Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

the institutions of philanthropy, which like all powerful institutions are full of false prophets who wield altruism as a kind of smoke and mirrors, obscuring the sources of their wealth. America’s wealth was made off of stolen lands and on the backs of enslaved and poor workers. Those who “give away” money to feed the poor with one hand while continuing to create conditions that keep people poor with the other are not repairing the breach but perpetuating it.

It is (we are) a period play, a costume drama, a fantasy of entitlement, altruism, and superiority. Far too often, it creates (we create) division and suffering rather than progress and healing. It is (we are) a sleepwalking sector, white zombies spewing the money of dead white people in the name of charity and benevolence. It is (we are) colonialism in the empire’s newest clothes. It is (we are) racism in institutional form.

Philanthropy is the savior mentality in institutional form, which instead of helping—its ostentatiously proclaimed intent—actually further divides and destabilizes society.

In Native traditions, however, medicine is a way of achieving balance. An Indigenous medicine person doesn’t just heal illnesses—he or she can restore harmony or establish a state of being, such as peacefulness. Medicine people live and practice among the people; access to them is constant and unrestricted. And the practice of medicine is not just limited to the hands of medicine people; everyone is welcome to participate. Engaging with medicine is a part of the experience of daily life. Traditionally, Indigenous people don’t wait to be out of balance before they turn to medicine. In the Indigenous worldview, many kinds of things can be medicine: a place, a word, a stone, an animal, a natural phenomenon, a dream, a life event like a coffee date with a friend, or even something that seems bad in the moment, such as the loss of a job. Have you ever looked back at your life and thought, That was the best thing that could have ever happened to me? That was medicine. In order for something or someone to serve as medicine, it only needs to be filled with or granted a kind of mystical or spiritual power. Anyone can find and use medicine, just by allowing intuition and feelings to determine whether something can serve as medicine. You listen for its sacred power; you don’t force it. You don’t choose the medicine, the elders say. It chooses you.

Money is like water. Water can be a precious life-giving resource. But what happens when water is dammed, or when a water cannon is fired on protesters in subzero temperatures? Money should be a tool of love, to facilitate relationships, to help us thrive, rather than to hurt and divide us. If it’s used for sacred, life-giving, restorative purposes, it can be medicine. Money, used as medicine, can help us decolonize.

Seven Steps to Healing: 1. Grieve. We have to stop and feel the hurts we’ve endured. 2. Apologize. We must apologize for the hurts we’ve caused. 3. Listen. We must acknowledge the wisdom of those excluded and exploited by the system, who possess exactly the perspective and wisdom needed to fix it. 4. Relate. We need space to share our whole selves with each other and understand we don’t have to agree in order to respect each other. 5. Represent. We must build whole new decision- making tables, rather than setting token places at the colonial tables as an afterthought. 6. Invest. We need to put all our money where our values are. 7. Repair. We must use money to heal where people are hurting and to stop more hurt from happening. These steps aren’t necessarily linear. Certain steps may need to be revisited, and the entire process may need to be repeated. In this way, it’s more of a circular or spiral process. Like any clever virus, the colonizer mindset keeps mutating and adapting, so in order to heal fully, we will need to be vigilant and get booster shots.

The Lakota say Mitakuye Oyasin (“all my relations”), meaning we are all related, connected, not only to each other but also to all the other living things, the inanimate things, the planet, and the Creator. The principle of All My Relations means that everyone is at home here. Everyone has a responsibility for 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.

Audre Lorde’s declaration, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”1 In other words, given the level of trauma caused by the colonizer virus and wealth consolidation, can funders actually support transformational change? The master’s tools, as I view them, are not money; the tools are anything corrupted to serve the aims of exploitation and domination. If money is an inherently neutral force, as I described in the introduction, then it can also be used for good, as medicine,

Being Native American inherently involves an identity crisis. We’re the only race or ethnicity that is only acknowledged if the government says we are. Here we are, we exist, but we still have to prove it. Anyone else can say they are what they are. No one has to prove that they’re Black or prove that they’re Latino. There are deep implications to this. The rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide are linked to this fundamental questioning of our identity. We exist in the Other box. To try to feel safe inside that box, and then be told you’ve got to prove your right to be in that box, that the box itself is under threat, is deeply demoralizing.

It’s so strange. Conquering is one thing: you travel to another place and take its resources, kill the people who get in your way, and then go home with your spoils. But in colonization, you stick around, occupy the land, and force the existing Indigenous people to become you. It’s like a zombie invasion; colonizers insist on taking over the bodies, minds, and souls of the colonized. Who came up with this, and why? Without going too deep into the details of humanity’s evolution (there are other great books for that),4 I just say that the concept of colonization followed the trend that seems to have begun when humans first became farmers and began managing, controlling, and “owning” other forms of life—plant and animal (giving us this horrifying word, “livestock”). Conceptually, this required that humans think of themselves as separate from the rest of the natural world. This was the beginning of a divergence from the Indigenous worldview, which fundamentally seeks not to own or control but to coexist with and steward the land and nonhuman forms of life. As the philosopher Derek Rasmussen put it, “What makes a people Indigenous? Indigenous people believe they belong to the land, and non-Indigenous people believe the land belongs to them.”5 It’s not that Indigenous people were or are without strife or violence, but their fundamental worldview emphasizes connection, reciprocity, a circular dynamic.

The separation-based economy exploits natural resources and most of the planet’s inhabitants for the profit of a few. It considers the earth an object, separate from us, with its resources existing solely for human use, rather than understanding the earth as a living biosphere of which we are just one part. Money, of course, has been used and is still constantly used to separate people—most fundamentally, into Haves and Have-Nots. Separation-based political systems create arbitrary nation-states with imaginary boundaries. Their laws and institutions oppress some groups and privilege others. Leaders and experts are considered a special breed, set apart from the common person; all the important choices are up to them. The separation-based political conversation revolves around the questions: Whom should we fear? and Whom should we blame? Most damaging of all, a long line of mostly white male bullies and sociopaths took the concept of separation and used it to justify oppression, slavery, and colonization by “scientifically” claiming the inferiority of Africans and Indigenous people, among other Others. And so we got to white supremacy.

White supremacy is a bizarre mythology created by people with pale skin. It asserts that paler people deserve more—more respect, more resources, more opportunity—for no reason beyond the utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless pigmentation of their skin. It says that pale people make the important decisions while people of color pay the price. Pale people define what is normal; they make the rules. Whiteness is the default, the standard, the norm; when it goes without saying what someone’s ethnic background is, it’s because they are pale. Pale people fill the airwaves, screens, and history books with their stories, until it is hard to find heroes and role models who are not pale. “This system rests on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group,” writes Robin DiAngelo, the whiteness studies professor who also coined the term “white fragility,” which refers to the discomfort and resistance white people often express when these issues are raised.

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, and rich. It has been a termite-like force that throughout history has eviscerated all in its path.”7

As far back as the 1400s, white supremacy, often in the name of Christianity, was employed to justify colonization—the conquest and exploitation of non-European lands—by claiming the inferiority of Africans and Indigenous people. The Christian Doctrine of Discovery specified that the entire world was under the jurisdiction of the pope, as God’s representative on earth. Any land not under the sovereignty of a Christian ruler could be possessed on behalf of God. European colonizers sailed around the world, taking stuff that didn’t belong to them and asserting that it was their God-given right to do so. 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. These two kinds of colonialism can and often do coexist. Violence and exploitation are always part of the process. The mantra of colonizers is “Divide, control, [and above all] exploit.” In many countries around the world, the colonizers came, wreaked their havoc, and at some point left, sometimes after uprisings and independence movements succeeded in pushing them out. In America, however, they stayed. This is known as settler coloniali...

In order to lay claim to land that did not belong to them, settlers had to erase everyone and everything that came before. They rewrote history to legitimize their actions. They had to find a way to justify their atrocious behavior, by claiming to be more deserving, more civilized, and superior to the original inhabitants, the First Nations. The settlers claimed their god granted them the right. 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 all scenarios, colonization has deep, long-lasting impacts on the colonized, the natives, but settler colonialism makes things much, much messier. The Tunisian author Albert Memmi wrote, “It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships.”11 What makes it even more complicated in the United States is that, over time, the white settlers brought slaves and later attracted low-wage workers—many of them people of color—who all were hurt and exploited and yet also were technically settlers, from the Indigenous perspective. The settlers caused death, disease, diaspora, and cultural subjugation of Native communities. They systematically suppressed our Native governance and sovereignty. They systematically delegitimized and stamped out our traditional, holistic ways of understanding, learning, and knowing. Forced removals traumatized Natives by severing us from the lands that contained the plants and animals we needed to sustain the physical, mental, cultural, and spiritual health of our communities. Our lands also contained the bones of our ancestors and the keys to our traditional...

Urban Indians—those of us who live somewhere other than on reservations—

The relatively new field of epigenetics studies how trauma that our ancestors experienced can literally be passed down, attached to our DNA. An essay in a 2013 issue of Discover magazine described it this way: “Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding.”22It was found, for example, that the descendants of Holocaust survivors had different cortisone profiles than normal, which was an adaptation to prolonged starvation, since cortisol impacts the ability of certain organs to use glucose and metabolic fuels.

Instead of divide, control, exploit, we embrace a new paradigm of connect, relate, belong. COLONIZED → DECOLONIZED DIVIDE → CONNECT CONTROL → RELATE EXPLOIT → BELONG

Wealth is used to divide us and control us and exploit us, but it doesn’t have to be.

“It’s not hard to map the neocolonial DNA across our sector … the effect of concentrating power, hyperprofessionalizing 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.

The basis of traditional philanthropy is to preserve wealth, and all too often that wealth is fundamentally money that’s been twice stolen, once through the colonial-style exploitation of natural resources and cheap labor and then a second time through tax evasion. Mostly white saviors and experts use this hoarded wealth to dominate and control—obviously or subtly—the seekers and recipients of those funds.

The staff was kept at a distance in order to control the narrative with the board. It wouldn’t do for them to question the leadership’s judgments about the staff and our work, or decisions about firing and restructuring. Many dozens of people had come and gone through this foundation, and it was less than a decade old. Tragically, the leadership style absolutely embodied the mantra of colonizers: “Divide, control, [and above all] exploit.”

Because of the power associated with controlling wealth, leaders in institutions of philanthropy and finance are some of worst perpetrators of the savior dynamic. Despite all their talk of wanting to help, reform, even revolutionize the world, saviors won’t touch the underlying system of privilege and power because that’s what grants them their status and position in the world. In the end, saviors don’t heal anything. The savior complex often goes hand in hand with white supremacy.

Becoming reconnected—overcoming the mindset of separation—is how humans heal from trauma. Reconnecting can mean remembering traditions and honoring our community’s wisdom. It can mean researching our family history and finding out how our wealth was generated. It will probably mean remembering and reexperiencing painful events. I know this was the case for me. There’s so much that I had pushed out of my memory, that I had wanted to forget. Reconnecting might mean having vulnerable, difficult, awkward conversations with people who are harmed by the system from which we benefit. It may entail forgiveness of those who have harmed us. It means recognizing that we are part of something greater, that we belong together, that we are all in this thing called life together. This is all part of the path to freedom, to really restoring balance in our lives and in the world.

And “showing up” doesn’t just mean walking into the room. It means having your heart in the space, too. It means being present. It means listening deeply, openly, without filters.

There is a responsibility involved in being a healer, of course, but it’s actually not to heal people. The power to heal is something that each one of us has access to inside ourselves, and what a healer does is to remind us of that power, or to unlock something so we can connect to that power. Healing happens through learning about ourselves, forgiving ourselves, and loving ourselves. Healers can hold up a mirror to others, but we can’t do the healing for them.

Are you able to sense more opportunities in your own life?

The most obvious kinds of wealth are ancient, priceless pieces or precious objects made of gold and jewels, for example, that are displayed behind reinforced glass and protected by high-tech security systems and guards. A lot of those artifacts were stolen from their cultures of origin by the original colonizers. There are approximately 90,000 pieces from Africa in French museums and cultural institutions.2 The British Museum has 8 million items in its collection, including sacred objects from all over the world, and more than 6,000 human remains. “Not everything was acquired illegally,” notes an article about the British Museum in The Economist. “Some items were bought, exchanged or received as gifts—though there’s a question as to how freely a gift is given, if it’s handed over to a man at the head of a platoon of bayonets.”3

Masum Momoya, a former curator for the Smithsonian Institution who now works in philanthropy funding the arts, commented: Most of the cultural institutions that we have today were born out of either projects of colonialism, projects of nationalism and nation building, or education in a very narrow sense. This moment is calling on them to do some internal work to decolonize themselves as institutions, to confront their own racism and systemic oppression, and to grapple with things like repatriation of artifacts and things that were taken as part of the projects of colonization, missionization, exploration.

Access is wealth. Literacy is wealth. Information is wealth, too. All can be used as medicine. For instance, libraries are the primary access to information, and even to the internet, for a lot of low-income people. Libraries function as community centers, safe spaces and counseling offices, and even employment agencies—many people rely on librarians to help them navigate job listings or fill out complicated forms and applications for government benefits such as disability pay or unemployment support. Librarians sometimes even help people create and print out résumés. So librarians have a real opportunity to be healers, and this is one of the reasons why it’s important that they come from the community they’re serving and really understand the needs of people in the community. As it turns out, less than 20 percent of library directors are people of color.

The LANDBACK movement isn’t an eviction notice for settlers; it’s an invitation to use this form of wealth to heal the long legacy of exploitation and a lack of safety.

The motto of the Human Library is “Unjudge someone,” and currently they’re working toward a global event called Unjudgment Day. I love it.

Indeed, beyond their impact in shifting perceptions, shattering stereotypes, and creating empathy on the individual level, the stories of our lives actually carry the seeds of potential for changing complicated systems like white supremacy and patriarchy. The key is to connect our personal stories with larger narratives.

Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz trains people who work on community issues to develop their “public story,” because once you step out into the public eye, if don’t tell your story, someone else will. A good public story, according to Ganz, “is drawn from the series of choice points that have structured the ‘plot’ of your life—the challenges you faced, choices you made, and outcomes you experienced.”3 Why did it feel like a challenge? Why did you make the choice you did? Where did you get the courage to make the choice? How did the outcome impact you? What can it teach us?

Some will say that the colonial system of wealth consolidation based on white supremacy has caused so much damage and suffering and is so intrinsically rotten that anything related to it, including the ostensibly altruistic worlds of philanthropy or aid, cannot be fixed, cannot be trusted, should not be saved. Those voices would burn the system to the ground and start fresh. I empathize with that perspective, yet I believe there are parts of the system worth holding on to. The both/and stance is how Native Americans have survived colonization. Evolution occurs both by holding on to the adaptations that keep us thriving and by abandoning the elements that keep us from thriving.

Grieving requires softening your self-protective defense mechanisms enough to feel, getting beyond the denial, numbness, righteousness, apathy, and other obstacles we have put in place to avoid the depths of pain. The humanity that was previously made invisible must be made visible again.

White people have to grieve the guilt that accompanies whiteness. You cannot and must not opt out of whiteness. You have to grapple with the messiness of the privilege. You have to come and collect your people. Settlers and their descendants have to grieve the lives of their ancestors, the culture that made their acts of domination and exploitation even imaginable, possible, and acceptable. What confused, numbed, dissociated hell it must have been for them, on a deep level, even if they enjoyed benefits on other levels. Hurting people hurt others (something else I learned growing up watching Oprah). Generations down the line must grieve the culture of the present, which perpetuates the colonizer mindset of domination and exploitation.

In her book Medicine Stories, curandera and historian Aurora Levins Morales writes: Ours is a society that does not do grieve 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

Philanthropist Peter Buffett talked to me about how it was no coincidence that the first philanthropic organizations were created in the Gilded Age, against the backdrop of industrialization, which, alongside creating enormous concentrations of wealth, also led to anxiety, depression, and existential crises. For most people, work had gone from mostly autonomous productive activities that involved a sense of purpose and satisfaction, like craftsmanship or farming, to being a cog in the assembly line of industry somewhere, lacking any sense of agency or power. “It led to one hundred fifty years of purposelessness,

An organizational design consultant in post-apartheid South Africa commented on how much of the emphasis in institutions is on articulating an exciting vision of the future. [But] selling the vision of a new, exciting future to people who are still in grief is akin to telling a grieving husband at the grave of his wife to marvel at the beauty and virtues of potential wives standing around the grave. Such thinking ignores the loss, hurt, and pain that comes with change. The widower must first grieve his spouse before he can see and appreciate new possibilities.5

Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility, argues that workplaces focus on positivity to the detriment of well-being and that the suppression of negative emotions can be harmful. “Teams that feel safe enough to articulate discontent or talk about frustration are the most high-functioning teams,” she notes. “When we only allow some emotions, we create a huge amount of emotional labor. We also create a situation for individuals that is psychologically unhealthy and undermines the organization’s ability to learn and function more effectively.”

It only makes sense that if people are busy suppressing some parts of their thoughts and emotions, they won’t be ab...

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. It clears or “settles” the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings.1

As Peter Buffett has written, “I believe that words can change the world. On a personal level, when we say, ‘I hear you’ or ‘I’m sorry,’ worlds can change.”6

To my Indigenous Relatives and Relatives of Color: I apologize for my ignorance of the harm that came to you and the horrors you survived through many generations. I apologize for my unconscious racism and white supremacy, and the pain they have caused you. I apologize for the silent ways I gave my own comfort priority over your existence as a sovereign human being. When I dishonored you, I dishonored my own humanity and the humanity of all our children. I am sorry. I love you. Please forgive me. To my European-Descended Relatives: I apologize for all the times I have judged you instead of allowing myself to feel the grief of our collective spiritual impoverishment and cultural amnesia. I apologize for seeing you as a monster of oppression, instead of a Child of Creation. I apologize for disassociating from you and denying that we are related. When I judged you, I judged my own ancestors, my children, and myself. I am sorry. I love you. Please forgive me.7

as the civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois said, “It is never too late to mend. Nothing is so bad that good may not be put into it and make it better and save it from utter loss.”8

Why is it so difficult for people and institutions of wealth to listen? They believe that they know more than others and know what’s best for others. They’re not open to learning or being influenced. They make positive assumptions about their own abilities and negative assumptions about everyone else. This is a reflection of the power dynamic, the white savior mentality. It’s about a lack of humility and a desire to be in control.

Otto Scharmer, a professor of leadership and management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that listening is key to leadership, but not just any kind of listening. He differentiates between “downloading,” which is when we only hear things that confirm what we already know; “factual listening,” when we filter what we hear in search of new data and evidence; “empathetic listening,” which puts us in the shoes of the speaker, connecting and feeling what s/he feels; and finally, “generative listening,” in which we enter almost a meditative flow state, which enables us “to connect to the highest future possibility that can emerge.”3 We need to be striving for empathetic listening 100 percent of the time in order to heal the past, and generative listening as often as we can in order to move forward and build new organizations and new culture.