The currency is gratitude
and the source is love
Hello to new subscribers! I write about all kinds of things, including education, momming adult kids, living in a townhouse, books, and when I can’t do Romanian Dead Lifts. But I want to also share that I’m the executive director of Chickadee Community Services, a nonprofit organization supporting Indigenous education projects. You can follow that on the website and by signing up for the monthly newsletter. Also…I’d be remiss to not suggest donating, which you can do here.
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Last night I started and finished The Serviceberry, the newest from Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), and what a lovely gift it is. As is her habit, she takes from nature a symbol, but something tangible that anyone could taste and touch — in this case, a serviceberry — and employs it as correspondent to something larger and more abstract. In this collection of thoughts about economies, she shows us that hoarding gifts: gifts from the land, gifts from above, gifts from others, arrests abundance, or at least stymies it. Rather, to perpetuate gifts, they must be shared.
She writes,
In a gift economy, the currency in circulation is gratitude and connection rather than goods or money. A gift economy includes a system of social and moral agreements for indirect reciprocity, rather than a direct exchange. So, the hunter who shared the feast with you today could well anticipate that you would share from a full fishnet or offer your labor in repairing a boat in the future. The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.
RWK mentions ways a gift economy, rather than a market economy, functions in our reality. For example: Little Free Libraries. The Buy Nothing movement. Free produce stands or garden plots. I’ve had some contact with each of these, so they float on the surface of my mind after the late-night reading. I also love the idea of mutual aid, where people who can help, do, whether that’s through a direct gift of money, grocery delivery to incapacitated folks, or clothing swaps.
During my excessive Bookstore Trail book-buying spree1 I picked up Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2010). I like her writing, and this seemed like a hopeful pick.2 My parents had one of those experiences after a hurricane knocked out power for several days, where everyone in the neighborhood unloaded freezers and barbecued their meats nightly to share with all. I love the sense of community in that anecdote, and I feel it here in my little townhouse group too. Last month we pulled together to build three new parking spaces for folks, including tilling the near-frozen sod and shoveling it into trucks and hauling it to the compost place and even renting a compactor! Some people did more than others, but that’s the nature of every group project and honestly, it’s fine. You just have to value the community over the individual.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the Potlatch3 Fund gala as a grantee with a board member of the nonprofit I direct, Chickadee Community Services.4 Watching the fundraising portion of the evening was incredibly inspiring. After the live auction and a musical performance, the auctioneer returned to the stage to straight up ask for money. “We are going to start at the top amount. If you can give at this level, raise your paddle.”5 The crowd hushed. “Twenty thousand dollars,” said the auctioneer. “If you can give twenty thousand dollars, raise your paddle.” Everyone looked around. It was totally quiet for maybe 10 seconds. Then…a man on the other side of the space…he raised his paddle. Eruptions of applause. The event continued by challenging more people to give smaller amounts, and soon paddles were flying overhead as people waved them to get the auctioneer’s attention as everyone cheered. As I said, truly inspirational.
A reminder lands with a dull thud in my gut: an intention I set for 2024, one related to the unhoused population of Missoula. The number of people lacking sufficient shelter in our community is enormous. How do some people have multiple homes and some people have no home? I intended to take some action, at least twice this calendar year, to help. I considered how to support with food, with clothing donations, with volunteering, with a check. A check feels insufficient and impersonal. Volunteering feels like too much for me, emotionally and maybe physically. Donating is easy to put off. I haven’t done anything and we’ve nearly reached 2025. Will I achieve this intention? I don’t know.
I do know I want to become more engaged with the gift economy. Reading The Serviceberry last night made me box up all my finished books and drop them off at Little Free Libraries around Missoula during my lunch break today, and to order up a bag from Trashie,6 and to collect my excess winter gear to donate to the Poverello.7 But I’m kind of just emptying my house of unnecessary stuff, and the intent of that action primarily serves my purposes alone. Let me rethink.
“Gifts are not meant to be hoarded, and thus made scarce for others, but given away, which generates sufficiency for all,” Kimmerer writes. And she is talking not just about food, material items, or money. All economies emanate from something. She points out that the western view asserts economic stimulus is “decision-making in the face of scarcity,” a survivalist mindset that pits us against everyone else and generates a scarcity mindset leading to consumption and, in our capitalist society, consumerism.
By contrast, she asks, What is the source of flow in “a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.”
Maybe it is love.
I can give love.
And yes, I did make it to every single bookstore on the map, not including that elusive Butte book-bus, and only the one in Malta was closed when I got there. Well technically, the one in Fairview was also closed, but the owner lives next door and when she spied me lurking around the shop, she came out and unlocked it for me!
I haven’t read it yet but I heard a reference to it in a podcast this week so I was reminded that it’s in The Stack
A word for “to give” in the Chinook language.
We received $10,000 from Potlatch Fund earlier this year for a project involving recording elders to create educational videos.
A word for our auction numbers but also a reference to the paddle of a Northwest coast traditional canoe, which we are all paddling together in a gift economy.
Is it better than donating to Goodwill? Possibly. I’ll be paying attention.
And thus addressing the intention I’ve dodged all of 2024.
I listened to RWK earlier this week talking about this book and the ideas behind it, ❤️ this reminder!
I love you.