Guarding Our Gift Exchanges: On Vegetables & Monsters
- Karyn Resch Brackney
- 4 minutes ago
- 12 min read
I read a lot—89 books last year, 41 so far this year, about half of it nonfiction. I get fixated on a subject, read everything I can find, then get interested in a tangentially related subject, rinse and repeat. In the second half of 2024, I read about feminism, matriarchy, and the egalitarian, matrilineal hunter-gatherer societies that predated the warring patriarchal nation-states we’ve known for the past 6,000 years. In early 2025, I read books on politics and American history, including titles on fascism, racism, and white supremacy. Then the book Decolonizing Therapy by Dr. Jennifer Mullan sent me on a hard pivot into the indigenous opposites of western structures of oppression, and for the last twelve months, I’ve been reading about shamanic healing, earth-based religions from all over the world, contemplative spiritual practices, and—relevant to this post—gift economies.
I got tired of reading about what was wrong with the world, and started reading about what the human race has, in different times and places, gotten right.
I've written about "communities of abundance" before. A gift economy goes further. My goals are threefold: I want you to 1.) be able to identify the gift economies you may already be participating in, 2.) have tools to create new gift economies, and 3.) know how to protect your gift economies, because they are vital to our survival and our healing.
A gift economy is a network of people joined by gift-giving ties—the exchange of goods or services without money. In a gift economy, the giving of a gift places an obligation upon the recipient to give a gift of their own. This can be as simple as a Buy Nothing group on Facebook, or as complex as a niche scientific community sharing research. It can be as small as a book club, or as large as a 5000-person referral network of therapists who offer one another consultations and professional support free of charge. Gift economies, however, do tend to have boundaries. There is a clear line between who is a member and who is not—not out of a spirit of exclusion, but simply because gift economies are built on trust, and you cannot reasonably build or maintain trust with everyone and anyone.
Many indigenous societies have functioned as gift economies, from Africa to the Mediterranean to the Americas. (For an example of a gift economy in action, research the Potlatch. The word comes from the Chinook, but it’s a traditional ceremony found in many indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest.) In gift economy societies, a person’s wealth is determined not by how much they have, but by how much they give. You gain status not by amassing goods, possessions, or money, but by giving them away. And in a culture where individual ownership is viewed as aberrant, and the land and its resources are held in common by all the people, who are only using it as a gift from Mother Earth anyway, this is a natural way to live. Only once you introduce competition and individualism do you get scarcity and, with it, the collapse of a gift economy and the need for personal wealth.
Two excellent books on gift economies are The Gift by Lewis Hyde (long, dense, and scholarly, but comprehensive and rich) and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer (a mini-book, more of an essay, but a gorgeous, moving introduction to the topic).
In her book The Serviceberry, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (oh, and you must read Braiding Sweetgrass!) uses the example of a neighborhood free vegetable stand, where members of a small community leave surplus vegetables from their gardens for others to take and use. The stand just popped up one day, a wooden stand with a sign saying “Free Vegetables” and an assortment of produce. And it worked, because of the communal trust in the neighborhood that everyone who participated was doing so under the same basic rules of decency: take a little, leave a little, give a little.
The best example I have in my current life of a gift economy is a small group of a dozen moms who meet a couple of times a month. We bring our own dinners and share funny stories about our kids. We cry in front of each other when it’s been a hard week. We tell stories of our lives, the kind of vulnerable, purposeful stories that only emerge when you make intentional space for them. We also goof off: ping-pong, terrible craft projects, Zumba. Over the course of the past year, we have built a “storehouse” of emotional and social support through mutual giving and receiving. While we don’t all have equal resources (it makes a difference, whether you have toddlers or teenagers, a supportive partner or a challenging ex), we’re all sharing those resources at roughly the same capacity. So the storehouse stays full—let’s say, at 100% (and building interest over time).
Most weeks, let’s say, I break even: I might bring 10% of the “vegetables,” and take 10% away with me. One week, I might need 25% of what the group brings—but maybe that’s the week several other people have an extra 5% to spare. And maybe a couple of months later, I’ve got a spare 15% to bring, and eventually, someone can use that surplus. Over time, no one is taking substantially more than they’re bringing—and nobody is forced to bring substantially more than they take. We all have different sized gardens, with different crops that are ripe at different times, but there are always enough vegetables, and so we can always eat. I know in my bones that these women will hold whatever parts of me I ask them to hold, and my hands are out, ready to receive whatever they’re struggling to hold on their own. There is safety and trust in this gift economy. I don’t have to make myself presentable. I don’t have to brace or go in guarded. I know whenever we gather, whether I have vegetables in my garden that night or not, I will get to eat.
It’s a wonderful, robust community, but I also have a sense of its fragility.
Gift economies are not sources of passive income, and they don’t just run by themselves. In today’s world of late-stage capitalism and traumatizing scarcity, gift economies require maintenance and vigilance. Like the indigenous communities who were destroyed when their gift economies were exploited by colonizers, the forces that run our world would rather crush our gift economies than allow them to disrupt their control of supply-and-demand and eat into their profit margins.
I can think of three primary threats to gift economies (though I don’t claim to have made an exhaustive study). In roughly ascending order of risk, they are:
1.) Hoarders
2.) Shrewd Investors
3.) Predators
While these threats can sometimes come in the form of individual characters disrupting a gift economy—as in the stories I share below—they are also tendencies within all of us, systems we are trapped in, traits built into the fabric of our societies, and forms of trauma we carry locked in our psyches.
Hoarders (Ebenezer Scrooge)
Ebenezer Scrooge was a financial miser by profession, but he is also one of literature’s saddest emotional misers. Dickens describes him as “self-contained…solitary as an oyster.” He had his heart broken, and then gave up on the gift economy of relationships. For most of his life, his business partner and his clerk were his only companions—both transactional relationships tied to money. He refused to go to his nephew’s Christmas party, opting out of both a literal and emotional gift exchange because he could not see any value in connection to other human beings. He hoarded his resources and refused to love anyone, and it left him impoverished, utterly cut off from any ability to receive love. His return to the world of love, interestingly, takes the form of a gift: a turkey sent to Bob Cratchit’s family on Christmas.
Hoarders are not, by themselves, a tremendous threat to gift economies. They just don’t participate. Rather than show up at the free vegetable stand with food to share, they go to the grocery store. It’s far less vulnerable to just exchange hard-earned cash for the food you need than to rely on your neighbors and reveal what is or isn’t in your own garden. Hoarders feel safer having their needs met by those they pay—a trainer, not a gym buddy; a masseuse, not a lover—and they’re suspicious of gift economies. A gift feels like a trick, an obligation like a trap. They believe human nature is inherently selfish and competitive—a survival of the fittest—and that life is about winning. He who dies with the most toys wins.
Oh well. Their loss.
Hoarders only become a threat to gift economies when there are so many of them—or when a few of them hoard so effectively—that they create overall scarcity and make gift economies hard to sustain due to a shortage of resources. Backyard gardens make no sense to them. You can’t get rich with a backyard garden. They would rather buy up all the land for corporate farms, and then use up all the water. When hoarders run the economy, everyone ends up at the grocery store. And then we stop hanging out with our neighbors—but that’s okay, because we don’t need them to put food on the table anymore. And besides, we’re too busy working overtime to afford the high grocery prices to have time for leisurely chats on the porch.
The urge to hoard is what shows up when you choose to get an Uber to the airport instead of asking a friend, because you don’t want to deal with someday having to drive them to the airport in exchange. Gift economies require vulnerability and risk—especially that first gift. Accustomed as we are to a world of hoarding, we will always fear to give first without the guarantee of a return. I wonder if our urge to hoard is really just about our difficulty with boundaries. To offer a ride to the airport or bring a meal to a neighbor is a minor sacrifice of resources—a risk, but a small one—and if these gifts aren’t reciprocated, we are under no obligation to continue giving. But I wonder how many of us are just don’t offer in the first place out of fear of “being taken advantage of,” because no one ever taught us we could say no. The old adage, “Give without expecting anything in return,” is flawed. Humans have always given with the goal of creating an obligation—but obligation is not the enemy. Isolation is.
Shrewd Investors (Ananias & Sapphira)
The story of Ananias and Sapphira is one of the more disturbing tales in the Christian New Testament. Early in the book of Acts, the fledgling Christian community was a gift community: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. …There were no needy persons among them.” (from Acts 4) People sold their assets and gave the money to the community to be shared by everyone. Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of property, gave part of the proceeds to the community but kept back some for themselves, and then lied to the Apostle Peter and told him they’d donated the full sum. It was a have my cake and eat it, too situation. They both ended up dead (although not, according to the text, struck dead by God).
Shrewd Investors want in on the bounty of the gift economy, but they don’t want to go all in. Too risky. While the gift economy looks great on the surface, they just aren’t sure they trust it, so they enter it with the mindset of a capitalist. They treat the gift economy like the stock market: invest a little, see if it grows, but always be ready to cut your losses and cash out. These are the rugged individualists who view relationships as an expendable luxury rather than a necessity. They only show up to the free vegetable stand when someone else has just brought a fresh load of produce; they take some, but they don’t share anything from their own garden. Or maybe they do share a little, but it’s not a gift; it’s a transaction, the price of an entry ticket to an all-you-can-eat buffet that everyone else supplies.
Their calculated caution is self-protective, and not usually malicious. At some point in the past, they were robbed or cheated or lost everything, and now they don’t trust anyone but themselves. No one else will have their back when things get tough. But partial participation is the antithesis of a gift economy. To those inside the gift economy, the Shrewd Investor’s strategy feels like a breach of etiquette, a violation of trust, or just plain selfishness. And over time, it draws down the “storehouse.” A robust gift economy can handle a Shrewd Investor or two without too much depletion, though there will likely be some low-level resentment among members. But if the “storehouse” gets too low, the fear of scarcity makes everyone else start to hold back some of their harvest to make sure they don’t go hungry…and over time, the offerings at the free vegetable stand get slimmer and slimmer. Eventually, the gift economy disappears.
The urge to be shrewd about our investments crops up when we start to worry about “not getting our fair share.” It’s there when we spread ourselves too thin among too many networks or relationships, what we bring to share is too small to create meaningful bonds, and our lack of belonging becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shrewd investing is showing up for the fun, but not for the work. It’s present in the belief that reciprocal relationships are unrealistic or too rare to hope for. In the face of shrewd investing, gift economies are courageous, wild acts of hope, and the embodiment of a spiritual conviction in the innate goodness of humanity.
Predators (the Wetiko)
The Wetiko is a mythical monster in Algonquian lore. It’s a cannibalizing creature, with a hunger that can never be satiated. With each victim it consumes, it grows larger and its hunger grows more intense. The Wetiko is a dangerous predator. If it comes into the village, it will devour the whole tribe without even blunting the edge of its appetite. The Wetiko is associated with winter, and has a heart of ice. According to some sources, a person who resorted to cannibalism to survive the starvation of a harsh winter was said to have become a Wetiko, corrupted and driven insane. In tribal communities where survival depended upon mutual cooperation, what could be more deranged than devouring the people of your own tribe, the source of your security?
Wetiko is also the destructive spirit of all-consuming greed, personified as a monster but also described as a contagion, a spirit that can possess a person and infect others through them. In themes developed in anti-colonial literature by Jack D. Forbes, Wetiko is the mind-virus or cultural contagion that has led us into ecological annihilation, the insatiable greed that drives conquest and colonization, that is killing our Mother, the Earth. Another writer, Paul Levy, uses the concept of Wetiko to understand malignant narcissism, how it forms and spreads, transmitting from one mind to another, a vampiric assault on human nature, leading to dehumanization and destruction. (Read my very conflicted review of Dispelling Wetiko here.)
The Wetiko is a warning about how high the stakes are for protecting our gift economies. A single Wetiko can destroy an entire gift economy. It will come to the free vegetable stand, bringing nothing to share, and then eat and eat and eat. And when the communal stores run low, it will rage and criticize, blame others for its ravenous hunger, and follow them home to get into their gardens at night. Once you’ve let it in, it’s hard to get rid of.
In her little book, Kimmerer shares the story of a thief who makes off with not just all the vegetables, but also the stand itself—the beautiful, hand-crafted stand that had been the center of the gift economy. The thief didn’t just take without giving; they also destroyed the sacred communal space in which the gift exchanges took place. The gift economy didn’t gradually run out; it was brutally killed.
We live in a Wetiko-possessed world. Wetiko is all the Elon Musks of the world, the oligarchs and warlords, Big Oil and Wall Street. Wetiko is late-stage capitalism. It is climate change. It is the Medical Industrial Complex. Wetiko is what we’re used to—and honestly, being a Shrewd Investor is a pretty common-sense adaptation to living in a Wetiko world.
Wetiko is a fearsome beast, and the gift economy is its biggest enemy.
Our gift economies need nourishing. They need protection. They need to take hold in our cultures and communities. We cannot let Wetiko in. But Wetiko, in everyday life, doesn’t look like a slavering monster with blood around its mouth. It looks like oppressive systems that perpetuate scarcity, like communities growing up in endless hunger—literal hunger, ancestral hunger, spiritual hunger, hunger for safety or belonging or self-determination—and like the chronic soul emptiness of unhealed trauma. By building gift economies and inviting in the hungry who are willing to fully participate and enrich the group, we are snatching victims from the jaws of Wetiko. I believe that growing up in a gift economy is the most effective inoculation we have against the Wetiko virus. I also believe gift economies—and the leadership of the people and cultures that remember them best—are our path to survival as the world careens toward ecocide and rapidly depleting natural resources.
If you’ve come this far, I would invite you to consider what your first step toward a gift economy in your own (literal or metaphorical) neighborhood might be. Is it asking a neighbor for help with something you’d usually handle yourself? Is it starting a dinner club with the friends you wish you saw more often? Is it joining a religious community, even if you’re not especially devout? Is it donating to the Food Bank you’ve used during a tight month? Is it planting a garden bigger than your family needs? There are so many ways to get started. All it takes is a stand and a sign.
Selected Bibliography
The Gift: Imagination & the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde (alternately subtitled “Creativity & the Artist in the Modern World”), pub. 1983 (rev. 2007)
The Serviceberry: Abundance & Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer, pub. 2024
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, & the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, pub. 2015
Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil by Paul Levy, pub. 2013
Columbus & Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, & Terrorism by Jack D. Forbes, pub. 1978 (rev. 2008)
Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, & Politicizing Your Practice by Jennifer Mullan, pub. 2023