CONCLUSION

Coming Full Circle

Decolonization takes us deep into the serpent’s belly to confront the white supremacy, the savior complex, and the internalized oppression that are entrenched in ourselves, our institutions, and our society. Only then can we heal from the trauma of the separation world-view that divided the world into Us vs. Them and led to exploitation, fear, and suffering. As we emerge from that process, we can lay a new social and economic foundation, based on new ways of relating to each other and to our resources. With its focus on connection and belonging, the Indigenous worldview—having persisted against all odds, as Indigenous people have—offers inspiration for the way forward.

The state motto of my home state of North Carolina is Esse quam videri, a Latin phrase meaning “to be, rather than to seem.” It was also my mother’s motto in childrearing. I can hear her now: “No half stepping! We must be real Christians, not just in name.” “We must really love people, not just do good for how it looks.”

As it turns out, looking back, the first actual philanthropist I ever knew was my mother, not that she would have ever used that word. After nearly a decade and a half of my working in the field, when asked what I do, she will say “philanthropy,” but she still stumbles over the word, and I’d be willing to bet money that she couldn’t spell it. Can we agree that words in English made of Greek roots were created so we’d have no idea what doctors are saying? So they can charge lots of money when they diagnose you with hypergargalesthesia? Yes, that’s a real condition: extreme sensitivity to tickling.

But I use the word because if you go by the Greek roots, philanthropy is about the love (phil) of humanity (anthropos).

To enable me to have a better life, my mom—a single mother—worked two or three shifts a day for most of my childhood, two of those shifts as a domestic worker, providing nursing assistance, helping sick, frail, and elderly (mostly wealthy) folks. A labor of love. Her first shift was at the DMV, a nine to five. Then she went to work providing care in a nursing home or someone’s home for her second shift, and then a third shift at someone’s home where, if she was lucky, she could get a few hours of sleep between caretaking, until the shift ended at 7:00 a.m., when she’d come home, change clothes, and start all over again. I’d tag along as often as possible. Many nights I hid in the car until the previous nurse left, then she’d sneak me into the houses where I would play the grand pianos, read in the libraries (this is where I discovered How to Win Friends and Influence People), and then get tucked into beds or couches.

On her precious days off, did the poor woman put her feet up and eat bonbons? No, she did outreach for church. She helped start a bus ministry. This involved not just her Sundays but her Saturdays too. Actually, our Saturdays, because I went along. If I was lucky, we’d stop at Bojangles and grab a cinnamon biscuit first for sustenance. For years, we spent Saturdays going from neighborhood to neighborhood, knocking on doors, saying some variation of “Hi, I’m Sheila from the neighborhood. We go to this church and we just want to invite you to come attend some time. If you have kids, we have a bus that is more than happy to come by and pick them up for Sunday school.”

On Sunday mornings when we went to get them, the bus would pull up and most times I was the person to jump out, run up and knock on the door: “I’m here to pick up Tasha.” (Or whoever.) Standing there at the door waiting for the kid to come out, I saw a lot of bad things that made me grateful. Although my mom and I were poor, there were people who were much poorer, more troubled. Kids were pushed to the door looking a mess, unwashed, half dressed. Or I’d get sent in to fetch them—“They’re in the back room, go get them”—and I’d have to climb over a man passed out from drink, surrounded by beer cans.

My mom was passionate about getting kids to church, and the bus ministry program grew to 300 children in our small community, 300 children getting bused in to attend our church. For years after, to this day, children, now grown children, come running up and hug my mom, shouting, “Sister Sheila, Sister Sheila! You probably don’t remember me, but you used to pick me up on a bus and oh my God, you were so special to me.”

Most of those kids were just so hungry for love. They’d be trying to climb into my mom’s lap, all of them at the same time. They hung out at our house and became my friends. Our home became a place where kids could come and be. My mother hugged them, she listened to them, she loved them. For a lot of those kids, it was the only little bit of light and love they had in their lives.

Anything my mother ever had, she shared, not just with family or friends, but anybody. If her tomato plants produced more than two tomatoes, she’d be bringing those tomatoes to church or setting out a basket in the front yard with a sign that said “Free Tomatoes.” Because of how generous my mom was, I had no idea how poor we really were when I was a child. She has spent her life caring for others, sharing resources, raising money for others, giving up her time.

That is an actual philanthropist right there.

And because of her, I decided to pursue a career in healing work. I came very, very close to being a minister. I got my master’s in health care administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then, at 28, I took my first job at a foundation, where each year I gave away 25 to 30 million dollars to support health care in low-income communities. For a while I felt like the luckiest man on the planet, coming from where I had, earning handsomely for doing what I thought was sacred work of love.

As I started off on the journey, I felt about my work in philanthropy what adrienne maree brown, a facilitator and futurist, writes in her beautiful book Emergent Strategy: “When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts. Perhaps humans’ core function is love.”¹

Almost 15 years in the field have shown me that actual philanthropists—those engaged in acts of love for humanity, like my mother—are much more prevalent in the regular population, and only rarely found inside the field’s formal institutions: the foundations. Honestly, the vast majority of foundations have no right to call what they do philanthropy. The word isn’t egoanthropy, expertanthropy, or ROI-anthropy. But in the field, instead of love of humanity, there is a lot of the opposite: ego, greed, fear, blame, and disrespect.

“That word philanthropy has been so abused,” says Donna, my philanthropy mentor and fellow Lumbee Indian. “Organized philanthropy has done a disservice to philanthropy. When people see the word “philanthropy” they automatically think of dollars. In the organized filed of philanthropy, philanthropy is something we “do.” For me, it’s not that. I’m not doing philanthropy, I’m being it. There’s a difference between acting as a philanthropist and being a philanthropist. When you’re being something, it infuses who you are and your contemplation into it. You connect with the things that resonate with your being, and your life is a testament to that. That was the way I was raised, to be rather than to seem, which is the state motto of North Carolina.”²

Donna has been my “philanthropy mother” since I got started in the field. She got involved in philanthropy a couple decades earlier than I did, and happens to come from the very same land as my people come from, Robeson County, North Carolina. Like most Natives, and especially the elders, her answers to theoretical questions are rooted in home and family—literally Indigenous:

My father, bless his heart, he would be 112 now if he was alive. He passed when he was 70. His way of leadership was quiet and powerful. I didn’t know everything he had been involved with until he died. People at the funeral coming up to me saying, “If it wasn’t for your father, I wouldn’t have a job,” you know, Indian teachers and others. That’s the philanthropy that I grew up with, that was the giving. We were of course poor as church mice. When he died it was just a little over $3,000 a year that was coming into the house and he raised 10 children on that. As poor as anyone was, we didn’t go to bed hungry, we were taken care of. He was disabled from the time I was in second grade, from cancer. He lived decades longer than they predicted he would. At the times when he was sickest we had the most food we ever had because that was the traditional way of the community. There was an infrastructure of giving.

Daddy was my mentor in politics. It wasn’t about getting credit, it wasn’t about what you did, it was what the outcome was, if it helped somebody. I grew up watching all the local politicians come to our house, and it was a house that didn’t have indoor plumbing, still had the front porch, kind of, wood shack kind of thing. But it was built on love and it lasted . . . it’s still standing after 65 some years. It was the highly segregated part of the county and yet people of all colors and stripes would come into our house all the time. That’s what he believed in, they believed in, Mamma and Daddy.

He would sit in front of the gas station with his buddy. People would come by and talk to him and he would give his opinion of the election and so forth. Politicians visited because they knew he could turn the election to their favor, sitting out in front of that gas station. I called him “the mayor” after I saw the movie Do the Right Thing, because the mayor was the one who sat on the front step and did that. That was Daddy, that’s what he did. So that’s the cultural context I’m rooted in, when I came to philanthropy.³

My own grandfather was the same way. He lived in Hope Mills, North Carolina, at the back of a dirt road that you couldn’t even get to if it was raining. When he passed away there were hundreds of people who came to his funeral, whose lives he had touched and I had no idea. I knew he spent a few days each week visiting men in the county jail. I had never known he had become the chaplain for Cumberland County in an official capacity. At his funeral, one after another, people stood and said, “I was in jail, your granddaddy talked to me and changed my life and now I’m doing this, this, and this.” I had no idea because he was just my quiet, very quiet, simple grandfather.

Donna nods, hearing about my grandfather. “We are the original philanthropists, Natives,” she says. “I mean Indigenous people worldwide. It’s so obvious that this is an Indigenous way. It’s not a Lumbee way, Navajo way, or a Maori way. It’s an Indigenous way that cuts across continents, the original way of being and giving.”⁴

This was echoed in my interview with Dana Arviso, the executive director of the Potlatch Fund. She told me the story of a conversation she’d led about poverty reduction strategies among a gathering of Natives in the Cheyenne River territory. “They told me they don’t have a word for poverty,” she said. “The closest thing that they had as an explanation for poverty was ‘to be without family.’” Which is basically unheard of. “They were saying it was a foreign concept to them that someone could be just so isolated and so without any sort of a safety net or a family or a sense of kinship that they would be suffering from poverty,” she continued. Dana is Navajo, and we compared notes on the traditions in our respective communities.

“If someone is sick or if someone passes away you will never lack for food. It’s just like the food comes out the woodwork. If you’re sick there’s a system in place to make sure that food and support are coming your way,” I told her.

“Absolutely,” she agreed. “There’s a lot of showing up with food, showing up to help and sit with people in time of mourning. Just showing up. I mean, that’s one of the biggest lessons I learned from my family: you may not know what to do, but you better show up. Whether that means sharing food, sharing firewood, sharing whatever you had. Taking in extended family because they’re going through a rough time and raising their kids. I think that’s the biggest difference I see between kind of this mainstream framework and Native communities is that there’s such a focus on individualism. And in our communities it’s like, no, we are not a healthy community if we’re not taking care of everybody.”⁵

We are not a healthy community unless we’re taking care of everybody, and I mean all our relations, inside and outside our tribes.

Philanthropy and charitable acts are often called altruistic. Altruism is about doing things for others, unselfishly, without expectation of reward or acknowledgement, and maybe even at some cost to oneself. In zoology, altruism is a little more extreme. It’s usually an action that benefits the rest of the species at the actual expense of the individual, like an ant who allows her sisters and brothers to use her body as a bridge across water and then drowns. In human behavior it’s meant less literally—there’s no expectation that a donor is dying for the cause—still, there’s an aspect of self-sacrifice. Many people hold this kind of self-sacrifice for others as the highest form of generosity and kindness.

Yet . . . how often is it called altruism when sacrifices are made by people from whom we assume and expect selflessness? We don’t call it altruism when a mother stays awake all night by her child’s bedside. We don’t even call it altruism when a home care worker stays way beyond overtime, until the hurricane has blown over, to ensure the safety of her elderly charge. We expect certain kinds of people to make sacrifices. Apparently we reserve the term altruism for the privileged, fortunate, entitled people for whom self-sacrifice is a stretch, is unexpected.

The anthropologist David Graeber notes that small societies without money or markets (like Indigenous tribes in the Amazon basin or Papua New Guinea) don’t even possess words in their vocabularies for either “altruism” or “self-interest.” Those two extremes oversimplify the reason for human interactions around giving, sharing, and hoarding resources, he says, which are always reflective of much more complicated motivations, including solidarity, pride, desire, envy, the anticipation of shared enjoyment, etc. It’s the entire web of our relationships that are at the core of our generosity.⁶

When you look more closely, altruism is actually a fundamental reflection of the separation paradigm, the Us vs. Them mindset. Linguistically it’s literally about Other-ing—the word comes from the Latin root alter, “other.” Altruism also is a linear concept: it moves in one direction, from the Have to the Have Not, a one-way flow of resources. Altruism is the poster child for white saviors.

The Native worldview shifts the focus from altruism to reciprocity. Reciprocity is based on our fundamental interconnection—there is no Other, no Us vs. Them, no Haves vs. Have Nots. Reciprocity is the sense that I’m going to give to you because I know you would do the same for me. No one is just a giver or just a taker; we’re all both at some point in our lives. This also reflects a cyclical dynamic, as opposed to a one-off, one-way relationship. The Native botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving. . . . Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual.”⁷

The Native principle of reciprocity is where the white colonizers and settlers got the concept of “Indian giver.” Natives expressed that any gift was given within the expectation of an ongoing relationship, the idea that I give you this because I know you would (and will, at some point) do the same for me. Mutual dependence is necessary for social well-being. We are symbiotic. All of our flourishing is mutual. The white people got all holier-than-thou about it, how a gift isn’t actually a gift unless there’s no expectation of return. But the cyclical nature of reciprocity is actually the truth of things. As the cultural scholar Lewis Hyde describes in his book The Gift, the very essence of a gift, as contrasted with a commodity, is its relational quality. Gifts aren’t actually “free” even when they don’t cost anything. There are always strings attached: a gift is always tied to a relationship.

The supposed selflessness of pure altruism doesn’t exist. There’s really no such thing as the self completely disconnected from what’s outside the self, the Other. What’s truer to the way things really are—interconnected and interdependent—is reciprocity. Reciprocity means we are only a healthy community if we’re taking care of everybody.

In 2016, Natives received a lot of positive media coverage and solidarity around the Standing Rock protests. In the spring of 2016, a call went out on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation to stop the proposed 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Standing Rock sits on the border of North and South Dakota, and the pipeline threatens not only the reservation’s vital water source, sacred lands, and ancestral burial grounds, but also the aquifer of the Missouri River that provides drinking water to 10 million Americans.⁸ The call was answered—and echoed—by thousands of people across the United States and beyond, from both Native and orphan peoples.

Standing Rock was a historic moment, a gathering of tribes that hadn’t been seen in over 100 years. I want to underscore this. Native Americans are not one lump of homogenous people. We differ starkly in our ways, and we’re often at odds with each other. We sometimes compete with each other for federal support or fishing rights. In the end, we’re soaking in the same colonized atmosphere as the rest of the country (and globe), and we’re infected by the colonizer virus and internalized oppression just like other communities are. So the fact that all the tribes put aside their differences and came together to support the Sioux over the contested black snake of a pipeline was a big deal.

Standing Rock—a camp of 4,000 to 5,000 people strong at its height—was managed by a distributed leadership structure involving elders, women, and youth, using community assembly meetings and technology to organize. Photographer Camille Seaman of the Shinnecock Nation reflected on her time at the encampment:

Before dawn every day, a rider on horseback (or, sometimes, a driver in a car) would make their way through camp, saying, “Good morning, my relatives! It’s a beautiful day. Wake up, and remember why you are here!” Then we would all gather in a circle and pray as the sun rose. Our prayers would be for those who opposed us, those who supported us from afar, and those who were among us. These prayers continued all day and all night in many forms. In the evening, the sounds of singing and of drums (our mother’s heartbeat) could be heard in the dark.⁹

Prayer, ritual, ceremony were everywhere and constant. “The whole time you are in ceremony,” said activist AnaYelsi Velasco-Sanchez, who volunteered in the kitchens. “You wake in a space committed to prayer, every action is referred to as an act of prayer. If you are working in the kitchen and you are preparing this food, you are preparing medicine for the people. Prayer was embodied in the space, it was a posture you took.”¹⁰

Predictably, heart-wrenchingly, the militarized police force turned out to protect the interests of the oil business. In the words of one observer who volunteered as a medic:

. . . ripping elders in the midst of prayer out of sweat lodge, forcing hundreds of people peacefully assembled to strip and stand naked, spraying hundreds of people peacefully assembled with water and chemical weapons in freezing cold weather, barricading the access to advanced healthcare response, blockading the arrival of supplies to keep people healthy and warm in the winter, and shooting sponge grenades and explosive devices at people’s faces, groins, and limbs, causing blindness and ripped open flesh.¹¹

It was a moment in which the dynamics of today’s world surfaced starkly and undeniably: the tension between the interconnected, reverential Native world-view on the one hand, and the violent, exploitative ways of the colonizer on the other.

If my heart cracked when the camp was broken down, it shattered at the results of the 2016 presidential election. I told Donna, my philanthropy mother, how I just wanted to retreat and avoid white people after that.

She told me that it was a symptom of colonization that I felt that way. And she shared this story:

Years back, around 1992, I was at the youth and elders gathering at Onondaga. I was in the cookhouse, the community space—we did everything there, shower and hang out and meet as well as, yes, cook and eat—so it was called the cookhouse. It was the end of the gathering, so we were getting ready to leave. We were packing up, and there was an elder sitting at the table with the youth. That’s the way learning was done.

I was ready to leave. But then I heard him say, “Europeans coming to this land was not a problem.”

As an elder, he had memories of some of the historic activities of [atrocities by] the U.S. government against Native people. So when I heard him say that, I decided I had to stay and listen to him.

“The problem was,” he went on, “they forgot their teachings.”

I’ll never forget that moment. Because it just opened my heart. There are people who remember the teachings, non-Indigenous too. But Indigenous peoples are a living reminder. We’re not gone, no matter how many times they tried to make us invisible. We’re here as a living reminder. That’s what we can be to all institutions, if we’re allowed to be.¹²

As Desmond Tutu writes in The Book of Forgiving: “When we assault another’s humanity, we assault our own humanity. Every person wants to be acknowledged and affirmed for who and what they are, a human being of infinite worth, someone with a place in the world. We can’t violate another’s dignity without violating our own. Violence, whether in words or deeds, only begets more violence.”¹³

It made me remember footage I’d seen of a young woman at Standing Rock. The day after she and her fellow Water Protectors had been gunned down by the militarized police and National Guard using fire hoses and mace and rubber bullets—the very next day—she trudged back to the armed forces with candy in her hands. The Water Protector walked right back up to the same guards and police, moving slowly, her open palms offering the sweets, the way you might approach a feral animal, and she said, “It’s not you, we know it’s not your fault, we’re not mad at you, we’re praying for you.” That young woman was reminding them of a different way to be. Mitakuye oyasin—all my relations. We are all related, all connected. The Native way is to bring the oppressor into our circle of healing. Healing cannot occur unless everyone is part of the process. Let it begin.