By Teju Ravilochan
GatherFor
Apr 5·6 min read
Photo by Ehud Neuhaus on Unsplash. The tipi symbolizes the Blackfoot view Maslow borrowed from: each pole requires every other to stand.
Some months ago, I was catching up with my dear friend and board member, Roberto Rivera. As an entrepreneur and community organizer with a doctorate and Lin-Manuel-Miranda-level freestyle abilities, he is a teacher to me in many ways. I was sharing with him that for a long time, I’ve struggled with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
The traditional interpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is that humans need to fulfill their needs at one level before we can advance to higher levels.As often happens, Roberto was deeply studied on the subject and revealed to me something I had no idea about: Maslow appropriated the concept from the Siksika (Blackfeet Nation) and got it backwards. He sent me a few articles to read. I learned that Maslow spent six weeks in the summer of 1938 living among the Blackfeet near Alberta, Canada. And, as the Wikipedia article on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs shares:
Maslow’s idea emerged and was informed by his work with Blackfeet Nation through conversations with elders and inspiration from the shape and meaning of the Blackfoot tipi. Maslow’s idea has been criticized for misrepresenting the Blackfoot worldview, which instead places self-actualization as a basis for community-actualization and community-actualization as a basis for cultural perpetuity, the latter of which exists at the top of the tipi in Blackfoot philosophy.
The Blackfoot Tipi
This is a slide from a presentation by Cindy Blackstock, a University of Alberta Professor, found at Karen Lincoln Michel’s blog here.The Blackfoot model describes the inverse of Maslow’s Hierarchy:
Self-actualization. Where Maslow’s hierarchy ends with self-actualization, the Blackfoot model begins here. In their view, we are each born into the world as a spark of divinity, with a great purpose embedded in us. That means that we arrive on earth self-actualized.
Belonging. After we’re born, imbued with a divine purpose, the tribe is there to love and care for us.
Basic Needs & Safety. While in Maslow’s model, we find love and belonging only after attending to our basic needs and safety, the Blackfoot model describes that our tribe or community is the means through which we are fed, housed, clothed, housed, and protected. The tribe knows how to survive on the land and uses that knowledge and skill to care for us.
Community Actualization. In tending to our basic needs and safety, the tribe equips us to manifest our sacred purpose, designing a model of education that supports us in expressing our gifts. Community actualization describes the Blackfoot goal that each member of the tribe manifest their purpose and have their basic needs met.
Cultural Perpetuity. Each member of the tribe will one day be gone. So passing on their knowledge of how to achieve community actualization and harmony with the land and other peoples gives rise to an endurance of the Blackfoot way of life, or cultural perpetuity.
Maslow’s Failure to Elevate the Blackfoot Model
According to some accounts, Maslow was awed by Blackfoot culture, but unsure how to incorporate their wisdom into a theory that fit with individualistic American culture. As Maslow’s biographer Edward Hoffman writes, Maslow discovered:
To most Blackfoot members, wealth was not important in terms of accumulating property and possessions: giving it away was what brought one the true status of prestige and security in the tribe. At the same time, Maslow was shocked by the meanness and racism of the European-Americans who lived nearby. As he wrote, “The more I got to know the whites in the village, who were the worst bunch of creeps and bastards I’d ever run across in my life, the more it got paradoxical.”
The generosity Maslow witnessed among the Blackfeet is quite common among Native cultures and rarer in European-American culture. The job of Potawatomi leaders, as described in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, was to be a safety net. The Chief would give of their own stores and possessions to help the tribe member return to health or sufficiency. This meant that there was very little inequality in Native cultures. Yet, ours is a civilization where we allow 1 in 4 households to experience food insecurity and in which the richest 0.1% of Americans earn 196x as much as bottom 90%.
And unlike Native Americans, those of us who have more than enough do not generally see it as our role to close the gaps of inequality. As Ken Stern writes in The Atlantic:
In 2011, the wealthiest Americans — those with earnings in the top 20 percent — contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid — those in the bottom 20 percent — donated 3.2 percent of their income. […] Some experts have speculated that the wealthy may be less generous [than other classes] — that the personal drive to accumulate wealth may be inconsistent with the idea of communal support.
Amidst stark inequality, self-interest, and separation, Maslow might have risked a great deal by using his privileged position to elevate the wisdom of the Blackfeet. Perhaps he would have been like a mid-20th-century Galileo, whose defense of the Copernican heliocentric solar system led to his being labeled a heretic by the Catholic Church and placed under permanent house arrest. But perhaps the interruption to normal life brought by COVID-19 and the growing awareness about injustice in the US might offer us an opportunity to change our story.
Waking up From our Dream
In Decolonizing Wealth, Dana Arviso, executive director of the Potlatch Fund and member of the Navajo tribe, tells author Edgar Villanueva about a perspective from Native communities when she asked them about poverty reduction strategies:
“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” (p. 151).
It’s time for us to let go of narratives like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the American Dream, which leave out any mention of participating in community well-being and tell a story only of individual flourishing. This is a profound distortion of reality and leaves us living in illusion, needing to wake up. As Daniel Suelo says in The Man Who Quit Money, “there’s not a creature or even a particle in the universe that’s self-sufficient. We’re all dependent on everybody else” (p. 133).
Who sewed the clothes you’re wearing right now? How many materials from how many different parts of the world are inside the device you’re reading this post on? How many hands touched the food you ate for lunch on its way to your bowl? How many living beings participated in the creation of your home? Even if you purchased these goods with money you earned, you are not self-sufficient. You are living, perhaps, more in alignment with the Blackfoot model than with Maslow’s.
Let this pandemic be our moment to interrupt our old story. There are already encouraging signs about how we’re beginning to embrace previously heretical ideas like reparations, universal basic income in the form of stimulus checks, and mutual aid. Our hope at GatherFor is to be part of this change in our collective story. This is our moment to step out of our lonely struggle to fend for ourselves, which we protect due to our own internalized oppression and at the cost of our humanity. This is our moment not to create something new, but to return to an ancient way of being, known to the Blackfoot and indigenous communities around the world. It’s a story that leaves no one without family, a story in which we begin by offering each other belonging, and end by teaching others how we lived: together.
Thank you to Colette Kessler and Vidya Ravilochan for reading drafts of this post and offering suggestions to improve it!
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