of our institutions, but they were design choices. This means that other choices are available, even when they seem far-fetched.

know what spaces and organizations look like, feel like, and function like when they are inspired by the colonizers’ principles of separation, competition, and exploitation. How would they be different if they were based on principles like integration and interdependence, reciprocity and relationship?

in

to form what ultimately wound