I started this doctorate more than twenty-five years ago.
Not formally. It began as an extension of my MBA — a few classes here and there, the sort of thing you tell yourself you will finish once the work slows down. The work never slowed down. About ten years ago I thought about it again, after I refreshed at the Thunderbird School of International Management, and again the moment passed.
Underneath all of it was the same aspiration I have carried since I was a boy reading by kerosene lamp in a hogan with no electricity. To be a writer. To be an instructor. To live a life of teaching, all over the globe.
That time has come. I am more than halfway now, the focus of the dissertation is defined, and last year I stood at a podium at Prescott College and gave the commencement address to a graduating class of doctors.
I came a few days early
This is the part I want to write down, because it is where the whole thing turned.
I did not fly in the morning of and read from a page. I came a few days early. I sat with the PhD graduates. I got to know the professors, and the programs, and what each of them was actually doing out in the world.
I was blown away.
Not politely impressed — genuinely taken apart by the depth of it. Every aspect, every program, every person had a place where real impact was happening. Kino Bay, working with tribes on the Sea of Cortez. Kenya, with traditional peoples. And of course the work happening right there, on that ground, in that valley.
And they treated me with the utmost honour.
Here is what I have come to understand about that: the energy came from arriving early. Not from the talk. The talk was the easy part. The abundance was created in the three days before it, sitting with people, asking about their work, letting myself be genuinely moved by what they were doing rather than rehearsing what I was going to say about what I do.
You cannot manufacture that in the green room. You can only arrive early enough to receive it.
What I said, and where it started
The address itself began where everything I know begins — on a windswept mesa called Horse Lookout Point, where my great-grandfather taught me to read the land’s oldest language.
His calloused finger traced the spirals and antelope herds carved into stone. “These marks are not art. They are maps for survival — how to follow the elk to water, how to plant corn in drought, how to remember who you are.”
One evening, as the sun bled crimson into the horizon, he asked me a question I have never put down: “Long ago, a people built towers that scraped the sky but forgot the songs of the soil. Their wealth turned to dust. What will the land say about us two thousand years from now?”
The pinstripe suit
Years later, as an MBA student, I arrived at the Kaibab Paiute Tribe near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim carrying a briefcase of spreadsheets. I was wearing a pinstripe suit sharper than my understanding, and I was ready to fix their economy after they had rejected a corporate waste incinerator.
Elder Vivian Jake met me with a raised eyebrow and one question:
“Why measure wealth in dollars instead of in healthy grandchildren?”
She gestured to the piñon groves behind us. “These trees fed my ancestors and will teach my great-grandchildren. What will your spreadsheets feed?”
That question ended an argument I had been having with myself for years, and it started the career I have actually had.
What we built instead
Under Elder Vivian’s guidance we built something that rejected extraction in favour of reciprocity.
The thousand-year vision came first. “Planning for fifty years is shortsighted,” she said. “We decide for seven generations. What good is a job today if it poisons the water our descendants will drink?” We mapped the ancestral trails, the medicinal plants, the springs that whispered survival strategies.
Then ceremonial trade. We revived the piñon nut trade using lunar cycles and grandmothers’ wisdom, and priced it by the prayers sung during harvest rather than by market whims. Plastic packaging was banned outright — “the land cannot digest your trash.”
When I presented a five-year return projection, Vivian laughed at me. “Child, these trees have five-hundred-year business plans. Catch up.”
Thirty thousand years of trade
Long before Wall Street, the peoples of this hemisphere had perfected economies rooted in reverence.
Hopi dry-land farmers and Diné herders met at the base of the mesas — wool for peaches, stories for songs. The great Shoshone gatherings drew tribes from the Plains to the Columbia. Hohokam canals are still irrigating Arizona a thousand years later. Obsidian, turquoise and shell moved continent-wide through hundreds of hands, and each pair of hands added a story.
These were not markets. They were kinship systems in which honour was the currency, governed by one teaching: t’áadoo ách’ááh ádiilííł — don’t take more than you need.
The forgetting
I named the loss plainly, because there is no use being sentimental about it. Communities traded buckskins for coal mines and acorn groves for oil wells. There was a time when nearly every Diné person could build their own home and run their own store — an enormous body of practical skill, now largely dormant.
Meanwhile the modern economy rewards the already-wealthy and structurally blocks ordinary families from building anything to hand on.
The elders’ warning was shorter than any slide I have ever made: you cannot eat money.
What communities actually choose
Here is the central claim of the talk, and I have watched it hold every single time:
When local people are given real authority over their own planning, they choose sustainability.
Two proofs from my own work. A Diné sheep cooperative whose first act was not a business plan but a set of principles — use the old methods, don’t overuse the land, no greed, don’t boast, keep the conversation humble and honourable.
And an intertribal gathering at Havasupai, where we set out to recreate the old trade fairs. The tribes barely bartered at all. They gifted. They watched each other’s delight. They sang songs from one another’s nations that had not been sung in generations.
A child’s lesson in 4023
I closed the way my great-grandfather would have closed it — by moving the question forward two thousand years.
Imagine a girl herding sheep near Horse Lookout Point in the year 4023. She pauses at petroglyphs now joined by new symbols: solar hogans, drought-resistant cornfields, and circles representing what her people call the Era of Repair.
Her elder tells her: “Long ago, people chose to listen. They measured wealth in clean rivers and fluent storytellers. They built economies that healed, not harvested.”
The child asks, “How did they remember what to do?”
The elder smiles. “They found maps in the stones and courage in their bones.”
The charge
To the graduates I said this, and I would say it to anyone finishing anything:
Ask not only whether this is profitable, but whether it is right. Measure success in legacies rather than logos. Treat the degree as a covenant, not a credential. Leave instructions in stone, not scars.
Become ancestors worth honouring.
May your work ensure that two thousand years from now the land will whisper: they loved fiercely enough to change course.
Nizhónígo naasháa doo — may we walk in beauty, leaving trails of healing for those yet unborn.
Ahéhee’ to Prescott College, to the doctoral faculty who spent three days showing me their work before I said a word of mine, and to Elder Vivian Jake, who asked the question that changed the direction of a life.