Reciprocity as a living value
Learning from my relataives and the land + a reading list
Welcome to 2026! The Blackfeet called New Year’s Day Holy Kissing Day – because it’s a day when we went around to visit our families and kiss them (a historic Blackfeet greeting). I hope you spend this year visiting and kissing your loved ones.
The ceiling of my grandma’s kitchen on the reservation has two hooks above the oven, and a piece of smooth wood on the right-hand side against the wall. She can slide it into the hooks to hang roots to dry. On her back porch, along an aging wooden bench, she sets up plastic buckets for cleaning and processing the plants we gather.
My great aunt’s fridge held metal pots filled with plants to be brewed into medicine. They can be used a few times before their potency declines, a dosage my great aunt knows well. Every day, she brewed teas to sooth her mother’s upset stomach.
My mother’s office has jars and jars of dried plants. Arnica, serviceberries, rose hips, blue root, chokecherries. She uses her collection of jars to train future ethnobotanists and for public education on Blackfeet traditional ecological knowledge.
My sister’s kitchen has beeswax and tins, filled with the plants she’s collected, turning them to salves and teas for care packages for boarding school survivors in our family.
The cabinet to the left of my sink has a collection of dried plants for teas I collected. I drink the tea myself, brew it in bulk for dinner parties, and gift small batches to dear friends and neighbors.
We are surrounded by plants that our relatives and ancestors have had reciprocal relationships with for tens of thousands of years.
Indigenous nations – including my tribe, the Blackfeet – have long valued reciprocity in our relationships. I learned about it when gathering plant medicine with elder relatives, my grandma reminding me how, where, and when to pick. I learned about it when sitting in a pow wow arena, listening to the emcee bring up a family for a memorial giveaway. I learned about it from my mom, who keeps a stash of Native-made soaps, sweetgrass, beaded keychains and tea, so she can always have gifts at the ready. Reciprocity as a value was imbued throughout my education as a young Blackfeet woman, especially my education from elder women on plant medicine.
Reciprocity is in how we gather.
I was raised in a family of Blackfeet ethnobotanists and learned about the intimate cultural and scientific relationship we have had with the land for generations. When gathering, I was taught to not over harvest: to only pick some berries or leaves from a plant, to avoid picking young plants, to leave berries and leaves behind for animals to eat, and to leave thanks with tobacco or other medicines. I was taught how to best pick the plant: to use a screwdriver to coax out the full root for blue root without damaging it, to use a shovel to get an entire alum root plant, or sharp clippers for huckleberry leaves or mint, so we could take parts of plants but not all of it. For the most part, if roots are gathered at the right time, they should be easy to pull from the ground. If you can’t get it out – they might not be ready yet.
Reciprocity is in how we manage the landscape.
The Blackfeet and other tribal nations had an intimate scientific and cultural relationship to the land and actively cultivated it – through controlled burns, pruning, and transplanting – to support plants we gathered for food and medicine and the animals we hunted for food and material goods. For example, the Blackfeet would cultivate specific grasses to attract and fatten up bison (which we used for food, lodging, and tools), and microbes from bison snot help prairie grasses grow strong, which we in turn would gather. Grasses, bison, and the Blackfeet all thrived because of our relationship to one another. By caring for and actively cultivating the environment, we were able to have a sustained, intimate relationship with our lands for tens of thousands of years.
Reciprocity is in how we transfer this ancestral knowledge.
Ecological knowledge, for the Blackfeet and within my own family, was managed by women, who were frequently those gathering and processing foods and medicine. Traditional knowledge was historically passed down through a master-apprentice method. My mom apprenticed with her aunt and grandma for multiple decades and learned Blackfeet ethnobotany directly on the land, season after season. Part of this, too, was payment. My mother regularly paid her aunt and grandma for their time and expertise, both with cash and gift bags of teas and sugar free candies. I was taught this was a traditional process of knowledge transfer; to not extract from elders for free, but to respect their time and expertise.
Reciprocity is in our gifting culture.
Historically, wealth and generosity were shown by what you could give away, and gift-giving was an important part of tribal relationships and economies. Gifting remains an important cultural value for many tribes today: Native families host giveaways at pow wows to honor a graduate or host memorial fishing derbies to remember their loved ones. The value is also present at a familial level. An example: when I was a child, our elders often came with us to gather medicine. But as they got older, we began to gather for them. My grandma has frozen berries we gathered last summer in her freezer, and some relatives continue to use plant medicine daily. My sister has begun to make salves with plant medicine to gift in care packages for elder family members. I often use what I gather to gift bags of tea. We were taught to always have gifts on hand, particularly to share with Native elders. What we gather is not just for us as individuals, but for our loved ones.
The plants my sister and I gift, that hang in my grandmother’s kitchen, and that fill my mother’s jars are manifestations of how our ancestors have long worked: gathering the plants we need for health and healing, gathering in direct relationship with the plants and lands that grow them, and sharing what we gather with our community. This focus on relationality is a stark contrast to the extractive, capitalist forms of interaction with the land and each other that have been imposed by Christianity and colonialism. Plant medicine is revitalization and resistance.
One of my resolutions for the year is to think more deeply about how I live Blackfeet cultural values like reciprocity. I work inside, on a computer, in an urban area far from home. I don’t speak Blackfeet, and I don’t practice or know Blackfeet culture to the same extent as my ancestors or elder relatives did. But how might I take what I’ve learned — and will continue to learn — into my daily life?
Here are my ideas:
Continuing to learn about Blackfeet history and culture from my family, through active listening and conversations
Continuing to care for my elders who have taught me (calling them on the phone, doing errands and chores for them when I visit, telling stories about those who have passed)
Gifting, sharing, and creating for people I love (like food, tea, plant medicine)
Paying people for their knowledge in culturally appropriate ways (like gifting elders tobacco, tea, or wild rice when I’ve learned from them)
Donating to mutual aid funds and organizations doing good work in my community to share my wealth
Providing support for my friends and loved ones – both emotional and practical – and asking for help when I need it
Organizing for political movements that prioritize care and humanity rather than exploitation and extraction
Continuing to read about reciprocity and our relationship to the land, especially from Indigenous and Black authors (see below!)
How are you living your values this year? Who have you learned these values from?
Reciprocity and the Land Reading List
Many women of color have written about reciprocity, relationships, and ecological learning. Here are some books and articles I’ve learned from; what would you add to the list?
Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leane Betasamosake
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumb
Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet, “Land as Text: Reading the Land,” “The Most Venerated: Cottonwood Trees and the Blackfeet,“ and more by Rosalyn LaPier
Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science and Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Roots During Climate Displacement by Jessica Hernandez
African American Folk Healing by Stephanie Mitchem
Kanaka ‘Ōiwi Methodologies: Moolelo and Metaphor edited by Katrina-Ann R. Kapā’anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira and Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright
Ancentral Places: Understanding Kanaka Geographies by Katrina-Ann R. Kapā’anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashely’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (particularly the story on pecans)
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Kimmerer
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman
“Restorative: Indigenous knowledge and land-based healing in the time of desertification” by me in Artists Remaking Medicine, edited by Emily F. Peters
Beautifully written
Love this. Reminds me of Brazil