Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

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.