A friend passed me Robin Wall Kimmerer's The
Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural
World a few months back and said, you need to read this.
She was right. Kimmerer is a botanist, a writer, and an
enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Many
readers know her from her beloved book Braiding
Sweetgrass, in which she weaves together Indigenous
ecological knowledge and Western science into something
that reads like both prayer and field guide. The
Serviceberry is shorter — almost a meditation — but its
message is no less profound. It centers on a single,
generous wild fruit tree and asks: what would our world
look like if we organized our lives the way nature actually
works?
The answer Kimmerer offers is reciprocity. Not a
transaction. Not the kind of thinking that only values
something if there's profit in it. The serviceberry
produces fruit in abundance — more than any bird or
bear could eat — and drops the rest back into the soil,
feeding what comes next. It operates on gift economy
principles, the same principles that Indigenous
communities across Turtle Island have practiced for
generations: you receive, you are grateful, and you give
back. Reading this, I thought immediately of the work we
do at WorldBeat Cultural Center. Our Ethnobotany Peace
Garden, our seed library, our community programs —
none of it exists to extract value from the people we serve.
It exists because we believe the land, the culture, the
knowledge, and the healing all belong to the community,
and our role is to be a good steward of that gift. The same
thread runs through African diaspora traditions across the
Americas: Ubuntu, the Akan concept of sankofa, the
community farming practices that
enslaved Africans maintained even in
bondage. We have always known that
abundance flows from relationships, not
ownership.
What moves me most about
Kimmerer's work is that she names
something many of us feel but struggle to
articulate — that the extractive systems
harming the natural world are the same systems harming
our communities, and that healing one requires healing
the other. If you are searching for a book that will slow
you down, open you up, and send you back into your
community with fresh eyes for what is already abundant
and waiting to be tended, I cannot recommend The
Serviceberry warmly enough. It is the kind of book you will
want to pass along.
— Makeda Cheatom, Executive Director, WorldBeat Cultural Center
