John D. Rockefeller on Indigenous Wealth: An Imagined Conversation About Building Wealth

Interviewer: Mr. Rockefeller, if you were alive today and looking at Indigenous nations — communities that were denied land, dispossessed of capital, discriminated against, destroyed — where would you begin a conversation about wealth?

Rockefeller: I’d begin by admitting that you can’t rebuild on air.
If a people have been stripped of the means to own and produce, then restitution — land, credit, opportunity — isn’t generosity, it’s repair.

But repair is only the first act. It gives you the stage. What happens next depends on what you build upon it.

Interviewer: Many governments have tried to help — grants, purchased farms, low-risk programs. Yet many of those efforts still lose money and eventually fail.

Rockefeller: Yes. The farms fail, but not because the land is poor. They fail because they were managed for safety, not success.
They were built to avoid loss, which means they never learned to win.

Governments mean well, but their programs are built for preservation, not creation.

They keep books.

They don’t strive to build empires.

Interviewer: And you would tell Indigenous nations to take risk instead?

Rockefeller: Carefully — but yes.
Risk is how ownership takes root. It’s how labour becomes capital.

If the State builds the scaffolding — finance, infrastructure, protection — then the people must still build the structure.

Otherwise you end up with a scaffold that never comes down.

Interviewer: That’s easy to say when you started with oil fields.

Rockefeller: I didn’t start with oil fields. I started with barrels and debt. The oil came later.
Capital grows when people organise themselves around a productive idea — when labour, discipline, and risk come together long enough for something to last.

That’s true whether you’re refining kerosene or rebuilding a nation.

Interviewer: But isn’t that unfair? Expecting the dispossessed to compete by the same rules that excluded them?

Rockefeller: It’s unfair, yes. History rarely balances its own books.
But it doesn’t mean there’s another path. Every society that’s ever rebuilt after ruin — Germany, Japan, Korea — did it by mixing state capital with private risk.

It’s not justice; it’s survival.

Interviewer: So you’d still see government as a partner?

Rockefeller: Absolutely. But a partner, not a patron.
The government can make the first investment, lower the first barrier, guarantee the first bond. But the ownership and risk taking must sit with the people, or the wealth will evaporate the moment the program ends.

Interviewer: And what would you call real wealth in that context?

Rockefeller: Not comfort. Not cash. Capacity.
The ability of a community to generate its own surplus — to turn its work into something that lasts.

Interviewer: You make it sound like wealth is less about money than memory.

Rockefeller: (smiles) That’s not far off.
Capital is the stored memory of labour — the trace of effort that endures.

The tragedy of dispossession isn’t just that land was taken. It’s that the memory of ownership was broken.
The task now is to rebuild that memory — to make capital Indigenous again.

Interviewer: And you think that’s possible?

Rockefeller: Possible, yes. Certain, no.
Wealth isn’t a guarantee — it’s a long experiment in persistence.

If the State can hold its nerve, and the people can hold their purpose, they might surprise everyone.

Sebastian Vanderzeil is Director of Strabo Rivers, an economic consultancy specialising in infrastructure, water, and investment strategy. This essay reimagines a conversation with John D. Rockefeller about Indigenous wealth, risk, and repair.