2024 November 30 The Serviceberry

Robin Wall Kimmerer first blew my mind with her book Braiding Sweetgrass. She weaved western ecology with indigenous perspective so beautifully that my own understanding of ecology changed forever. Since my childhood, I believed humans were intrinsically greedy and destroyers of nature. There is truth to that in our materialistic western mindset, however Kimmerer showed a new way to see us humans as part of nature; both giving and receiving gifts.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous American author and ecologist

The timing was perfect for The Serviceberry. It was available at the library for us to read over Thanksgiving break. It’s Native American Heritage month as well as a time of gratitude. This short book expands upon the ideas about nature’s gifts and uses the serviceberry tree as an example of a gift economy. 

While the society we live in is extremely capitalistic, gift economies already exist here. We have Little Free Libraries, food pantries, Buy Nothing Facebook groups and public libraries that function in types of a gift economy. Nature works on gift economy alone. The plants’ giving of fruit disperses seeds which continue the species and continue the gifts, for example. We benefit individually and share our excess with family and neighbors. This builds community.

The message to me is both the high respect for nature and that humans should value our own gift economies more. When we give, we also foster relationships and connections that sustain us too. When an arbitrary human system starts to fail us (like the modern economy, for example), we can learn from nature’s example. Gift giving and receiving builds the communities we need in an unending positive reciprocal cycle.