Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

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 ways of life. When all these efforts and policies failed to extinguish us, the settlers launched the era of “boarding schools,” separating Native children from their families and cultures, cutting off our hair, forbidding us to speak our languages, forcing us to act white. Divide, control, exploit.