CHAPTER SIX

Freedom

How our focus on individual leaders is also a reflection of the colonizer virus

Around the time I left KBR, I got my Indian name. I wish I could tell you a romantic story about a vision quest where I became a man after spending a month building my own shelter, sleeping under the stars, foraging and nearly starving, and having hallucinogenic experiences that revealed the true nature of things. But that’s not how it happened.

No, it was in a beige conference room at the Marriott in Denver. I had found a job, finally, in the direct aftermath of KBR, and was running the North Carolina American Indian Health Board, an organization that represented the six tribes around the state, working toward improved health in our communities, and the National Indian Health Board conference was taking place in Denver. At the conference was a sign-up sheet to meet with an Ojibwe medicine man.

Obviously, I signed up.

There was a line of people waiting their turn to go into the room and have a session with him, and I was nervous. In my church, growing up, this kind of thing—shamans and the like—would have been condemned as heresy.

“What’s going to happen in there?” I asked the woman waiting in line in front of me. I felt like I was on my way to see the Great and Powerful Oz.

She looked at me doubtfully and asked, “Do you have tobacco to give him?”

Um. I don’t carry around tobacco with me. “Is that what they like?” I asked.

“You have to take a gift!” she said, shocked at my ignorance. She broke off a bit of hers and gave it to me.

I went in, holding the tobacco out in front of me. The medicine man nodded at his assistant to take it from me, and gestured for me to sit down. We sat in generic hotel chairs across from each other at a generic hotel table. He was wearing something vaguely ceremonial but not extravagant. I was wearing my usual colonized attire: as nice a suit as I could afford.

He stared at me for a moment. I felt very uncomfortable, skeptical but hopeful at the same time.

He asked me why I’d come. The truth was someone had suggested that if I were lucky, he might give me an Indian name, even though it’s pretty unusual for someone from another tribe to give you a name. There are different traditions around naming. My tribe does not have a naming ceremony. You are just who you are, whatever your mama names you. I felt I’d be more legit with a real Indian name, but of course I wasn’t going to express that to the medicine man.

So I said, “I’m part of this organization, trying to help my community. I’m trying to get reconnected to my culture because I did not grow up in traditional Native ways. I just want to open my mind to all of this, so that I can be in a better position to help my community back in North Carolina.” I was babbling a bit.

“The ancestors are happy that you’re here,” he said.

What? My colonized mind kicked in, wondering if this dude was totally making stuff up. At the same time, I thought I might burst into tears.

He talked about the colors he saw coming from me. His eyes flickered around the room as he spoke, and suddenly he flinched and practically ducked: the ancestors and spirits were flying around the room, he told me.

Okay, this was definitely ridiculous. Wasn’t it? I had no idea. I wanted to scream and run out of the room, but I couldn’t move. I was transfixed. And then he said it: “I want to give you an Indian name.”

My moment had arrived. My prayers had been granted.

Niigaanii Beneshi.

It’s in Ojibwe, from northern Minnesota.

“It means ‘Leading Bird,’” he added, sparing me from having to find someone who speaks Ojibwe to translate it for me. “When birds are flying in the V formation, there’s a bird that’s leading the formation. That’s you.”

I thanked him and floated out of the room, feeling all spiritual and mysterious after the experience. Niigaanii Beneshi. Leading Bird.

After I left him, I researched the qualities of migratory birds. It turns out migration is no party. More birds die during migration than at any other time, from dehydration, starvation, or sheer exhaustion. When birds fly together, they cut the wind for each other—all except for the one at the front. That one has to bear the full force of the wind. That one has to stick his nose out. That one has to lead the way forward despite the discomfort.

At the same time, one of the great lessons of migrating birds is that they take turns occupying that tough position at the front, which allows for greater resilience for the whole group. By working together, a flock of birds is greater than the sum of its parts. In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes about what we can learn from flocks of birds:

The lesson is that thriving is not actually about the leader; it’s about the whole flock. Everyone has the potential to lead, and leadership is about listening and being attuned to everyone else. It’s about flexibility. It’s about humility. It’s about trust. It’s about having fun along the way. It is more about holding space for others’ brilliance than being the sole source of answers, more about flexible shape-shifting to meet the oncoming challenges than holding fast to a five-year strategic plan.

I am frequently asked what decolonized leadership looks like. Compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable leaders? Servant leaders? Leaders who listen? Yes, and it’s not about the individual. We have to shift from our obsession with individual leaders to a focus on organizational design, which tends to be taken for granted and invisible in most of our institutions.

Fortunately, conversations about new kinds of organizational design have been exploding recently. There’s a sea change happening, moving us away from the colonized hierarchical pyramid structure, with its command- and- control leadership, to a realization of how everyone has leadership potential. Businesses have been at the fore-front of experimenting with organizational models that transcend the colonized mindset of division, control, and exploitation; now it’s time for the fields of philanthropy and finance to follow their lead, in order to heal divides and restore balance.

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 Native American existence for you. Natives can be both denim- wearing, television-watching, 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 show that the Indians with the highest chance of becoming alcoholics are the ones on either end of the spectrum—those who completely adopt the ways of the colonizers and those who completely reject 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.

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 on which we’ve always lived, 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. 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. It’s no coincidence that it was at this point in my story that I really began the process of becoming more curious about my Native heritage and connecting with Indigenous traditions. For modern Natives, the process of decolonization often looks like this, an exploration and embrace of traditional rituals and practices from which one has become disconnected.

“The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves,” says Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born doctor who is one of the world’s top experts on trauma. “Trauma is not terrible things that happen from the other side—those are traumatic. But the trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions. So, the real question is, ‘How did we get separated and how do we reconnect?’ Because that’s our true nature—our true nature is to be connected.”³

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.

But—for me at least—it’s not simply just a full return to the ancient ways; it’s the both/and integration. I have no intention of acquiring traditional skills like hunting and skinning game or building canoes or shelters by hand. I intend to keep working with money, guiding people to think about it as medicine, as a tool of decolonizing and healing. I am keeping my tailored suits (tailored in my head, at least!) and my Brooklyn apartment. As they say about relationship status: It’s complicated.

I firmly believe that integrating my Native heritage has contributed to my resilience as I have gone on to new roles within philanthropy and to encounter even greater challenges. As I’ve faced off with more overseers, saviors, and my own internalized oppression, I’ve been able to call upon the aspects of myself that are Lumbee, that are the Leading Bird.

As humanity faces all kinds of challenges that have come from the separation worldview—the devastation of the planet, the hate and fear among different religions and races and political ideologies—cultivating integration will be key to healing and saving all of us, and to restoring balance to the world.