Ethics and Reciprocity
Welcome to the 'Ethics and Reciprocity' page of MedicineSinging.com, a space dedicated to exploring and honoring the profound wisdom woven throughout indigenous traditions and cultures. This page is also dedicated to those who help bring awareness to these invaluable subjects.
Introducing Robin Wall Kimmerer
Introducing, one the most significant writers and speakers on the aspect of Reciprocity and Nature. Her work has deeply impacted my life. Get to know her. You will not regret it. Please consider her book Braiding Sweet Grass (A New York Times Bestseller; A Washington Post Bestseller; A Los Angeles Times Bestseller)
https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/books
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
In the past, human relationship with nature has been unidirectional: humans take from nature and gain from nature yet have little or no responsibilities or accountability to sustain nature.
Reciprocity ideas have always been emphasized by Indigenous peoples, and now are pushing back against a unidirectional nature-people relationship that is rooted in human supremacy. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) has raised concerns as to how nature and land has been diluted down to being human property. She contends, “in a culture of gratitude, everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity and flow back to you again” (Kimmerer 2013).
In the magazine Human-Nature, Robin Walls Kimmerer writes: We are showered every day with the gifts of the Earth, gifts we have neither earned nor paid for: air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honeybees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice and the exuberance of a field of goldenrod and asters at full bloom.
Though the Earth provides us with all that we need, we have created a consumption-driven economy that asks, “What more can we take from the Earth?” and almost never “What does the Earth ask of us in return?”
The premise of Earth asking something of me—of me! —makes my heart swell. I celebrate the implicit recognition of the Earth’s animacy, that the living planet has the capacity to ask something of us and that we have the capacity to respond. We are not passive recipients of her gifts, but active participants in her well-being. We are honored by the request. It lets us know that we belong.
For much of human’s time on the planet, before the great delusion, we lived in cultures that understood the covenant of reciprocity, that for the Earth to stay in balance, for the gifts to continue to flow, we must give back in equal measure for what we take.
Ethics, Reciprocity, Humans, Nature, and the Kitchen Table. A story.
Stephen W Emerick PhD
I am watching a mother and her 7-year-old twins playing in the living room. One child says to the other “you’re stupid,” and the other responds “am not!”.
Taking a deep breath, the mother goes over to the children and has them stand face to face, each putting their right hand upon the heart of their sibling.
The mother asks the child who had called the other one “stupid” to consider if she would want others to call her stupid; “No!” Now the mother is suggesting the one twin apologize to the other: “Say sorry”. Once said, the mother asks the other if she forgives her twin. She says “Yes!”
Feminist philosophers Barrett Emerick and Audrey Yap bring theoretical arguments about personhood and moral repair into conversation with the work of activists and the experiences of incarcerated people to make the case that prisons ought to be abolished. They argue that contemporary carceral systems in the United States and Canada fail to treat people as genuine moral agents in ways that also fail victims and their larger communities. Such carceral systems are a form of what Emerick and Yap call “institutionalized moral abandonment”. Instead, they argue that we should create communities of moral solidarity which open up space for wrongdoers to make up for their wrongs.
As part of this argument, the book directly addresses one of the paradigm cases of wrongdoing often used to justify carceral systems: rape. Carceral systems that treat perpetrators of sexual violence as irredeemable monsters both obscure the reality of sexual violence and are harmful to everyone involved.
As an alternative to carceral systems, Emerick and Yap argue for an orientation towards justice that is grounded in moral repair. This incorporates elements of restorative justice, mutual aid, and harm reduction. Instead of advocating for one specific and universal approach, the authors argue for multigenerational collective action that aims to build resilient communities that support the wellbeing of everyone.