Very thought-provoking and enlightening piece.

My take on Maslow before reading the article you shared (linked below):

https://medium.com/basic-income/the-case-for-hierarchy-c8fb6c1551b?source=friends_link&sk=8ade8eb7898edafa8939e8432d627a5f

I don't actually see them as mutually contradictory. I see Maslow's as limited, tailored to an audience addicted to a narrative of rugged individualism.

I don't see them as inversions of each other, but rather different areas of focus and different assumed givens. The Blackfeet model seems to take for granted that everything below self actualization in Maslow's will be a given if self actualization and community are achieved. Which makes a lot of sense in a society that backs that up like theirs did. And Maslow's version seems to take for granted that self-actualization will lead to greater community and societal benefits, much in line with common western trickle down capitalism thinking. Help the individuals, and the group will naturally flourish, so the thinking goes.

So, while this was a very illuminating article, my first inclination is not to say Maslow "got it wrong." My inclination is to address the assumptions in both models and improve upon them by blending them and removing those assumptions.

In short, why not just add the two more community rows (community actualization and cultural perpetuity) on top of Maslow’s? Then the scope of the hierarchy would be neither too broad nor too narrow to enmesh with either culture’s norms. The Blackfeet might look at the bottom half of this conglomerate pyramid and think "well, duh," but sometimes it needs to be spelled out for people who aren’t raised in a healthy culture to see things a certain way. It’d be an act of patience, helping the western worldview to more easily understand the theory societal perpetuity. It’s like teaching kids arithmetic before calculus. It has to be done. We westerners are the kids in this analogy, if that’s not clear.

Also, I dig the cultural acknowledgement I didn’t previously have a view to going on here. I wouldn’t call this new thing I’m proposing "Maslow’s Hierarchy" any more, but rather a name that better acknowledges the various cultural influences behind its development.