Relational ethics vs. selfish politics
By Benjamin Alva Polley EBS COLUMNIST
In many traditional Indigenous societies, a person was measured not by what they accumulated, but by how well they cared for the community and the land that sustained them. A hunter who hoarded meat, a leader who schemed only for personal gain, or a relative who refused reciprocal obligations did not just earn a bad reputation; they could lose their standing, their voice, even their right to remain with the group. Extreme selfishness was treated not merely as a character flaw, but as a failure to act as a full human being in a web of relationships.
In present-day Montana, both the Blackfeet (Niitsitapi) and Crow (Apsáalooke) tribes traditionally hold cultural values that strongly frown upon greed and emphasize generosity, community sharing and, in some contexts, treat excessive desire as a form of social or spiritual illness.
Modern American politics offers a stark contrast. Some of the most powerful people in our government behave in precisely the ways those societies warned against: fixated on wealth, blind to the common good, and willing to sacrifice community and land as long as decisions bring profits to their donors and allies. Instead of being shamed or removed from power, they are rewarded with campaign contributions, cable news spots, and lifetime careers in office or industry.
If we took seriously the ethical standards that helped Indigenous communities survive for millennia, many current officers in President Donald Trump’s administration would be deemed unfit to govern—not because of partisan disagreement, but because their actions reveal a deeper failure. They repeatedly choose the billionaire class over the wider community, over “the least of these,” and over the biosphere that makes life possible.
Consider efforts by politicians like Utah Sen. Mike Lee to privatize public lands. In many Indigenous frameworks, land is not a commodity; it is a relative—according to the Lakota phrase “mitakuye oyasin”—and a living system with which humans are in constant relationship and obligation. Public lands are at least a partial recognition that some places belong to all of us and to future generations. To carve them up and sell them off is to declare that the immediate profit of a few outweighs the long-term wellbeing of many.
The decision to open land bordering the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, one of the continent’s most pristine freshwater ecosystems, to mining and development follows the same logic. Short-term gains are treated as more important than the health of the watershed, the livelihoods of local communities, and the integrity of a unique and fragile ecosystem. This is a moral choice. It states plainly that corporate interests, investor returns, and short-sighted economic growth matter more than clean water, healthy forests, and the right of future generations to inherit a living world.
The push to weaken the very agencies charged with stewarding our shared heritage—the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service—fits this pattern. Strip them of funding, authority and expertise, then point to their diminished capacity as proof that the private sector should take over. It is a classic sabotage-and-sell-off strategy that treats the public trust as an obstacle rather than a responsibility.
We see the same disregard in the way many leaders treat pollution and public health. Time and again, they side with major polluters, fossil fuel companies, industrial agriculture and chemical manufacturers, and allow them to dump toxins into our air and water with minimal oversight. Regulations meant to keep communities safe are dismissed as “burdens on business,” and any attempt to strengthen protections is attacked as anti-growth or “job-killing.” The message is clear: clean air, clean water and the survival of other species matter less than rising profits for the elite class—even if leaders lure voters by promising prosperity for the middle class.
This profit-at-all-costs attitude is the opposite of a relational ethic. In Indigenous perspectives, the air we breathe and the water we drink are not disposable resources; they are sacred gifts that bind us to one another and to the more-than-human world. To knowingly poison a river, an aquifer or the atmosphere is not just a technical policy decision; it is a violation of relationship. It harms children with asthma, communities with cancer clusters, and ecosystems pushed to the brink. When leaders shrug off these harms as the “cost of doing business,” they reveal whose lives they value and whose they are willing to sacrifice.
Holding leaders accountable
In a society that took relational ethics seriously, these topics would not be seen as routine policy disagreements. They would be recognized as violations of the basic obligations we owe one another and the Earth. Leaders who consistently harm the community and the land would face consequences: at a minimum, shame and loss of status. In some traditional societies, they would be banned from the community.
We do not live in a small band society, and we cannot simply banish senators or representatives from the village circle. But we can reclaim the underlying principle: if you persistently act only for yourself and your wealthy patrons, if you treat the planet as expendable, you forfeit your moral claim to lead.
This requires rethinking political accountability. Too often, we frame debates around abstractions—markets, growth, efficiency—as if they exist in a vacuum. An Indigenous-informed lens asks different questions: Who is being harmed? Who is excluded? How will this decision affect the seventh generation to come? Does this policy honor our relationships with land, water and non-human life, or does it treat them as disposable?
By those standards, much of contemporary governance fails. But failure is not fate. The same traditions that condemn narcissistic leadership point toward another path: reciprocity over extraction, obligation over entitlement, collective thriving over private hoarding.
We do not need to romanticize Indigenous societies to learn from them, nor are all of them perfect. We only need the humility to admit that cultures that sustained vibrant communities and intact ecosystems over thousands of years might know something our short-sighted politics has forgotten.
When leaders behave as if only they, and the billionaires and corporations they serve, truly matter, it is not just bad policy. It is a betrayal of what it means to be fully human.
The question before us is whether we will continue to normalize that betrayal—or whether we will finally say, as earlier societies did: this is not how a human being should behave, and such people should not decide the fate of our communities or our planet.
Benjamin Alva Polley is a place-based storyteller. His words have been published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Field & Stream, The Guardian, Men’s Journal, Outside, Popular Science, Sierra, and WWF, among other notable outlets, and are available on his website.
