For various reasons, I have thought about this article a lot including that it is seems dubious... but that's not really meant as much of a critique for a few reasons. It does however lead to something very useful and also I'm guilty of the same thing.

First off, the weakness of Maslow's model is exactly what the writer says. It's based on excessive individuality... a seemingly Western curse that's now a bit out of hand. This is also where I play fast and loose with the truth as well. Maslow comes the closest to something I describe, so I call it Self Actualization. It is when one consciously controls their beliefs, actions and reactions instead of just following their instinctive and experiential programming. It's not what Maslow called Self Actualization, but the term well describes what I am thinking about and is familiar so I sort of appropriated it.

I study human genetics and am pretty good at it... hence my description of humans transcending their instinctive programming. That's why I'm very skeptical of that story about the Blackfoot. It contradicts what our instincts tell us. It describes a conscious community and cultural identity that supersedes the individual. It does make sense and it seems like quite a good survival strategy. In a way, I'm sure it is true, but it is incomplete and misses something important... How do I describe this briefly? When humans started walking as a strategy, the time of Lucy, we had small brains but everything else about humans was fairly similar such as eyesight, dexterity, etc. We were in a new ecology and poorly adapted. The big cats thought we were great meals. The rapid evolution of the human brain shows the requirement for communication and cooperation in this new ecology. In a sense, to survive, they needed an overall strategy described by the Blackfoot hierarchy. Conflict within the tribe could destroy the whole tribe. About 160,000 years a go, give or take, humans changed. You could say that the parietal lobe developed or you could say that the human mind re-organized, but we were different. Funeral practices, art, tools, society, etc. Changed we became dominant in the ecology. We started killing the big cats and everything else including each other. That finding surprised the anthropologists. It was though actually quite natural. Evolution is red in tooth and claw. It mostly works by mindless, brutal competition. I tend to say that this peaked in the West with the Roman Empire. It was so nasty that religions and philosophies that offered an alternative strategy to constant conflict were quite popular such as Christianity.

So what about the Blackfoot? Well, they might have had that philosophy/strategy and they might have even been able to support it within their society... to some degree. But they had the same problem as the West: violence is a very good strategy and it is pushed by evolution. Don't for a moment think the Blackfoot escaped it. That's actually how it was in the West. Politically, warfare was constant. Philosophy or morally we followed Christian teaching to love one another... and that's not a joke. There was always a balance between them. Luckily humans had a significant evolutionary history of having to cooperate and be peaceful, but that competes with other evolutionary times and forces that led to bloody conflict. You can see it today. People are wonderful, happy to help and do amazing things working together. They are also murderous competitors. We have both instincts, as did the Blackfoot. (This is only avoidable when the environment is so harsh that it is the primary selective agent rather than other humans.)

Sew... while the Blackfoot might have believed that , they couldn't have widely acted on it... Or while in the West we seem to have insane individuality, we also philosophically are extremely cooperative and put the community and society above the individual. Understand it as a balance or fail to understand it.

The relevance is that what you say about the Blackfoot motivational model is that that is what humans need to survive into the future. We do have it in the West, it's just that extreme competition is so natural, effective and exciting that peace, harmony and survival become invisible. What would help is a conscious knowledge of these two strategies in the context that a person can find both instincts within themselves. Then they must choose and that is what I have translated Maslow's term "Self Actualization" to mean, making the choice to follow the cooperative instinct we have instead of the competitive one that nature drives. As you are trying to describe, it is our only hope for long term survival but I follow a different path of reasoning. If you want to seem my path which is all based on ecological analysis, I put it in a video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjVieFKevMk

or the more up to date and complete book "Genetics For A New Human Ecology" at Amazon...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544900996

The dangers are greater and closer than it appears but the potentials are as great as human aspirations.