The Flow of Money

“This is primarily a book for people who direct the flow of money. The more money you direct, the more this book is for you.”

With this invitation, Edgar Villanueva introduces Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, first published in 2018 and now in its second (2021) edition. Decolonizing Wealth explores how our institutions of philanthropy and finance are built upon the oppression of Indigenous and other enslaved / exploited peoples in the United States — and how those institutions continue to perpetuate that oppression in subtle and not-so-subtle forms.

In an engaging conversational style, Edgar (he apparently prefers to be referenced by first name) covers a range of vital and often painful issues. These include the ways in which the devastations of colonialism have become benignly invisible (“You know there’s a style of architecture called ‘colonial,’ right?”); the pervasive dynamics of “divide, control, exploit” that are sometimes justified in the very name of diversity, equity, and inclusion; the power of personal storytelling, grieving and healing; and the transformational potentials of “money as medicine.”

Edgar offers a colonial plantation metaphor of house slaves, field hands, and overseers to describe financial relationships. Yet the real-life stories he shares reflect far more complicated dynamics of internalized oppression. His Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina was the first to be colonized in the United States, its Indigenous spirituality long suppressed by Christianity. (The Doctrine of Discovery that provided the Christian justification for expropriating Native lands is briefly noted.) Edgar was a thirty-something professional before he was given a Native name by an Ojibwe medicine man at a conference in Denver.

“The more money you direct, the more this book is for you.” More than 200 pages later, we seem to reach a different conclusion: “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…and I’d be willing to bet that she couldn’t spell it.” Edgar describes his mother Sheila as a devoted church woman, engaged in active ministry with neglected and abused children in their community while raising him as a single parent and three-shift service worker.

“She has spent her life caring for others, sharing resources, raising money for others, giving up her time….Sixteen years in the field have shown me that the actual philanthropists — those like my mother, engaged in acts of love for humanity — are much more prevalent among the regular population and are only rarely found within the field’s formal institutions, the foundations.” (pages 208-209)

As a committed participant-observer outside the formal institutions of philanthropy for nearly three decades, I am not surprised by this insight. But I am saddened that Decolonizing Wealth does not address the deeper implications of such a core realization.

Like Edgar’s mother, we are ALL “people who direct the flow of money.” Whether we call it decolonization, solidarity or charity, the practice of money as medicine begins — and ultimately ends — at home, not in the colonial-styled halls of philanthropy and finance.

Of course, those moneyed halls do offer the enticements of greater affluence to struggling idealists, as Edgar acknowledges. “After one year [at a family foundation], I bought a beautiful brand-new house, because I’d listened to Oprah growing up, and she had driven home the message that home ownership was the anchor of wealth. I had subscribed to the American Dream.” Only later did he discover the divide-and-conquer dynamics that too often pit tokenized minorities against each other — and fear for his mortgage payments as his work environment became increasingly toxic.

Although Edgar does not discuss his personal financial giving, upward mobility reflects a paradox of our American Dream. It’s a taboo subject, downplayed and deflected — but nevertheless documented — by philanthropy research. And it’s a truth that any program aimed at decolonizing wealth needs to face: as household affluence increases, the share of income donated tends to shrink. This implicit hoarding occurs along a gradual continuum, beyond our dualistic notions of rich and poor. And when we look at how inequality manifests across the global economy that colonization did so much to create, the challenges are literally brought home.

How are we “spending” our lives? As Edgar rightly observes, our experiences and stories as well as our money, possessions, and land are all part of the abundance that can be used as medicine. His Seven Steps to Healing certainly offer medicine — as do the Nine Steps of Your Money or Your Life and the Twelve Steps of recovery in our money-addicted society.

Decolonizing Wealth is upbeat, not marked by overt bitterness or guilt. Yet I had the sense that many of the collected anecdotes (Amazon.com as radical vanguard?) and sweeping recommendations for philanthropic overhaul needed to settle and dry out further, like buffalo chips. After all, what Edgar calls the “colonizer virus” carries inherent blind spots — as highlighted by Céline Semaan and Yasmin Ahram in their nuanced discussion of promotional “Decolonizer” merchandise.

I was reminded of the proverbial person who has lost keys in a dark alley, but continues to search for them under a bright street lamp because “the light is better here.” Like a network of bright street lamps, institutions and critics of philanthropy and finance have issued many calls over many decades for accountability, transparency, imagination, narrative change and paradigm shift. But in the bottom-line focus on bigger donors and bigger budgets (“The more money you direct, the more this book is for you”), lower-income philanthropists like Edgar’s mother are invariably left behind in the shadows.

Even philanthropy researchers who documented the greater generosity of lower-income givers in 2014 decided, three years later, to limit their study of “How America Gives” to those with annual earnings of $50K or higher — sidestepping the question of how those with so much less can afford to give so much more. And the overall average giving rate of 2 percent over the past 50 years  — regardless of economic boom or downturn — remains, in the words of philanthropy historian Benjamin Soskis, “the stubborn constraint on the index of American generosity.”

The ultimate challenge of decolonizing wealth is to leave the bright street lamps and venture into those dark alleys of no easy answers, where the “keys” can truly be found. With mutual support and accountability, we can claim the power to direct the flow of our OWN money through continued practice, reflection, storytelling, learning, feeling, healing, and more practice.

Let the buffalo chips fall where they may! There is firepower and fertilizer in this lifelong process. May it enrich all of us with greater justice.

Copyright © 2022, 2025

Rabbi Regina Sandler-Phillips is the founding executive director of WAYS OF PEACE Community Resources, a social microenterprise that donates at least 10 percent of net staff compensation forward to other organizations that renew justice and kindness across lines of diversity and throughout the life cycle. She authored the sourcebook Generous Justice: Jewish Wisdom for Just-Giving, and teaches “How to Move Our Money” workshops on practicing reparations as spiritual release.