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By Dr. Kumu Michelle Manu
There is a peculiar contradiction in contemporary conversations about Indigenous authenticity. Indigenous knowledge may be described as sacred, invaluable, culturally significant, and urgently necessary to preserve and perpetuate, while the people responsible for carrying that knowledge can become increasingly suspect the moment their work produces money, influence, visibility, or institutional success.
Somewhere between cultural preservation and cultural commodification is the question:Must Indigenous people stay poor to stay authentic?
The answer should be no.
But that answer cannot mean that everything Indigenous is available for sale.
Between those two propositions lies one of the most difficult questions facing living traditions: How do Indigenous people participate in modern economic and institutional systems without allowing those systems to determine the value, boundaries, or meaning of what they carry?
There is an accusation that appears periodically within Indigenous communities, particularly when one of our own becomes successful inside institutions created by the dominant society. They are playing the colonizer’s game. They are using culture as currency. They have commercialized something sacred. They have learned how to make themselves acceptable to Western institutions. They have exchanged resistance for access.
Sometimes the accusation is unfair.
Sometimes it is absolutely correct.
That is precisely why this conversation deserves more than slogans, as I see posted on social media. There are legitimate reasons to be suspicious when Indigenous culture becomes profitable. There are legitimate reasons to question proximity to institutional power. There are legitimate reasons to ask whether someone is carrying culture into a system or allowing the system to reshape the culture they carry.
Colonization is extraordinarily adaptive. It does not always demand that Indigenous people abandon their identities. Modern institutions can sometimes accommodate Indigenous identity as long as that identity becomes legible, marketable, administratively manageable, politically harmless, or economically useful. So the concern deserves serious consideration.
But there is another danger at the opposite extreme. If Indigenous legitimacy requires refusing every institution touched by colonization, then we must ask what remains available to us.
Can an Indigenous person practice law?
Can an Indigenous person become a physician?
Can an Indigenous person teach in a university?
Can an Indigenous person own a corporation?
Can an Indigenous person participate in government?
Can an Indigenous person use social media?
Can an Indigenous person sell a book?
Can an Indigenous person charge tuition?
Can an Indigenous person use neuroscience to describe something their ancestors already understood through another vocabulary?
Can an Indigenous person become economically whole while teaching, preserving, interpreting, or transmitting Indigenous knowledge?
And maybe most provocative: Can we learn to operate the machinery of a dominant system without allowing that machinery to operate us?
This is the harder question and there is no intellectually honest answer that fits on a meme.
The Argument Against Participation Deserves to Be Heard
We should begin with the strongest version of the criticism, rather than dismissing it. Colonial systems do not merely conquer territory. They reorganize reality. They determine which languages carry authority, which institutions issue credentials, which forms of knowledge count as expertise, which property relationships are enforceable, which economic activities produce wealth, and which identities become advantageous or disadvantageous.
Eventually, colonized peoples can begin seeking legitimacy from the very institutions that displaced their own systems of legitimacy.
This is not imaginary. A university credential may become more persuasive than decades of cultural apprenticeship. A social media following may confer more apparent authority than community recognition. Western scientific terminology may make Indigenous knowledge suddenly credible to audiences who ignored the same knowledge when expressed through Indigenous epistemology.
Money complicates the matter further. Once culture enters a marketplace, markets begin exerting pressure upon culture. What sells? What photographs well? What attracts followers? What can be taught in a weekend? What can be branded? What can be copyrighted? What will tourists purchase? What will institutions fund? What can be packaged into certification?
The marketplace rewards accessibility and scalability. Sacred traditions frequently depend upon almost the opposite: restriction, preparation, relationship, discernment, responsibility, timing, and limits. There is a genuine danger in turning cultural knowledge into cultural product. Not everything inherited should become inventory. Not everything known should become curriculum. Not everything teachable should be taught. And not everything someone will pay to receive should be available for purchase.
When Culture Actually Does Become Currency
Cultural commodification exists. A person can use Indigenous identity primarily as branding. Someone can exaggerate lineage, authority, titles or access to make themselves commercially attractive. A practitioner can remove knowledge from its ceremonial, genealogical or ethical context because doing so makes the knowledge easier to sell. And we are okay with a non-Kānaka owned surfing merchandise line making millions without giving credit to the Hawaiian People and without providing any profits to the Hawaiian People?
People can create artificial credentials around traditions that never required those credentials. Sacred knowledge is transformed into workshops for audiences who have neither preparation nor continuing responsibility to the knowledge. Practices can be stripped of their cultural architecture and repackaged as wellness products, leadership systems, spiritual technologies or entertainment. And communities can watch pieces of themselves become products.
Criticism of these practices should not automatically be dismissed as jealousy, gatekeeping or resistance to progress. Sometimes the guardians at the gate are guarding something. The question is whether there is actually a gate and what it protects.
There is also a difference between preserving a gate and using a gate to preserve personal authority. Not every accusation of cultural misuse is necessarily about protection. Sometimes disputes over commercialization are also disputes over legitimacy, hierarchy, geography, generation, access or who possesses permission to speak. This distinction matters because cultural protection and cultural control are not always the same thing.
Compensation Is Not the Same Thing as Commodification
If the mere exchange of money corrupts culture, Indigenous cultural practitioners are placed in an impossible position. Consider what preservation actually requires.
Teaching requires time. Research requires time. Travel requires money. Facilities require money. Books require publishing. Archives require preservation. Gatherings require venues. Students require instruction. Instruments, clothing, implements, technology, and materials require production. Organizations require administration.
Cultural practitioners still require housing, food, transportation, medical care, retirement, and the ordinary necessities of human life. Yet Indigenous practitioners are frequently confronted with an expectation: their knowledge is described as invaluable while their labor is expected to be free. That contradiction should make us uncomfortable.
There is a profound difference between receiving compensation for cultural labor and selling cultural legitimacy itself.
A hula teacher charging tuition does not automatically sell hula.
An Indigenous musician selling an album does not sell the culture from which the music emerges.
An artist selling traditional work does not necessarily commodify the sacred.
An Indigenous scholar receiving a salary does not cease to be Indigenous because a university signs the paycheck.
An Indigenous author selling books is not necessarily selling identity.
The ethical question cannot simply be: Did money change hands?
We must ask better questions.
What exactly was exchanged?
Was the person selling labor, instruction, art, scholarship, access, identity, initiation, status or sacred knowledge?
Was the practitioner authorized to transmit what was transmitted?
What remains unavailable regardless of price?
What obligations accompany what was taught?
Who benefits economically?
Who remains accountable after the transaction?
Is there anything the practitioner refuses to sell?
If everything has a price, criticism of commodification becomes considerably stronger. But if money supports transmission while some knowledge remains protected from the marketplace entirely, we are dealing with a much more sophisticated cultural economy.
The Indigenous Poverty Test
This is uncomfortable. Indigenous authenticity is often associated with economic sacrifice. A practitioner or kumu who struggles financially may appear devoted. While a practitioner or kumu who prospers may suddenly appear suspicious.
A person teaching without compensation may be praised for serving the people. Charge tuition for the same instruction and questions about motive can emerge. Become genuinely prosperous through that work and the suspicion may become stronger still.
This creates what might be called an Indigenous Poverty Test:
If you make nothing from your cultural work, you are pure.
If you make something, you are questionable.
If you become highly successful, you must have sold something sacred.
This cannot be our standard!
Poverty is not evidence of cultural integrity. Of course, neither is wealth evidence of cultural integrity. We should ask what produced the wealth, what produced the poverty, whom each condition serves, and what was exchanged along the way.
There is a troubling historical inversion here. Colonization did not merely attack Indigenous ceremonies, languages, governments and identities. It frequently disrupted Indigenous economies, dispossessed peoples of productive lands and resources, displaced systems of exchange and concentrated economic power elsewhere. Economic dispossession was not incidental to colonization. It was often part of how colonization worked.
We would be wise to be extraordinarily careful about transforming the economic consequences of colonization into the moral requirements of decolonization.
If dispossession helped result in Indigenous poverty, Indigenous poverty should not later become the credential through which we prove that we resisted dispossession successfully.
There is nothing inherently Indigenous about being economically powerless.
And there is nothing inherently colonial about becoming economically capable.
The deeper question is what kind of economic power is being built and what it serves.
Who Is Allowed to Prosper from Indigenous Knowledge?
Another uncomfortable question. Indigenous culture already generates enormous economic value. Tourism industries profit from it. Publishers profit from it. Universities build programs around it. Museums build exhibitions around it. Entertainment companies use Indigenous stories and imagery.
Hospitality industries use Indigenous places, language, aesthetics, food, music and history, to create destination value. Researchers build careers studying Indigenous peoples. Institutions obtain grants to preserve Indigenous knowledge. Consultants build programs around Indigenous concepts.
The economic value does not disappear merely because Indigenous practitioners decline to participate in it. Someone may still capture that value. Should Indigenous culture generate money? It already does, so a better question would be: Who controls the economic value generated by Indigenous culture?
Does it strengthen practitioners, families, communities, language programs, archives, schools, cultural institutions, land stewardship and future transmission? Or does Indigenous culture once again generate wealth primarily for corporations, institutions, tourism industries, publishers, universities, intermediaries and outsiders, while Indigenous people provide the cultural material? These are different economic arrangements.
Economic sovereignty should be part of the conversation about cultural and personal sovereignty. Otherwise, we risk constructing an ethical system in which everyone may profit from Indigenous culture except Indigenous people themselves.
But Prosperity Does Not Create Immunity
None of this should become a convenient defense against legitimate criticism. Economic sovereignty cannot become a phrase used to justify unlimited commercialization. A successful Indigenous practitioner or kumu should be subject to the same questions—and greater ones—about responsibility, authority, boundaries and accountability.
Success or impactful work magnifies visibility and consequences. If cultural work produces substantial income, influence or institutional power, the practitioner (or kumu) should be willing to ask difficult questions.
Has the teaching changed because the audience changed?
Have sacred/esoteric boundaries moved because consumers wanted more?
Has complexity been removed because simplicity sells?
Has authority been exaggerated because authority creates market value?
Has cultural identity become inseparable from personal branding?
Would the practitioner still refuse a lucrative opportunity if accepting it violated cultural
kuleana?
If the answer to the final question is no, the marketplace may have become the authority.
Money is not inherently corrupting. But money is powerful enough that pretending it has no effect is equally naïve.
Playing the Colonizer’s Game
This criticism is more complicated because, in one sense, nearly all of us participate. Most Indigenous people living within modern states use contemporary currency. We drive on government roads. We use banks. We pay taxes. We enter contracts. We own or rent property through Western legal systems. We use smartphones manufactured by multinational corporations. We participate in social-media platforms. We seek medical care through Western institutions. Our children attend schools governed by contemporary educational systems. We invoke courts when harmed. We use intellectual-property law. We form nonprofits and corporations.
Even activism opposing colonial institutions frequently depends upon those institutions’ infrastructure. The question cannot realistically be whether we participate. For most Indigenous people living inside modern states, participation is already unavoidable. The real question is: What happens internally while we participate?
There Is a Difference Between Fluency and Allegiance
A Kānaka can understand a system without worshipping it. A Kānaka can become highly skilled at navigating an institution without accepting that institution as the ultimate measure of truth. This is very important to understand. There is a difference between saying: “Western law defines reality” and saying: “Western law currently exercises enormous power over this reality, so I need to understand it.”
These sayings are not equivalent. One may become epistemological surrender. The other may be strategic literacy. A colonized people who refuse to understand the institutions governing them do not cause those institutions to disappear. They simply surrender fluency in the mechanisms through which power is exercised. This can be dangerous.
If a government controls land through statutes, someone must understand statutes.
If courts determine legal rights, someone must understand courts.
If corporations control resources, someone must understand corporations.
If technology shapes public discourse, someone must understand technology.
If universities determine what enters scholarly archives, someone must understand academia.
If artificial intelligence will influence how future generations retrieve and interpret knowledge, Indigenous peoples should understand artificial intelligence.
Otherwise, we may preserve ideological purity while other people continue making consequential decisions about us.
But Institutional Fluency Can Become Institutional Capture
This is where the opposing argument returns. Someone enters a system intending to change it. Then success within that system begins requiring accommodation. Language changes. Priorities change. Relationships change. This doesn’t include “code-switching” because some of us Kānaka are bilingual—operating in two worlds—that of the Anglo-American and as Kānaka ‘Oiwi.
A Kānaka may learn what cannot be said if a promotion is desired, what cannot be challenged if funding is required, what cannot be taught if accreditation matters and what cannot be questioned if institutional acceptance becomes valuable. Eventually, the individual may still believe they are using the institution while the institution has quietly begun using them.
This is one of the most sophisticated mechanisms of assimilation because it does not necessarily require cultural abandonment. The person may still use Indigenous language, attend ceremony, teach cultural concepts and sacred traditions and speak publicly about decolonization. Nevertheless, success is evaluated through fundamentally dominant metrics: visibility, wealth, credentials, institutional recognition, titles, followers, access, celebrity and proximity to power.
That is why external appearance cannot answer whether someone has been assimilated. Assimilation may occur much deeper than aesthetics. It can occur in the architecture through which a person determines what counts as success.
The Architecture Beneath the “Decoder”
Perhaps “code-switching” is insufficient to describe this phenomenon. A code is something we consciously change. This exists much deeper than just switching language. Every culture carries an interpretive architecture: assumptions about relationship, obligation, personhood, land, ancestry, time, knowledge, authority, reciprocity, consequence and belonging. We may learn another architecture without entirely losing the first. For Indigenous people living within dominant Western systems, this can produce simultaneous fluency.
The danger is not necessarily learning the second architecture. The danger is forgetting that it is an architecture that we are operating within. Eventually a learned system can become so familiar that we stop perceiving it as culturally constructed and begin experiencing it simply as reality. This is where strategic fluency can quietly become assimilation.
Is Strategy the Opposite of Justice?
Strategy is not inherently dishonorable. Strategy is morally dependent upon its purpose and its methods.
Every successful resistance movement has required strategy.
Every warrior tradition understands strategy.
Every diplomatic tradition understands strategy.
Every survival culture understands strategy.
Knowing when to confront, when to withdraw, when to negotiate, when to conceal, when to preserve resources, when to speak, when to remain silent, and when to enter an opponent’s terrain are all strategic decisions.
There is nothing inherently dishonorable about strategy. But strategy must answer to something: Strategy toward what?
If strategy produces access but gradually abandons the people for whom the access was supposedly obtained, it has failed.
If strategy produces personal wealth while community conditions become irrelevant to the strategist, criticism is appropriate.
If strategy requires continual surrender of principles until nothing remains except the strategy itself, the original purpose has been lost.
But if strategy allows Indigenous people to preserve knowledge, acquire resources, influence institutions, protect land, educate descendants, build economic strength and transmit cultural intelligence into the future, strategy may be part of survival.
The Politics of Indigenous Purity
This is where economics becomes part of a larger phenomenon because Purity Tests are not limited to money.
Who is Indigenous enough?
Who is traditional enough?
Who lives in the correct place?
Who learned from the correct person?
Who speaks the language well enough?
Who remained home?
Who left?
Who returned?
Who teaches?
Who is allowed to teach outsiders?
Who works for Western institutions?
Who has too many Western credentials?
Who uses scientific terminology?
Who participates in commerce?
Who has become too visible?
Who has become too successful?
Some of these questions can be legitimate. Cultural traditions require standards. Genealogy matters in traditions where genealogy confers responsibility. Training, authorization, community recognition and accountability matter. But legitimate standards can become something else when they are transformed into endlessly shifting tests of ideological purity. Purity politics can eventually create a culture in which nobody can act without being accused of contamination.
Use Western law and you are colonized. Reject Western law and you are ineffective. Earn money and you are commercializing culture. Do not earn money and cultural work becomes economically unsustainable.
Teach outsiders and you are giving culture away. Do not teach outsiders and misunderstandings proliferate unchecked. Live away from ancestral lands and your legitimacy is questioned. Return to ancestral lands and you may be accused of claiming authority you did not earn there. Use modern terminology and you Westernize the tradition. Refuse modern terminology and younger generations may struggle to understand how ancestral knowledge relates to their contemporary world.
These tensions do not disappear through accusation. They require discernment.
Purity Can Become Its Own Colonial Trap
Oh the irony! If Indigenous authenticity requires withdrawing from every institution created or influenced by colonization, then colonialism still determines the boundaries of Indigenous behavior. We simply organize ourselves negatively around it.
The colonizer says: enter our institutions and become like us.
Purity politics can sometimes answer: then we must never enter those institutions at all.
In both cases, the colonial institution remains the reference point.
That is not sovereignty.
Sovereignty requires something more difficult: the capacity to decide according to one’s own governing principles when to enter, when to refuse, when to adapt, when to preserve, when to exchange and when no exchange is permissible. This requires much more internal strength than either automatic participation or automatic rejection.
There Must Still Be Lines
None of this means every form of adaptation should be celebrated. Some things should remain protected.
Some teachings should remain within particular relationships.
Some ceremonies should not become performances.
Some knowledge should not become content.
Some authority cannot be purchased through tuition.
Some titles cannot ethically be self-created.
Some traditions cannot be separated from the people responsible for carrying them. Some knowledge may require genealogy. Other knowledge may require initiation. Still other knowledge may require decades of demonstrated responsibility.
And some things may simply not belong in the marketplace.
Modernization without boundaries eventually becomes extraction. But preservation without adaptation can become fossilization. The difficult work lies between them, but who decides? Who determines when adaptation becomes corruption?
There is not a single Indigenous authority capable of answering for an entire people. Communities contain elders, practitioners, teachers, families, scholars, activists, traditionalists, innovators, people living on ancestral lands, people living throughout the diaspora, people raised inside cultural practice, and people returning to culture after generations of disruption. They will disagree. Some disagreements will concern principle. Others will concern authority.
We should be willing, and mature enough, to recognize the difference.
Arguments about commercialization sometimes conceal arguments about who has permission to teach.
Arguments about assimilation sometimes conceal disagreements about who gets to represent the culture, publicly.
Arguments about diaspora sometimes become arguments about whether geographic distance diminishes cultural legitimacy.
Arguments about Western terminology sometimes become arguments about who controls interpretation.
Arguments about credentials sometimes become arguments about competing forms of authority.
Calling someone “colonized” does not resolve those questions. Neither does calling every critic a “gatekeeper.” Both labels can become ways of avoiding the underlying dispute.
What Does Your Participation Produce?
Maybe we need to stop asking whether Indigenous people participate in colonial systems and begin asking what their participation produces.
Does it increase or decrease cultural dependency?
Does it preserve knowledge or flatten it?
Does it strengthen community capacity or primarily strengthen an individual’s brand?
Does it create economic sovereignty or merely reproduce extractive commerce with an Indigenous aesthetic?
Does it expand the number of Indigenous people capable of navigating institutions?
Does it protect what should remain protected?
Does it make future generations more culturally intelligent?
Does it maintain accountability?
Does the practitioner or kumu remain capable of saying no when money, prestige,
popularity, or institutional acceptance require too much?
After decades of operating inside the dominant system, can you still recognize when its values are speaking through you?
This may be one of the most difficult tests of decolonization.
Two Forms of Captivity
There may ultimately be two traps facing Indigenous peoples.
The first is assimilation: We become so fluent in the dominant world that eventually we forget another world exists.
The second is reaction: We define ourselves so completely in opposition to the dominant world that the dominant world still determines the boundaries of our existence.
Neither is sovereignty.
Sovereignty requires the capacity to choose. To enter without surrendering. To withdraw without disappearing. To translate without reducing. To adapt without forgetting. To earn without selling everything. To preserve without embalming. To engage without asking the dominant society to tell us who we are. And to recognize that sometimes the correct answer really is no.
No, you cannot buy this.
No, this will not be taught publicly.
No, institutional approval does not make this legitimate.
No, a credential cannot manufacture cultural authority.
No, popularity does not establish truth.
No, economic opportunity does not automatically outweigh responsibility.
These refusals are essential. But so is another kind of refusal.
No, Indigenous people do not have to remain economically powerless to prove that we are authentic.
No, we do not have to remain institutionally illiterate to prove that we resist institutions.
No, we do not have to abandon science because modern science emerged through Western institutions.
No, we do not have to abandon law because law has been manipulated, disregarded and used against us.
No, we do not have to disappear from modernity in order to demonstrate that our ancestors still live through us.
And no, we should not transform the economic consequences of colonization into the moral requirements of decolonization. Poverty is not proof of cultural integrity, just as wealth is not proof of cultural betrayal. Both require us to ask what produced them, what they serve and what was exchanged along the way.
Maybe the deepest form of colonization is not using the colonizer’s tools. Maybe it is reaching the point where we can no longer distinguish the tool from the hand holding it or the values of the system from the values within ourselves.
And maybe the deepest expression of cultural sovereignty is neither withdrawal nor participation. It is possessing enough clarity to know when to enter, when to refuse, what may be exchanged, what must remain sacred, what prosperity is for, and whom all of it ultimately serves.
Questions We Might Ask Ourselves
Perhaps none of us should leave this conversation believing the questions apply only to someone else. Whether we are practitioners, teachers, scholars, activists, professionals, community members or simply people trying to understand our relationship to culture, the examination must eventually turn inward.
What parts of my understanding of authenticity actually come from my culture, and what parts have I inherited from colonialism, capitalism, academia, social media or other people’s expectations of what an Indigenous person is supposed to look like?
If I criticize another Indigenous person’s participation, prosperity, visibility or adaptation, can I identify the specific cultural principle being violated? Or am I measuring that person against my own preferred expression of Indigeneity?
What would I refuse, even if refusing it cost me money, status, access, recognition or power—and what does that answer reveal about what I actually consider sacred?
Author’s Note
This essay began unexpectedly. I encountered a public social media post criticizing Kānaka who allegedly use culture as currency, participate in the “colonizer’s game,” compromise integrity, and sell what is sacred. Another statement accompanying it suggested that making room for both colonizer and colonized was not justice but strategy.
My first response was defensive, as I do welcome non-Hawaiians into the study of the sacred tradition of Lua. I do charge my dedicated haumana a monthly charge. But instead, I became interested in the proposition itself. Intellectual integrity required me to turn the proposition around. What was most troubling to me was what happens when the material consequences of colonization themselves become transformed into qualifications for Indigenous legitimacy?
That is how this essay emerged. I ultimately found myself less interested in determining who was “right” or “authorized” than in understanding what standards we are using to decide.
