Sharing Our Gifts
“Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
In her paradigm-shifting memoir, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer contextualizes her own life journey in the balancing and blending of her two worlds. Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a botanist by training, has spent nearly all the decades of her life actively and curiously learning and teaching about the interrelationships between people, animals, and plants, and Braiding Sweetgrass is, as Elizabeth Gilbert put it, a “hymn of love to the world.”
As the book’s title suggests, Kimmerer is expert at braiding—stories, ideas, people, aspects of identity, even her daughters’ hair. Each story is delicately interwoven with images, observations, and experiences that, in the aggregate, add up to a book as brightly complex as a carpet of leaves on the forest floor.
In the chapter titled Maple Sugar Moon, Kimmerer introduces the reader to Nanabozho, “the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher,” who, upon observing that the people had become lazy, and were taking the maple trees’ gifts for granted, “poured…water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.”
As the chapter unfolds, Kimmerer shares her own maple sugaring story, as a single mother of two daughters homesteading on their Upstate New York property. In their endeavor, Kimmerer relies on her training as a botanist and the stories of her elders and ancestors to guide her, tapping trees by hand and hauling brimming buckets to the sugaring shack where twenty-one buckets cook down to “nothing more than a skin of syrup on the bottom of the pan, scarcely enough for one pancake.”
But this does not deter the little family. They carry on with their mission through the sugaring season, and as they do the reader becomes the beneficiary of Kimmerer’s particulate insights: “The Maples each year carry out their part of the Original Instructions, to care for the people. But they care for their own survival at the same time.”
If we cannot ingest and emulate this most basic truth, we humans are surely lost.
As the Thanksgiving holiday quickly approaches, I am thinking of Kimmerer’s chapter titled Allegiance to Gratitude, in which she contrasts the notion of pledging allegiance to a political system with pledging gratitude to the abundant world that sustains life. She shares the story of The Thanksgiving Address, recited every morning by students at a tribal school on the Onondaga reserve. The address is given by a different grade each day, and on the day in this story, a class of eleven third-graders speak “the words they’ve heard nearly every day of their lives.”
The address is long, and the chapter becomes—to this reader, caught in the paradigm of my conditioning—somewhat wearying. But as the address unfolds, and the mind brightens, Kimmerer observes:
“You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposal…The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything that you need.”
If we accept Kimmerer’s position, then even at this undoubtedly difficult and frightening time, we have everything we need, and it’s up to us to know this and to allow gratitude to exponentiate the wealth.
Says Kimmerer:
“Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them…If I receive a stream’s gift, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and perform them…What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking, ‘What is our responsibility?’ is the same as asking ‘What is our gift?’ It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts.”
So, here we are, together in this place and time, shell-shocked by four years of atrocious governmental leadership, a global pandemic, and economic free fall, a handful of days away from a holiday so many Americans prize as a day for gathering with family, for feasting, for celebrating abundance, for giving thanks for what we have been given.
But, perhaps this Thanksgiving is a day to reflect on our responsibilities, to re-contextualize the notion of a “gift,” and to pledge allegiance to gratitude, to reciprocity. We are like Kimmerer’s maples: we cannot help but benefit from sharing our gifts, and, it turns out, we actually need to share our gifts in order to thrive.
Isn’t that what 2020 has shown us?