In 2023, I had a nightmare client. I had to threaten small claims court to be paid. And in retrospect, I think it’s still an opportunity to practice my decolonizing efforts.

My mother Lorraine Iron Shell-Walking Bull was fond of saying, “’Render unto caesar what is caesar’s and render unto the lord what is the lord’s.’ That money doesn’t have your name on it, it does not say ‘Alfred Walking Bull,’ it says, ‘UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.’ You cannot take it with you and you shouldn’t get obsessed with it.”

Granted, my mother was the daughter of a land-owning rancher (a fact which, my father loved to remind her about quite frequently) so she knew the power of what money could do for someone. But we were all still poor Indigenous people living on the reservation, hustling for every last penny. Her exhortation was more about not letting the tool of our colonizers take root in my heart, the way it had in other families.

And it worked. I’m really bad with money. I can’t make it grow and when I’m short, I go laughingly begging friends, “Would your foundation like to make a charitable donation to the Alfred Walking Bull Center for Survival?”

But I think that’s a great thing. It means that I never let myself get obsessed with making money the way my father had. Granted, he was better at it than I was, but I inherited his love of work, so I decided in 2022 to start consulting on a regular basis and just get paid to do what I like to do anyway.

But it really fucked up my generational trauma when a woman of color made me beg and plead for the money that she contractually owed me after renegotiating a contract I didn’t want to sign in the first place. “You know how Indians feel about signing papers,” is what the disgraced Indigenous author Sherman Alexie wrote for “Smoke Signals” in 1998, but it had not really been so clearly articulated in popular culture.

People in power have a history of screwing over Indigenous people when it comes to making us sign things.

My great-great-great-grandfather Iron Shell was the first signer of the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868, the last agreement our people signed with the United States and one that was regularly ignored and abrogated when we began enforcing the terms on our end. I have a historical rage about non-Indigenous people making me sign things they don’t have the capacity to agree to. In the family I was raised in, being asked to do something by anyone was a tacit acknowledgment that someone thought enough of us to ask us to do something and so we’re bound to make their request happen. But when that same effort isn’t returned, we cut ties.

All of this got me thinking recently about contract work as an Indigenous consultant working within capitalism and with my colonizers, their descendants, and apologists in projects that I have a great admiration and care to complete. How do I make that happen in a way that’s grounded in decolonization?

I learn by doing.

I’m still writing this, but two weeks ago, I stumbled across the idea of not signing contracts. Instead, I will ask potential clients to agree to a Statement of Principles. Once they agree, they give me a dollar amount they’re thinking of paying me, I do the math of how much time I can dedicate to it and once the work is complete, they pay and that’s it.

I ran this by my white people and the reactions went from SO YOU’RE ASKING TO BE SPECIAL AGAIN, HUH? to GOOD LUCK WITH THAT! It’s OK, I know what I’m asking people to do when I ignore the premise of the paradigm.

The Internal Revenue Service does not care about your contracts. They care about what you paid, what you got paid, and what their cut of the business is, like any other authorizing thug coming in demanding protection money. White supremacy teaches us to love the written word to the point where we worship its every iteration of existence. We start to believe that writing things is superior to all other forms of documentation. So why do we uphold contracts as the only way of doing business?

Because we’re taught to be afraid of the stranger.

We’re living in fascism right now because white folk and their accomplices believed the lie that Black and Brown people are strangers and mean them harm. To an insidious extent, we teach that contracts are about accountability when what we really mean is that they’re a means to punish noncompliance. To a lesser extent we teach that contracts are a legal protection, an indemnification against financial ruin.

As if I had never been poor before.

I’m not saying it will be perfect. I will probably have to turn down work because someone will insist on a legal contract. But I will have left an impression. I will have disrupted conventional thought. I will have left a bitter taste in someone’s mouth as they say, “That’s a real shame, I really wanted to work with Alfred.” As a former organizer, I know not everyone will be moved to do anything about that feeling, but I don’t need everyone to do something. I just need to keep disrupting the narrative long enough for people to think critically about why they choose to uphold what they uphold.

And in my middle age, the stress now manifests in my gut, for which, I have fewer years in front of me to ignore.

For the last half of my life, I need to start choosing a life that doesn’t physically hobble me when it comes to playing a willing part in white supremacy culture. The more stressed I get about legal agreements, the more my gut starts to hurt; the more my gut starts to hurt, the longer it takes me to do things, the less present I am for the good things in my life.

Decolonizing isn’t just about rebelling or rejecting, it’s about undoing harmful things from within so that we can inspire others to do the same. Hopefully I can play a part in that work.