In daily life, greed, or the accumulation of capital, was seen as an assault against the collective because it offended the spirits of the plant and animal nations that made up our peopled cosmos, and therefore put Nishnaabeg at risk. Gift giving is part of our diplomacy and designed to reinforce and nurture relationships. Many of our ceremonial practices include a giveaway component where goods are distributed among participants.

Harvests are distributed in community to our most vulnerable members-those who cannot harvest for themselves. We also have a series of embedded practices that redistribute wealth within the community. Our grounded normativity compelled us to assist our neighbors if we were able. The Michi Saagiig oral tradition has within it stories of Wendat and Rotinonhsesh:ka /Haudenosaunee coming to us and asking to hunt or farm in our territory during times of famine. In times of hardship, we did not rely to any great degree on accumulated capital or individualism but on the strength of our relationships with others. My Ancestors didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust. Watching hunters and ricers harvest and live is the epitome of not just anticapitalism but societies where consent, empathy, caring, sharing, and individual self-determination are centered. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.There is an assumption that socialism and communism are white and that Indigenous peoples don’t have this kind of thinking. Simpson makes clear that the resistance's goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around refusing the dispossession of Indigenous bodies and land.

In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. Summary: 'Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women.

As we have always done leanne simpson