Reflections on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, healing, and the work that sustains us
Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day—a day to honor the resilience, sovereignty, and enduring contributions of Native peoples whose wisdom has always been here, waiting for us to listen. As I work toward becoming a victim advocate while healing from my own experiences with domestic abuse, I find myself drawn to the teachings that indigenous communities have been offering for generations: that thriving is only possible when we nurture strong bonds with our community.
The Gift Economy of Healing
I recently read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and it arrived at exactly the moment I needed it. Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, uses the humble serviceberry tree as a lens to examine how we might reimagine our relationships—with each other, with the natural world, and with the very concept of abundance itself.
The serviceberry gives freely. Its blossoms feed early insects, its leaves nourish the soil, its fruit sustains birds and humans alike. Everyone who participates in this exchange receives what they need, and in giving, the tree ensures its own survival. This is what Kimmerer calls a “gift economy”—a system rooted in reciprocity, gratitude, and the understanding that wealth comes from the quality of our relationships, not from what we hoard for ourselves.
As a survivor, this concept resonates deeply. Abuse operates on the opposite principle—it’s about taking, controlling, hoarding power. It creates artificial scarcity where there should be abundance: scarcity of safety, of autonomy, of voice. Recovery, then, becomes an act of remembering that there is enough—enough support, enough healing, enough hope to go around.
“In My Neighbors’ Bellies”
Kimmerer shares an anecdote that stays with me: A Native hunter, after a successful hunt, was asked by a non-Native person where he planned to store all the meat. “In my neighbors’ bellies,” he replied.
The whole concept of hoarding for yourself alone was foreign to him. In a gift economy, abundance is meant to flow. You share what is plentiful, not because you have to, but because that’s how the community—and therefore you—survives.
This is the model I hope to see—and help create—in victim advocacy work. Twenty years ago, when I was in my abusive relationship, I didn’t have access to victim advocates. I didn’t even know such services existed. There was no gift economy for me, no community flow of support. I survived alone, in the artificial scarcity that abuse creates, believing that was simply how it had to be.
Now, as I pursue certification, I’m learning what should have been available to me—and what I can help make available to others. I want to believe the world is a better, more giving place than it was two decades ago. But when I see victim services being cut, grants expiring, support systems dismantled, it’s hard not to feel that familiar scarcity creeping back in. Still, I’m choosing to be part of the flow—to offer what I can, to help build the reciprocity I never had, trusting that even in uncertain times, we can strengthen each other.
When the System Steals the Stand
But Kimmerer also tells a harder story. A neighbor named Sandy set up a roadside stand where she gave away surplus produce from her garden. She put up a sign: “Free Farm Stand.” At the end of the season, someone stole the entire shed.
Kimmerer uses this story to illustrate what happens when gift economies collide with a mindset that sees everything as property to be claimed, hoarded, exploited. The thief didn’t just take vegetables—they dismantled the very structure of generosity, robbing the entire community for individual gain.
This year, I’m watching a version of this play out in real time.
The Shutdown and the Stealing of Safety
The current government shutdown has had devastating consequences for victim services. The Department of Justice has furloughed grant-making staff, frozen critical VOCA (Victims of Crime Act) funding, and allowed over 100 grants supporting trafficking survivors and domestic violence victims to expire. Organizations that provide emergency housing, crisis counseling, and legal aid are laying off staff, cutting programs, or closing entirely.
These aren’t abstract budget numbers. These are lifelines—for survivors fleeing danger, for children escaping abuse, for people trying to rebuild their lives after unimaginable trauma. And they’re being severed, not because the resources don’t exist (Congress already appropriated the funds), but because of political maneuvering and ideological conditions.
Kimmerer writes about the “Windigo” in Potawatomi culture—a cannibal monster whose hunger is never satisfied, who takes too much and shares too little, jeopardizing the survival of the community. She asks us to think about the “Contemporary Windigos who cannibalize life for accumulation of money.”
When funding meant to protect the most vulnerable among us is withheld or frozen, when grant managers who connect survivors to resources are furloughed, when services are disrupted to prove political points—that is Windigo thinking. It creates artificial scarcity where there should be abundance. It steals the “farm stand” of safety that our communities have built together.
What We Can Do: Mosaic Economies and Mutual Aid
Kimmerer acknowledges that we can’t simply dismantle the market economy overnight and return to small, tightly-knit gift-based communities. Most of us don’t live in that world anymore. But she suggests we can create “mosaic economies”—spaces where gift economies run alongside the market economy.
Think of Little Free Libraries. FreeCycle networks. Community gardens. Mutual aid groups. Public libraries themselves, which Kimmerer praises as “civic-scale practice of a gift economy.” These are small acts of reciprocity, seeds of a different way of being.
In victim advocacy, I see this too. Support groups where survivors share their stories freely. Advocates who volunteer their time. Communities that rally around a neighbor in crisis. These aren’t replacements for the federal funding we desperately need—but they’re reminders that the capacity for reciprocity and care still exists in us.
The Honorable Harvest
Kimmerer shares indigenous principles of the “Honorable Harvest”—guidelines for taking from the natural world in a way that honors the gift:
- Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them
- Introduce yourself; be accountable as the one who comes asking
- Ask permission before taking; abide by the answer
- Never take the first one or the last one
- Take only what you need, only that which is given
- Never take more than half; leave some for others
- Harvest in a way that minimizes harm
- Use it respectfully; never waste what you have taken
- Share
- Give thanks for what you have been given
- Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken
- Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever
I think about how these principles might apply to advocacy work, to healing, to how we build community in times of crisis. What if we approached each interaction with this kind of reverence? What if we took only what we needed and gave freely of what we had?
Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Work of Recognition
Today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we recognize that the world colonizers “discovered” was already a thriving interconnected network of hundreds of nations with their own languages, governments, and cultural practices. We acknowledge the devastating impacts of colonization—and we celebrate the resilience, sovereignty, and ongoing contributions of Indigenous communities.
But recognition without reciprocity is hollow. If we honor indigenous wisdom, we must also act on it. We must question the systems that prioritize accumulation over care, scarcity over abundance, individual gain over community wellbeing. We must push back against the Windigo thinking that steals resources meant for the vulnerable.
Seeds for the Future
Kimmerer uses an ecological metaphor: after land is cleared or burned, fast-growing opportunistic plants colonize the space, consuming resources rapidly until they exhaust them. Eventually, these give way to mature forests—systems based on cooperation, reciprocity, and slow, sustainable growth.
Maybe we’re in that transition now. The extractive, exploitative systems are showing their unsustainability. The question is what we’ll plant in their place.
For me, pursuing victim advocacy while healing from trauma is a way of planting seeds. I can’t change the federal budget or stop the shutdown. But I can learn to give and receive care with reciprocity. I can be part of the gift economy that says: your healing matters, my healing matters, our collective healing matters—and there is enough for all of us.
As Kimmerer writes: “Thriving is possible only if you have nurtured strong bonds with your community.”
So today, I’m grateful—for the indigenous teachers who have preserved this wisdom, for the advocates who help victims when they needed it most, for the community that continues to show up even when the systems fail us. And I’m committing, again, to be part of the reciprocity. To give what I can, to take only what I need, to sustain the ones who sustain me.
The serviceberry keeps giving. The harvest continues. And we keep showing up for each other, even—especially—in times of scarcity.
What does reciprocity look like in your life? How are you participating in gift economies, even small ones? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.