Maslow Got It Wrong [gatherfor.org]

Written By Teju Ravilochan.

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.

As often happens, Roberto was deeply studied on the subject and revealed to me something I had no idea about: Maslow borrowed and misrepresented Siksika (Blackfeet Nation) teachings without providing due credit for their influence on his developmental model. Roberto sent me a few articles to read, in which I learned that Maslow spent six weeks in the summer of 1938 living with the Blackfeet near Alberta, Canada. According to Gitksan First Nation member and University of Alberta Professor Cindy Blackstock, Maslow had been “stuck on his developmental theory” before visiting. But he found shape for his ideas in the Blackfoot teachings. Indeed, the Wikipedia article on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs shares:

Maslow’s idea emerged and was informed by his work with the 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

The Blackfoot model describes the inverse of Maslow’s Hierarchy:

1. 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.

2. Belonging. After we’re born, imbued with a divine purpose, the tribe is there to love and care for us.

3. 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, and protected. The tribe knows how to survive on the land and uses that knowledge and skill to care for us.

4. 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.

5. 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

To be fair to Maslow, his theory is not based only on the teachings of the Blackfeet. As Dr. Scott Barry Kauffmanindicates in his book Transcend, it also draws from Kurt Goldstein’s self-actualization research done; William Sumner’s work on human motivation; the psychological theories of Alfred Adler, Harry Harlow, Karen Horney; and Maslow’s own empirical research. Yet why did he flip the Blackfoot model and not cite it as a key influence in the hierarchy of needs?

One answer might be that Maslow was keenly aware of the differences between the community-oriented Blackfoot and First Nation cultures and the individual-oriented European-American cultures. Maslow’s biographer Edward Hoffman writes:

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 cultures. 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, in our civilization, we allow 1 in 4 households to experience food insecurity, and the richest 0.1% of Americans earn 196x as much as the bottom 90%.