Unstaking the Claim: On Language, Power, and the Sacred Act of Honouring

For over twenty-five years, the word stakeholder has lived in my mouth like an old, reliable stone. Solid. Familiar. Useful. In the world of projects, systems, and strategy, it was a catch-all that carried weight: the people whose voices mattered, whose buy-in we needed, whose interests had to be accounted for.

I never questioned it. It was part of the air we breathed in boardrooms and collaborative tables. And to be honest, I liked it. It helped map the complexity of engagement in a world full of competing priorities.

So when I first encountered the movement to shift away from the term stakeholder, my initial response wasn’t curiosity—it was resistance.

Why change this word? Why now? Aren’t we just making things complicated?

But language, I’ve come to remember, is not just communication—it’s a carrier of consciousness. It encodes worldviews. It reveals how we relate to others and what we believe about belonging, about value, about power.

And when I truly listened—not just intellectually, but in my body—I began to hear what I hadn’t before.

The term stakeholder assumes that everyone at the table has a stake. It implies shared investment, shared benefit. But that simply isn’t true.

Not everyone is risking the same. Not everyone is benefiting equally. And crucially—not everyone was invited to shape the table in the first place.

And when I traced the word back—stakeholder—I couldn’t unsee it: imagery of land being staked out, ownership claimed, territory divided. This is the language of colonialism. Of marking what’s ours and who is allowed in. For many, especially Indigenous peoples, this word isn't neutral—it’s painful. It echoes histories of erasure, exclusion, and the violence of being “consulted” but never truly heard.

What began as resistance became reverence.

I started to understand that language can be an instrument of domination or a tool for healing. That what we call people shapes how we treat them. That collapsing everyone into one neat word—stakeholder—often flattens the complexity and uniqueness of their relationships to the work.

Some have offered alternatives:

• Rights-holders — those with inherent claims and histories that must be respected.

• Partners, community members, people with lived experience, elders, wisdom-keepers, those most impacted.

These aren’t just euphemisms. They’re invitations to see more deeply. To differentiate. To honour.

And this is the deeper remembering:

That what we call people matters.

That honour is not abstract—it is specific. It is knowing someone’s name, their story, their lineage. It is asking, not assuming.

It is remembering that not everyone wants to hold a stake in the system as it is.

Some are dreaming new systems altogether.

So, here’s the inquiry I offer you, as I’ve been sitting with it myself:

• Where in your work are you still using language that flattens or claims?

• What might open if you asked people how they want to be known?

• What becomes possible when we move from engagement to relationship?

Changing a word won’t fix everything. But it’s a beginning.

A gesture of reverence.

A movement from unconscious repetition to conscious remembering.

We’re not just redesigning systems. We’re re-weaving the human story.

And every word matters in that tapestry.