Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

by Edgar Villanueva

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.