How to Give Thanks

Have you ever passed on a great book to a friend? Shared surplus garden produce with neighbors? Sent a new parent the baby clothes you no longer need? These are all ways of participating in the “gift economy,” the economic (or rather, non-economic) system Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for in her new book, The Serviceberry. It’s “a voluntary cooperation where the currency of exchange is relationship and gratitude and sometimes goods as well,” says Kimmerer. “When you have a surplus of something, you share it with the people around you. Unlike a money economy, where there’s no relationship after we pay, gift economies keep generating more and deeper and wider relationships.”

In The Serviceberry, Kimmerer frames gift economies as a form of biomimicry; guided by nature, she finds examples of gift economies in a patch of the book’s namesake, serviceberry bushes, in the journey of a carbon atom, and in the shining of the sun. She also finds them in Indigenous societies across the globe. “From the potlatches of the Pacific Northwest to the exchange of objects in Polynesian societies, Amazonia, there are lots of examples where the market economy doesn’t really exist,” she says. “It’s all gift economies on a very small, local, close-knit scale.” Not that Kimmerer ever planned to write a book on any kind of economy. She says The Serviceberry actually began as an essay commissioned by Emergence magazine, which had asked her to write about economics, and at first she declined, citing a lack of knowledge on the subject. But after the editors insisted what they actually wanted was an economic perspective, the idea for The Serviceberry came to her. “I realized I know a great deal about the economy of nature, and maybe I could compare how nature distributes goods and services to my very limited understanding but, lived experience, of Western economics,” she explains.

Kimmerer says Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift first introduced her to the term “gift economy” when she was writing her 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass — but no matter what it’s called, it’s an irresistible way to be. In a capitalist culture, we all find ways to weave relationships into our exchanges. “This is not something we have to invent,” insists Kimmerer. “We know how to do it and I think we crave doing it.” The point of the book, she says, is really to name something we already know how to do, show us how delightful it feels to do it, and invite us to imagine our way there.

A Mossy Log or Boulder

I’ve learned the most looking at things like mossy logs and boulders that are usually in special places, like an old growth or rich maple forest. Here are these plants that are so tiny, and we think, Oh well, they’re practically beyond our notice. But they’ve lived here since life began on land. Their measure of success is longevity. It’s truly sustainability. 90 percent of the organisms who’ve ever lived here have gone extinct, but the mosses haven’t. They’ve endured every climate change that has ever happened. What are they doing? What’s their secret? I’m always asking them that. The message of all my writing, I suppose, is: Give more than you take. Live within your means, follow natural law, and make beauty while you’re doing it. I would have to name mosses as these amazing teachers of redefining what it means to be successful.

Essays of Loren Eiseley

One of the inspirations for me as a scientist and writer are the essays of Loren Eiseley — very much forgotten these days. He was publishing mostly back in the ’70s, maybe even before that. He was a scientist and poet, and he was the first person who I ever read who really thought metaphorically about the lessons of nature — not only in forests and prairies, but in the cosmos as well, what that might teach us about our relationships as human people. He wrote lyrically and poetically, which gave me permission to say, “Oh, that’s what I wanna do” when I was in graduate school.

A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit

She’s so prolific. A Paradise Built in Hell was really helpful for me in starting to articulate gift economies. It’s about the ways that we deal with crises — the floods in North Carolina are a recent example — the way that people rally around each other. Solnit does a deep dive into the history of those kinds of moments and an inquiry into those kinds of mutual aid. I don’t know if she uses the language of “gift economy” or not, but it’s the idea that as human people, we want to do this. It’s spontaneous, isn’t it, when we have these disasters, but how do we keep it? That was a really important book for me.

Matika Wilbur

Matika Wilbur is a photographer and writer. She wrote the book Project 562, and is a wonderful Indigenous media activist. She’s got some really nice resources about correcting the Thanksgiving story, and an invitation to genuine gratitude. I think “complicated” is the best term, when we think about the misinterpretations, the incorrect history of the first Thanksgiving — the way that the Thanksgiving holiday gets all tied up with colonialism and celebrating falsehoods is deeply troubling. We need to decolonize the holiday and separate it from that outrageous and wrong story. At the same time, our society is so depauperate in occasions for gratitude that I’m glad there is at least one Thanksgiving. Despite its deeply problematic nature around Indigenous peoples, it’s the one holiday that we have that is devoted to gratitude, and gratitude for the gifts of the earth.

The foods that we eat on Thanksgiving that are so iconic, they’re all native foods. They’re all foods from this land. It’s as close as we have to an agrarian land celebration, and I don’t want to lose that in the issues around Indigenous peoples and Pilgrims and all of that nonsense. Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry are calling us to cultures of gratitude, to greater awareness of the gifts around us, that they’re not commodities. I’m grateful for the storytelling, led by both settlers and primarily by Indigenous people, to be able to decolonize this holiday. We need days of gratitude. We need years of gratitude.

Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein’s work really helped me frame some of the value conflicts that I feel about extractive capitalism but really didn’t have the language for. I found it very instructive in helping me to analyze what were some of the root causes of discomfort with extractive capitalism and where that comes from. He also gives us this language for thinking about the notion of sacred economics, of our spiritual responsibility to one another. How do we fulfill our spiritual responsibilities in a very pragmatic way, in how we live in the world? He offers some guidance and commentary on that. For me, it was mostly helpful that he gave me vocabulary.

The Honorable Harvest

The honorable harvest is a fundamental teaching from my culture. It’s a lived experience. I dig into it in Braiding Sweetgrass, but the editor of The Serviceberry said, “Oh, you must include it here too,” as a reminder to people that there are other ways to view and be in exchange with the world. When you think about the world as made up of gifts given to you by plants and animals and land, you have an ethical dilemma on your hands, because if these are gifts from your relatives, you are talking about eating your relatives. You have to figure out a way that life can be sustained while honoring the lives that are given to you. Western capitalism has no such parallel; why is that? Because we don’t view the world as gifts. We view it as our possessions, natural resources, commodities, so there’s no need for ethical restraint in consumption because it’s all stuff. It’s just objects, not subjects, so we can consume it however we want, which is mostly dishonorably. But the world creates ethical requirements.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.