The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World is the latest offering from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, one of the great Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes. This slim but powerful volume continues the work of her previous books, including Gathering Moss and the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass. Here, she draws from the traditional Anishinaabe economy for her understanding of reciprocity and gift economies, ones where, she writes, “a system of redistribution of wealth [is] based on abundance and the pleasure of sharing.”
Through vivid descriptions of the heartbeats around her—cedar waxwings, bluebirds, neighbors sharing garden-grown zucchini—Kimmerer immerses readers in her kinship and connection to the land. Moving between Western science and her own Potawatomi knowledge, she illustrates an accessible model for building reciprocal relationships with both nonhuman and human life around us through the harvesting and sharing of a fruit known as Amelanchier—or serviceberry, “Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis.” Kimmerer writes that “ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance” and informs us that serviceberries are medicinal fruits that also synchronize “the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous people, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready.”
Kimmerer breaks down how an extractive economic system like capitalism, which focuses on individualism, competition and exploitation of resources, impacts our spirits; she does so in a language and tone that is generous, even toward the violence of such a system. Indigenous people, she explains, change themselves to suit the land’s changes of harvest, whereas Western methods of farming attempt to make the land suit a population’s desires and consumptions. “We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs,” Kimmerer notes, “rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time.”
“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.” The Serviceberry is a kind reminder that we would do well to restore the sovereignty and practices of Indigenous peoples for the present and future of our world.