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!”
Standing there with hands on their hearts, the twins hugged and now are going about their play.
Tears begin blocking my sight, and I hear myself saying: “If only nations could do this! If only we could do this with mother earth and help heal the harm, we have done to her”.
I suddenly see two brown-robed figures standing under a giant oak tree. The morning is dawning, and their hoods shade their faces. One is placing their right hand upon the heart of the oak, and the other placing their right hand upon mother earth. When finished, they place a hand upon the heart of the other, and then embrace. They are talking in a language I do not recognize – yet I feel warmed by it as I listen.
I know I am standing for this moment, in the presence of Reciprocity and Ethics.
I want to linger there, but I am brought back into the room by voices announcing that dinner is ready. Extra leaves have been added to the old and worn oak kitchen table to make room for everyone. Extra leaves for the family tree. The prayer is said, and thanksgiving offered, with all of us holding hands.
I briefly sit at the table, but now am excusing myself as I rush to get a poem I want to read. I find it, and quickly return, not wanting to miss any familial exchanges. I ask if I may read something, and I receive everyone’s consent. Permission is given to begin eating, as the food is warm, and so are our hearts, as I serve up a healthy portion of: The world begins at a kitchen table, by Indigenous poet Joy Harjo (my favorite):
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror.
A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating
of the last sweet bite.
The twins are now sitting at the table with all the family. “Do you want some of this?” the twin in the red dress asks. “Yes please.” This is followed by the twin in the blue dress asking in return, “do you want some of this?”
These twins and their mother have helped all of us move from a one up – one down interaction (Winner-loser) to a healing, ethical and reciprocal way of relating (Win-win).
It is ethics and reciprocity that makes such a poem memorable, and as we leave this table of conversation and go back out into the world, those precious seven-year-old twins and their mother have embedded within our hearts what ethics and reciprocity is all about.
Source: The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, by Joy Harjo, (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1994).