The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I never imagined that I could pick them here. The local native Serviceberries, Amelanchier arborea, have small, hard fruits, which tend toward dryness, and only once in a while is there a tree with sweet offerings.

Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed. In this folklore, this was the time that mountain roads became passable for circuit preachers, who arrived to conduct church services. It is also a reliable indicator to fisherfolk that the shad are running upstream—or at least it was back in the day when rivers were clear and free enough to support the spawning of shad.

Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves. Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives.

Serviceberries were a critical ingredient in the making of pemmican. The dried berries, along with dried venison or bison, were pounded to a fine powder, bound with rendered fat, and solidified into the original energy bars.

In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity.

When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes. In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual. Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude—of which you will be reminded.

Many Indigenous Peoples, including my Anishinaabe relatives and my Haudenosaunee neighbors, inherit what is known as “a culture of gratitude,” where lifeways are organized around recognition and responsibility for earthly gifts, both ceremonial and pragmatic.

Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyperconsumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver. Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?

If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.

Materials move through ecosystems in a circular economy and are constantly transformed. Abundance is created by recycling, by reciprocity.

years, but it always comes back into circulation. The juice that bursts from these berries was rain just last week and is already on its way back to the clouds.

I suppose in an industrial economy “production” is the source of the flow, rooted in human labor and the conversion of earthly gifts to commodities. But so often that production is at the cost of great destruction. When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?

The maternal gift economy is a biological imperative. There is no meritocracy or earning of sustenance. Mothers do not sell their milk to their babies, it is pure gift, so that life can continue. The currency of this economy is the flow of gratitude, the flow of love, literally in support of life.

If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the “Sun” of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.

IN A SERVICEBERRY ECONOMY, I accept the gift from the tree and then spread that gift around, with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes. In contrast, if I were to buy a basket of berries in a market economy, the relationship ends with the exchange of money. Once I hand over my credit card, I have no further exchange with the clerk or the store. We’re done. I own these berries now and can do with them as I like.

Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed.

It seems absurd to me that someone could own water, a free gift that falls like the proverbial manna from heaven. Could you sell manna without spiritual jeopardy? I don’t think so.

Anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

Valerie prefers to define economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves.” I like that better.

“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.

In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.

In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein states: “Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.”

The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.

Gifts are not meant to be hoarded, and thus made scarce for others, but given away, which generates sufficiency for all.

The economic contest between colonial and Indigenous currencies did not end with the Buffalo.

When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies. People give freely to one another, and bonds of ownership disappear when everyone pools their resources of food and labor and blankets in solidarity.

The excess in my life tends to be books, because people are always giving them to me. So, when I turn the last page—or sometimes well before—I might give a book to a friend. You do it, too. That simple act is the atom of a gift economy. No money was exchanged, I have no expectation of compensation in any form. That book was kept from the landfill, and my friend and I have a bond and something to talk about; the act of giving opened a channel of reciprocity. It’s not so different from what the Serviceberries are doing.

Why does everything have to be expanded? It is the small scale and context that make the flow of gifts meaningful.

This is the inherent problem with gift economies—they can’t function well when there are cheaters who violate the trust.

The guidelines of the Honorable Harvest are not usually written down, they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if I were to list them they would look something like this: Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first one. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever.

Some of the abundance of spring rain and sun manifests in the form of flowers, which offer a feast for insects when it’s cold and rainy. The insects return the favor by carrying pollen. Food is rarely in short supply for Saskatoons, but mobility is rare. Movement is a gift of the pollinators, but the energy needed to support buzzing around is scarce. So the trees and the insects create a relationship of exchange that benefits both.

In summer, when the boughs are laden, Serviceberries produce an abundance of sugar. Do they hoard that energy for themselves? No, they invite the birds to a feast. Come, my relatives, fill your bellies, say the Serviceberries. Are they not storing their meat in the bellies of their brothers and sisters—the Jays, the Thrashers, and the Robins?

Feasting has another benefit. Passage through a bird gut scarifies the seeds to stimulate germination. The birds provide services to the Serviceberries, who provide for them in return. The relationships created by the gift weave myriad relations between insects and microbes and root systems.

The gift is multiplied with every giving, until it returns so rich and sweet that it burbles forth as the birdsong that wakes me in the morning.

Let’s remember that the “System” is led by individuals, by a relatively small number of people, who have names, with more money than God and certainly less compassion.

They’re all thieves, stealing our future, while we pass around the zucchini.

The Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. Without gift relationships with bees and birds, the Serviceberries would disappear from the planet. Even if they hoarded abundance, perching atop the wealth ladder, they would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance. Hoarding won’t save us either. It won’t even save Darren. All flourishing is mutual.

As a participant in a traditional culture of gratitude, now with a bucket full of berries in my hand, I’ve never quite understood something about human economics, and that is the primacy of scarcity as an organizing principle. As a person schooled by plants, my fingers stained with berry juice, I’m not willing to give scarcity such a prominent role. Gift economies arise from an understanding of earthly abundance and the gratitude it generates. A perception of abundance, based on the notion that there is enough if we share it, underlies economies of mutual support.

microbial communities that are exchanging resources. Perhaps inculcated with the Tragedy of the Commons perspective, we used to assume that these fungi were “stealing” nutrients from the trees, but the closer we look, it seems as if the nutrients might be freely given in a network of reciprocity.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from a better way of life? When I examine Serviceberry economics, I don’t see scarcity, I see abundance shared: photosynthate is usually not in short supply, since sun and air are perpetually renewable resources. Of course, sometimes there’s not enough rain, and then the scarcity ripples through the web of relationships, for sure. That is real scarcity: when the rains don’t come. It is a physical limitation with repercussions and loss that are shared, just as abundance is shared.

It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept. In order for capitalist market economies to function, there must be scarcity, and the system is designed to create scarcity where it does not actually exist.

pure, beautiful water, a gift from the skies. It was previously unthinkable that one would pay for a drink of water; but as careless economic expansion pollutes fresh water, we now incentivize privatization of springs and aquifers. Sweet water, a free gift of the Earth, is pirated by faceless corporations who encase it in plastic containers to sell. And now many can’t afford what was previously free, and we incentivize wrecking public waters to create demand for the privatized.

Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil.

the “monster” in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little. It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world. Windigo thinking jeopardizes the survival of the community by incentivizing individual accumulation far beyond the satisfaction of “enoughness.”