In the summer of 1938, a young psychologist named Abraham Maslow travelled to the province of Alberta in Western Canada to live among the Blackfoot Nation.
He was 30 years old, freshly minted with his PhD, and searching for something that laboratory rats and academic theories couldn’t provide. What he found would shape one of the most influential frameworks in modern psychology, but not in the way the Blackfoot intended.
Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, typically depicted as a pyramid with physiological needs at the base and self-actualization at the peak, has become gospel in psychology textbooks, business schools, and self-help seminars worldwide.
Yet what few people know is that Maslow didn’t depict it as a pyramid during his life. In his older years, he underwent a profound change of thought where he shifted from self-actualization to self-transcendence through pro-social community engagement as a much better path to happiness, which is documented in Scott Barry Kaufman’s excellent book Transcend.
Maslow also didn’t invent this framework from scratch. He adapted it from indigenous Blackfoot philosophy and in doing so, he flipped it upside down, both literally and philosophically.
What Maslow Actually Learned From The Blackfoot
During his time with the Blackfoot people known as the Siksika (the Blackfoot call themselves Niitsรญtapi, meaning the original people), Maslow observed a society that functioned on principles radically different from the individualistic culture he knew.
The Blackfoot worldview was built on the concept of collective actualization. Their tipi, in fact, represented a different kind of hierarchy where community actualization sat at the top, not individual self-realization.
In Blackfoot philosophy, the highest form of human development isn’t personal achievement or self-fulfillment. It is cultural perpetuity, which can be described as the continuation and flourishing of the community across many generations.
Individual growth was not the end goal; it was a means to strengthen the collective.
The Blackfoot understanding goes something like this: Yes, individuals need food, safety, and belonging. But these needs aren’t stepping stones to personal glory. They’re the foundation that enables a person to contribute to something larger than themselves.
The most actualized person in Blackfoot society wasn’t the one who had transcended their community to achieve personal enlightenment. It was the elder who ensured the children were taught, the ceremonies were maintained, and the knowledge was passed on.
The Great Inversion Of The Blackfoot Philosophy
When Maslow returned to academic life and began developing his hierarchy in the 1940s, something crucial changed. The pyramid got flipped. What had been a communal framework became an individualistic one. Self-actualization through personal fulfillment, peak experiences, and becoming “all that you can be” rose to the top.
As a result, the community became merely a middle-tier need, something to satisfy on your way to the real prize: your own self-realization.
This wasn’t a small tweak. It was a fundamental reorientation that reflected the values of mid-20th-century American psychology: individual achievement, personal growth, and self-sufficiency. The Blackfoot had shown Maslow a society where people flourished through connection and contribution. He gave the world a ladder to climb alone.
To be fair to Maslow, he spent his later years trying to articulate something beyond self-actualization, what he called “self-transcendence,” a state where the individual moves beyond personal needs to serve larger values and communities.
This addition never caught on the way his original hierarchy did. The damage was done. Western psychology had its individualistic framework, and it fit perfectly into a culture already primed to celebrate the self-made person.
The Massive Cost of Isolation Today
Fast-forward to today, and we’re living with the consequences of this inversion. Modern psychology, built largely on Freud, Maslow and other notable psychologists’ rigidly individualistic foundation, excels at diagnosing personal pathology but often fails to recognize social pathology.
We treat anxiety and depression as individual disorders, prescribing therapy and medication to fix the broken person, while ignoring the broken communities they’re living in.
But here’s what the research increasingly shows: humans are not meant to self-actualize in isolation. We’re deeply social creatures whose nervous systems are literally regulated through connection with others.
The polyvagal theory, attachment research, and studies on loneliness all point to the same conclusion that we are fundamentally relational beings, and our mental health is inseparable from the health of our relationships and communities.
The epidemic of loneliness in Western societies isn’t a collection of individual failures to connect. It’s a structural problem, a predictable outcome of organizing society around individual achievement rather than collective well-being. We’ve built a world of isolated strivers, each climbing their own pyramid, wondering why they feel so empty when they reach the top.
The Blackfoot understood something we’ve forgotten: belonging isn’t a need you satisfy so you can move on to bigger things. It’s the context in which all human flourishing occurs. You don’t transcend your community to become fully human. You become fully human through your community.
Reclaiming The Collective
The irony is that Maslow’s hierarchy, properly understood through its Blackfoot origins, could be a powerful tool for addressing the very neuroses it helped create. Imagine if we reorganized our understanding of human needs with cultural perpetuity at the top.
What would change?
Therapy shouldn’t just ask, “How can you feel better?” It should ask, “How can your community be healthier?” Education shouldn’t just prepare individuals for personal success; it should prepare them for meaningful contribution. Businesses shouldn’t just optimize for individual productivity and profit; they should optimize for collective flourishing.
This isn’t just theoretical. Indigenous communities around the world, despite facing tremendous challenges, often demonstrate higher levels of social cohesion, purpose, and resilience than their Western counterparts. They’ve maintained what we’ve lost: the understanding that individual and collective well-being are inseparable.
The Blackfoot didn’t need Maslow to tell them how human needs work. They had it figured out long before he arrived. What they gave him was a gift, which is a glimpse of a different way of being human. He took that gift, repackaged it for a culture obsessed with the individual, and in the process, lost the very wisdom that made it valuable.
The Path Forward For Reclaiming Belonging
Reclaiming the indigenous roots of Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t about romanticizing the past or appropriating Indigenous wisdom. It’s about recognizing that Western psychology’s individualistic bias is a choice, not a truth. It’s one cultural perspective, and not necessarily the healthiest one.
The good news is that we can choose differently. We can build therapeutic approaches that address social isolation as seriously as they address individual symptoms. We can design communities that prioritize connection over convenience. We can measure success not just by individual achievement but by collective well-being.
The Blackfoot tipi, with cultural perpetuity at its peak, offers a different vision of human flourishing: one where the highest expression of human development is ensuring that future generations have what they need to thrive.
In a world facing a growing polycrisis of climate crisis, social fragmentation, political polarization and epidemic loneliness, perhaps it’s time we stopped climbing pyramids alone and started building tipis together.
Maslow went to the Blackfoot looking for answers about human nature. He found them. But somewhere between the great Alberta plains and the American academy, the message got inverted.
The question now is whether we’re ready to flip it back.
I believe the future of education starts with helping people find their "zone of genius" so they can develop their uniquely human ability to create meaning, connection and community (that A.I. can't replicate).
I'm also big on completely unplugging from tech to recharge on nature retreats and trekking adventures. That led me to start my most recent company Sacred Treks, where we help people reconnect with nature on wild trekking pilgrimages.
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