Said, thank you sincerely for offering this context, and for including the comments of your colleague Keith. He is right that I am not an expert in Maslow so it is helpful to hear more of the influences that were part of Maslow's thinking. Thanks to feedback from Scott Barry Kaufman, I did include the fact that Maslow was influenced by Kurt Goldstein's self-actualization research, which I have not directly read. I also did try to learn as much as I could (without having access to psychological journals and academic papers) about the Blackfoot view of Maslow's ideas, and did find this fascinating talk from Ryan Heavy Head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTO34FLv5a8. It's nearly 3 hours long, but around 2:35:39, he articles the idea that "self actualization, I think his model for that almost suredly is coming from the Blackfoot community."

I am not a scholar, nor am I an expert in Maslow. So I benefit from the addtiional context you're sharing with me. I also imagine that going back to identify origins is difficult work and the truth is quite complex. As Richard Katz says in his podcast conversation with Scott Barry Kauffman (https://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/honoring-the-wisdom-of-indigenous-peoples-with-richard-katz/), there are some Blackfeet who do believe that Maslow outright stole his ideas from the Blackfeet. There are others, like Ryan Heavy Head, who are more cautious about making this claim. Richard Katz and Scott Barry Kaufman both acknowledge this was unlikely to be Maslow's intention and also that he had many sources. But my concern is that he omitted the influence of the Blackfeet, even as he drew from many sources in his writing (which in many academic contexts is considered plagiarism, in my understanding). As such, this seems a significant omission. And my curiosity is what unlocks for us when we see the teachings of the Blackfeet that did inspire Maslow for ourselves? What questions do they bring up for us? At least for me, encountering them has opened me up to imagining new possibilities for our world and for how we build our communities. That's why I have started a very humble and currently tiny nonprofit called GatherFor (http://gatherfor.org) to explore what might happen when we start with the belief that each of us arrive with a spark of divinity and when there is a community that has our back in our effort to meet our individual needs.

So I fully accept the critique that I am no expert in Maslow. And, from the research I have done, I am learning (and you're helping me continue to learn) the simple idea of the Hierarchy of Needs is far more complex than certainly I realized, and that I believe many of us realize. My hope is that this post helps us engage in a wrestling with some of the core assumptions in our civilization, and see that there may be alternatives, like those offered by the Blackfeet. Their wisdom, as both you and Ketih indicate, has been ignored for far too long.