4. In the trade of salmon for car repair, or the trade of berries for new skirts. Rebecca Adamson: I’ve gotta say, it’s about time the bubbles burst. Adamson: Watch how you spend your money; apply your values to every dollar you spend. Adamson, a Cherokee, is founder of First Nations Development Institute and First Peoples Worldwide. This has resulted in Indigenous overrepresentation in low paying jobs, higher unemployment rates, and lower educational attainment than their non-Indigenous counterparts. As this work unfolds, it is vital to remember that economic systems are only as good as the values, responsibilities, and community agreements that govern them. Adamson: The economy used to be about livelihoods and the provision of a household, but we’ve lost that purpose. What can we give back to the land to cultivate the regeneration of life?

Explore ways of re-integrating traditional resource distribution practices, as well as governance and community accountability mechanisms. This ownership paradigm is about excluding people from resources because you’re afraid you’re going to run out. So you design the economic system with an emphasis on sharing. When we were looking for some wisdom on building a new economy, I immediately thought of Rebecca Adamson. What abundance does the land offer? When people are consumed with filling all their space with stuff, and all silence with noise, you lose that sacredness. That’s a very, very healthy economic system. Within a “prosperity of creation” mindset, though, there’s wind energy and solar energy, and there’s the ability to create new kinds of energy that we haven’t even tapped yet. treaties, and systematic exclusion of Indigenous peoples from economic systems. Indigenous elders At great risk in this pandemic are indigenous elders. Every Indigenous Nation had a traditional economy, a way of gathering and distributing what we needed to live and thrive, that was connected to extensive trade routes across the Americas, allowing exchange of the gifts of the land, knowledge, language, and culture. Copyright 2019 YES! ‘Indigenomics acts as a vehicle for understanding, creating meaning and expressing the relationship of Canada’s Indigenous people to current economic systems. Sarah van Gelder: When you look ahead at the coming months, perhaps years, of economic downturn, what do you see coming, and what does indigenous experience teach us about what we should be doing? 2. Then everybody calls the baby back in. Indigenous resilience is now expressing out from the margins to the centre of this country’s economic lifeblood. YES! We will find abundance through hard times when we find each other. Within an indigenous economy, the mere fact of your birth guarantees you usage rights through the clan system. What makes scarcity self-fulfilling? I just wish they were taking the brunt of it instead of Main Street. On April 3, we’re hosting the special, web-based event, Taking Meaningful Action in a Time of Crisis, with Nick Tilsen, Executive Director of the NDN Collective, an organization creating a regenerative, sustainable future for their community on the Oglala Lakota Native American reservation. As a result of history, our economies are now modeled after the colonial economics of globalized capitalism, a system based on large scale resource extraction, privatization, and commodification of the beings that give us life. Insist that corporations do not externalize their dirt, pollution, low wages. Under ideal communism, people would receive equal benefits of the work they do. Every Indigenous Nation had a traditional economy, a way of gathering and distributing what we needed to live and thrive, that was connected to extensive trade routes across the Americas, allowing exchange of the gifts of the land, knowledge, language, and culture. Adamson: When we’ve seen a contemporary system that comes from a paradigm like the indigenous paradigm, it usually has a spiritual base. Disruption: The first is characterized by the systemic disruption of existing Indigenous economic systems, ways of being and removal from the land while severing inherent authority and responsibility to place.

The United States encouraged the slaughter of buffalo to destroy the ability of the Plains Nations to provide for themselves. What products do we have to trade for? It’s not about a financial recovery, it’s about an economic rebuilding, and first and foremost, it’s about a moral rebuilding.

Indigenous peoples have existed on the margins of the balance sheet, viewed as a liability. It’s a new word that settles across the tongue conjuring up possibility of the unknown. A fundamental question that shaped this country was, how do we eliminate the Indian problem? Get involved with the socially responsible investment movement. There are signs of drought, crop failure, and forced migration over the millennia, and of course these peoples survived centuries of colonialism. van Gelder: So someone with very high status can’t accumulate too much wealth? These economies developed based on countless generations of learning from our homelands and each other, learning to care for the beings that give us life while ensuring their continuance. The shopping mall becomes the cathedral.

(Buffalo roaming freely in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Sarah Sunshine Manning). If I own something, man, you can’t even put your foot on it.

This figure acts as an initial metric of the growing strength of the Indigenous economy. Adamson: You can’t get high status unless you give gifts. How does this apply to economic development that will support our people in this world of cash and markets? Setting the stage for a next-level Canada today means actualizing this growing story of Indigenous economic potential. We just got back from a visit with the James Bay Cree. Hold Congress accountable. The more people directly experience the impacts of economic decision-making, the less likely folks will make decisions that are harmful to the land or their neighbor. That way of thinking brings us into a relationship in which we create new responses to what we need. Photo by Sarah Sunshine Manning. We are growing our reservation-wide networks, supporting one another with skills, products, and services.

And, above all, remember that although we have to engage with markets and capitalism to a certain extent, we can do so on our own terms, without buying into destructive mentalities.

It must be based on a new understanding that the growth of the Indigenous economy cannot be advanced within existing Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada program and funding approaches. A state of dependency was intentionally created, with the Nations having to look to their colonizers for survival assistance. This number increased to 96 per cent sewage disposal and 98 per cent water delivery by 2004. Media archives was originally published in the Summer 2009 issue of YES!

What indigenous experience tells us is that an economy is about fairness and equity. An indigenous system is based on prosperity, creation, kinship, and a sense of enough-ness. The more you’re fearful, the more you go out and buy.