We spent New Years this year at a cottage and the weekend was filled with all manner of interesting conversation about issues that have preoccupied us in the past year. One of those is truth and reconciliation in our relationship with indigenous people in Canada.
In one of those conversations there was some reference to the value of real estate in the Haldimand tract “valued at billions of dollars”. I think it was made in an effort to get at the magnitude of the injustice. That comment got me thinking about the value of real estate, reconciliation, and how we make our way forward. My concern is that the reference to the dollars skews the real value because, while dollars may be the way that we as settlers measure value, it is not how our indigenous brothers and sisters see land value.
I also think it’s misleading. The truth is that it is settler development that created the dollar value (or even the concept of thinking of land value in dollars) and changed the land in a way that would be impossible to restore. The land had value in a very different way for indigenous peoples. Indigenous people did not consider themselves owners of the land. Value was not measured in dollars but rather in terms of what the land was able to provide in food, spiritual wellness, and a sense of place. We settlers could learn from that. The settler influence, however, is not necessarily all bad. Capitalism has created a lot of wealth and innovation and, as a result, a lot of influence in the rest of the world.
So what is the way forward?
Personally, I am less inclined toward guilt and angst about the effects of colonialization and more inclined toward grief at what was lost. Guilt may be appropriate, but it’s not useful. The thing that I grieve as I learn about our history is that our forefathers had a tremendous opportunity to learn from a culture that was very different from ours (and superior in many ways) when they first met the indigenous peoples of this land. And that opportunity was squandered because of an arrogant belief in our superiority.
Imagine, if you will, a world in which a capitalist system was built with the good of society as one of its pillars. We cannot deny that our capitalist system has achieved some remarkable things over the last 200 years, albeit driven by a construct of scarcity and competition. And as someone who has grown up in that system, and has seen the quality of life benefits and technical innovations that the capitalist model has provided us, I am not quite prepared to toss the whole system out. And I don’t think our society is willing to throw that baby out with the bath water either. I do, however, believe that we need to make adjustments. One of the results of the current model is that 1% of the people hold 50% of the world’s wealth, and the wealth gap has continued to grow. That trajectory is not serving anyone.
Indigenous people valued the land for the abundance that it provided for their society. Success was measured by whether or not everyone had what they needed to thrive. Capitalism pits individuals against each other in competition for resources and output. There are winners and losers. What if we could harness the competitive nature of capitalism to include a measurement of the social benefit that is created by business operations rather than relying on charity and philanthropy to serve the needs of those less able to compete? What kind of innovation could we imagine if one of the values of capitalism was that no one could be left behind?
For the past couple of years I have been sitting on a thing called The New Economy RoundTable brainstorming ways in which we can influence a better work environment. I believe that we could improve our world by educating consumers to demand more from the corporations that provide our goods and services. We need to be creative about how we can improve our capitalist model, and I wonder if using indigenous values as a guide would be a helpful way to frame our thinking.