decolonization

From Whole Selves to Deep Relationships – Six Teachings from Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva

Take-aways on every page.

“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.” (p.181)

In my first job after graduate school, I coordinated a fundraising campaign supporting social priorities in the Greater Vancouver area that raised over a million dollars over two campaign cycles. After that role, I moved to Toronto, and worked at United Way Toronto supporting community projects in a donor engagement capacity. Because of these experiences, over the past few years I’ve been a part of reviewing grants within different organizational environments. The more I am involved in gathering and disseminating money, the more interested I become in how to do philanthropy well.

So I was thrilled when I came across Edgar Villanueva’s book “Decolonizing Wealth”,  a book that is a clarion call to rethink the way foundations and philanthropic organizations operate, relate to others and seek to create change in the world.  The subtitle of the book: “Indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore balance” is a theme throughout, and Villanueva’s thoughtful, generous reflections on how we need everyone in order to create a decolonized world left me with softer perspectives, a wider heart and a desire to live my life in deep relationship with others.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section, titled “Where it Hurts”, outlines problems with the philanthropic sector, and evokes slavery with each chapter title to powerfully remind us that wealth in North America is more likely than not created through systems of oppression, and acts of theft and violence. In this section, Villanueva describes how philanthropy itself is based on colonial notions of separation and scarcity, notes that philanthropic organizations typically mirror colonial principles, outlines how funding largely does not reach people of colour, details how philanthropic organizations often do not share power meaningfully with those more marginalized, and critiques the sector for generally not addressing intersectionality well and creating unnecessary barriers to funding through the way applications are administered.

Reading about the pain and problems in the sector, it seems an impossible task to reform philanthropic spaces. But this is a book of hope, and in the second part of the book titled “How to Heal”, Villaneuva outlines seven steps (grieve, apologize, listen, relate, invest, repair) on how to heal and decolonize our relationship with wealth in order to use money for social good. Villanueva’s arguments are compelling, and are supported by the deeply personal stories he shares, his interviews with numerous practitioners in the field, and the scores of articles, books and scholars he references. This book invites readers to read more and there is so much this book offers for its reader to look up and continue learning.

Though this is not an exhaustive list, here are some of my take-aways from the read.

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There is No American Dream – On Reading “Homegoing” By Yaa Gyasi

Required reading

Required reading

“Yaw nodded. He sat in his chair at the front of the room and looked at all the young men.”This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children would tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories. Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to the village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe then?”
The boys were silent. They started at him, waiting.
“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”(Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, 2016, p.226)

“How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance. He had only heard talk of his great- grandpa H from Ma Willie, but those stories were enough to make him weep and to fill him with pride. Two Shovel H they had called him. But what had they called his father or his father before him? What of the mothers? They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.” ((Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, 2016, p.296)

There are some books that shake the very foundation of your being, and “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi is one of those books for me. This book is an unexpected jewel. I started reading “Homegoing” yesterday and finished it today, because every time I put the book down my hands were eager to pick the book up again. The book is about two half sisters named Esi and Effia who do not know each other and who live in different villages. Effia is married off to the British governor James Collins and lives in the Cape Coast castle, Esi is kidnapped and sent to the Cape Coast castle dungeons before being sold into slavery. In the Cape Coast castle slaves are received and sold, and during Effia’s first night in the castle, she asks her husband about the crying she hears, and asks if there are people below. She quickly realises that this is not something she is allowed to talk or ask about. From the stories of these two sisters, “Homegoing” follows the two families of these two sisters, generation after generation, in Ghana and in America, through slavery, through the slave trade in Ghana, through the official end of slavery, through the actual continuation of slavery, through segregation, until the present day.

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