Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva

Author:Edgar Villanueva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

The day after I received my name, the Native Health conference ended. As I was heading to my gate at the Denver airport, I saw the medicine man wearing a T-shirt and jeans, eating at TGI Fridays. That’s the modern American Indian existence for you. Natives can be both denim-wearing, television-watching, and fast-food-eating people on the one hand, and people who honor the ancestors, participate in ceremonial rituals, and prepare traditional feasts on the other.

I was reminded of an observation from my mentor, a Lumbee elder named Donna Chavis who worked in institutional philanthropy before me, one of the very first Native women to do so. She had been telling stories about her grandfather, “a Bible-thumping Baptist preacher. His way of being was not just Christian; it was a blend, because he was a traditional healer too. He made the connection.” As I’ve mentioned, the contemporary Lumbee identity inevitably includes faith in Christianity, a result of the fact that we were colonized 500-some years ago.

“Blending Native tradition with Christianity made it possible to move through both worlds. There was not a rejection—it was not either/or—it was both/and. The both/and mindset influenced just about everything in the way I was raised within our clan. I think the word mutual captures it,” said Donna. “Mutual means that both sides have something to offer, and that’s what’s true.”2

When the both/and disappears and Indigenous people have to choose either the colonizers’ way or the traditional way, and reject the other way, including whatever good might exist within it, they tend to be much less resilient. There are studies on alcoholism among Natives, Donna told me, that showed that the Indians who had the highest chance of becoming alcoholics were the ones on either end of the spectrum: those who completely adopted the ways of the colonizers and those who completely rejected them. “It was those who learned not only how to respect and live within their culture but also to navigate the world outside their culture who wound up having the lower risk of alcoholism,” she told me.3

Being Native means living in the complex space where worlds meet. Members of Native American tribes literally hold dual nationalities: first as citizens of their Native nation, and second as citizens of the United States. Today in our everyday lives we do not dress like Natives portrayed in movies like Dances with Wolves. We blend in; we’re wearing jeans (or the latest B. Yellowtail fashions) and jet-setting. We’re getting degrees in law and Western medicine. At the same time, we’ve still got a connection to the land we’ve always lived on, to the places where our ancestors are buried, to our songs and our medicine.

“Integration means we can lift up what we have. At the same time, we bring in what is needed,” as Donna says.4 Accepting the both/and nature of things was key to Indigenous survival against all odds.

By the time I left KBR I was fairly thoroughly colonized, after years of church, mainstream schooling and higher education, and then the oh-so-white experience of the foundation built with tobacco money.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.