We are named after Abraham Maslow. That naming carries a history we are responsible for acknowledging — and a tension we are committed to sitting with honestly.
Maslow acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we reside and operate — the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia.
We recognise that the lands and waters were never ceded. It always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
Abraham Maslow is best known for the "hierarchy of needs" — the pyramid framework that has been reproduced in textbooks, corporate training programmes, and pop psychology for decades. It places self-actualisation at the apex: the individual's highest attainment.
What is less commonly known — and what a growing body of scholarship has documented — is that Maslow visited the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in 1938, and that many of the ideas most associated with his hierarchy have direct antecedents in Blackfoot teachings, long held and lived.
In Blackfoot teachings, self-actualisation is not the apex — it is the foundation. The individual's flourishing is the base on which community actualisation, and then cultural perpetuity, are built. Maslow inverted the structure and did not attribute its origins.
The primary research on Maslow's 1938 visit and its conceptual influence has been led by Ryan Heavy Head (Kainai Nation) and the late Narcisse Blood (Kainai Nation, coordinator of Kainai Studies at Red Crow Community College), with their lectures housed in the Blackfoot Digital Library. Dr. Cindy Blackstock (Gitxsan First Nation), Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, has developed the Breath of Life Theory as an Indigenous counter-framework to the hierarchy.
How to read this history is itself contested within Blackfoot scholarship — Heavy Head and Blood do not characterise Maslow's work as appropriation; other Blackfoot voices do. We do not resolve that tension on their behalf.
Maslow was named in the early years of the company's consumer product phase, before the founders were aware of this history. The name was chosen for the resonance of the hierarchy's architecture — a structure of human needs as the basis for a financial services offering. We have since learned the fuller story.
We have chosen to acknowledge this history openly rather than quietly rebrand or remain silent. We do so because intellectual honesty about the origins of ideas we use or benefit from is fundamental to the kind of company we are trying to be.
One expression of that honesty is the two-word slogan we have chosen to operate under — Together. Thriving. — chosen in direct contradiction to the hierarchy attributed to Maslow, and in respect of the Blackfoot teachings from which it was drawn. Where Maslow's hierarchy places individual self-actualisation at the apex, alone, our two words name the inverse — and what the Blackfoot have always held: that human flourishing is collective, that the collective is the foundation, not the summit.
A company building infrastructure for communities and committed to non-extractive economics cannot be comfortable with a name that carries the weight of knowledge extracted without attribution. We hold that tension, and we are working through what the right response is — not performatively, but substantively.
This page is a beginning, not an endpoint. We are actively seeking guidance from Indigenous scholars, communities, and advisors as we consider what a responsible path forward looks like. If you have knowledge, perspective, or guidance to offer, we want to hear from you.
We will update this page as that conversation develops. We commit to being transparent about what we learn and what we decide.