The Serviceberry

A friend handed me a copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s slight new book, The Serviceberry. I’d been meaning to get the book, but it had been backordered over Christmas, so I accepted the gift gladly, and asked how she’d liked it. “Nice, but unrealistic,” she said.

I read the book—maybe with this in mind. Copies arrived at the bookstore, and I gifted a copy to a friend, who thought it “delightful,” although she also said it was “depressing”—if we think about all of the ways we’ve “messed” with the world’s natural processes.

The book begins with the serviceberry and its bounty: species and names—serviceberry, juneberry, saskatoon, etc.; then picking bucket, pies, neighbors, birds, etc. But soon moves on to economics. Kemmerer describes the classical capitalist economy of “scarcity” and its creation of individual and corporate profit, and contrasts it with the natural world’s economy of “abundance,“ of sharing and interdependence. “Mutualism,” she calls it.

She finds an entire new group of ethnobotanists who are exploring the ways in which the natural world grows with interdependence and recreates itself, even through catastrophe. Kemmerer briefly criticizes evolutionists’ emphasis on competition in nature, saying that alongside competition in the natural world there is exploration of niches and growth of specialization and interdependencies. Burned out forests blossom with explosive growth of dense, monolithic species, return nutrients to the ground, and then make room for more long-growing and sustainable species. Birds and bees develop special niche relations with plants, etc.

The Serviceberries in her title are bound to the neighbors who planted them and invited her and others to pick their abundance. Birds too come to the party, overeat, process seeds in their digestive tracks, replant them in new places. The gift of the bush brings pies, neighborly conversations, birdsong, and renewal.

It is easy to get caught up in the smallness of this, the naivete, the David of it in the face of the Goliath of capitalist economics. And, indeed, when we look around us and see the successes of superrich entrepreneurs in high tech and the size of baseball stars’ contracts, even the lesser wealth created with college athletes selling their images and online influencers counting their followers, the economy of the Serviceberry in one small new England town seems almost quaint.

Oligarchs have been around since the dialogs of Plato, and wealth and ecclesiastical and military power have moved the world forever. Yet… botany and biology, the workings of the natural world, have also been continual players in the story of human evolution and development. And, current fires in California remind us that wealth is not a guarantee of survival and success; rich and poor watch their houses, and their ways of life go up in smoke in California. Historically, the eruption at Pompei, the scourges of the Plague, smallpox, polio, and covid took the lives of the famous, royalty, the saints and the wealthy along with those of sinners, commoners, and the indigent.

Kemmerer, a Potawatomi tribal member, a Phd botanist, bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, and recently named MacArthur Fellow, reminds us that the power of plants and natural processes has always been with us, and can continue to serve as an example and catalyst for an economy based on sharing, on mutualism and sustainability. Not that we will soon—or maybe ever—do away with an economy based on scarcity, competition and private gain created through real and contrived scarcities. But that the two have existed side by side for a very long time, and that for our own happiness as individuals and as societies, we should embrace the serviceberry.

Watching the California fires on television is a lesson in humility and humanity. There is tragedy of course—the loss of lives and property, the climactic disruption of all that is normal in a place that seemed solid and safe. Safe with schools and swimming pools—and yogurt shops mentioned by many survivors as places they’ll miss. Tragedy in the name-calling and blaming of and among federal, state, and local governments. Tragedy in the looters dressed as firemen, in the strange odd person caught trying to start a fire.

Alongside the tragedy is humanity, the outpouring of goods and services by food preparers and ordinary citizens driving miles to drop off clothing and food, blankets and simple furniture. Firefighters working long shifts and saving individual houses and lives, neighbors checking on neighbors and helping them flee.

We see the same local heroes helping and sharing in hurricane and war—I am struck by Palestinian soup kitchens in the midst of bombings; by Syrian “white helmets” digging through bombed out cities.

It’s no surprise that Robin Kemmerer is Native. And that all I have learned in the last decades of my blessedly long life about Native American culture and values celebrates the gifts and interrelationships of our natural world.

Will Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos get to Mars? Their competition seems trite next to the Los Angeles firefighter or the Serviceberry’s service to an ongoing world of birds and humans.

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Carter, the Hostages, and the Shah

These blog posts usually address Native American and local history; I try especially to trace the pre-contact history and culture, and the early and continuing relationships of Indians and non-Indians in the Wallowa Country. But I also try to keep blog followers aware of new work in Native American history generally; I want people to know that the pope repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, and to know what that Doctrine is and how it entered into American Indian Law, and how its impact can be followed right down to Nez Perce treaties.

We know about the Indian Boarding schools now, but it took Canadian school graves and our first Native American Secretary of the Interior to bring them to the attention of Americans. And we now know something of their immediate impact on Native Americans from the 1870s forward, and we can discuss the lingering generational impacts on families—and individuals—of these schools. Many of our Nez Perce friends have family stories that involve boarding schools and their consequences. Etc.Read Rich’s Post →

A few words to my blog friends

Writing this blog is one of my favorite parts of working at the Josephy Center. Who gets to shout out about new things learned, old injustices exposed; about the resilience of the Native American people!

And do you know that a 2021 blog post called “How much is a beaver pelt worth” has had over 2600 hits! The next most seen post is “Nez Perce Music” with 1650, and then “Nez Perce Treaties” with 1350.

In America today there is a great curiosity about the Nez Perce, and about Indians in general, and I have the privilege of reading, writing, and living some of this curiosity. This year Kolle (my library colleagure) and I went on Snake River with Nez Perce elders, visited a tool-making site with elders and an archeologist, and I look forward to hosting an exhibit of Nez Perce artists in spring.

Right now our exhibit, “Nez Perce in Oregon: Removal and Return,” is up at the university in La Grande, will go to the community college in Pendleton after the first, and eventually make its way to the State Capitol.

Old blog posts, past exhibits, talks about sockeye and Alvin Josephy’s broadcast from the WW II Marine Corps landing at Guam are all on our webpage: https://library.josephy.org/. Go explore. And to help Kolle and me continue our work with more exhibits, host more elder visits, and send out my blog posts, click on https://josephy.org/donate/general-fund-donation/ and make your donation.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for friendship and support. And have a great holiday.

Updates November 1, 2024

Two things today. First, we had a great presentation on sockeye salmon on Tuesday. Sarah Barnes, the new Nez Perce Fisheries biologist on their sockeye team, gave us the history and biology of Wallowa Lake sockeye. She was backed up by other staff from NP Fisheries who had information on past programs, even lamprey! Her talk is worth the listen:
https://youtu.be/w2EiddagKiM

Second item: Brian Oliver, who built the fine exhibit structure, Kolle Riggs, who made the exhibit more interesting with additional photos and design, and I took the “Nez Perce in Oregon” exhibit from the Wallowa History Center to Loso Hall on the Eastern Oregon University campus. It is in the lobby in front of the theater entrance–a fine place for it, i think. Pepper Huxoll, the new Native American, Indigenous, and Rural Programs Coordinator at the college, is responsible for getting the exhibit to Eastern. Interestingly enough, she quickly found her great grandfather in a photo of the 1890 Carlise boarding school band that is part of the exhibit. Pepper who is of Mandan-Hidatsa heritage, went school at Eastern when the late Jackie Grant had her position. I think Jackie would be proud.

The Legacy of Jefferson

In the July-August 2024 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, in an article on “Mapping the Mississippi,” Boyce Uphold writes of Thomas Jefferson:

“Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. It would fuel the creation of an ‘empire for liberty.’…

Read Rich’s Post →

Riding a wave

I’m privileged, I tell visitors to the Josephy Center, to be at this place in this time, riding a wave of good feelings and sympathies for Native Americans. We see the Yuroks buying and rehabbing land in Northern California, managing for wild flora and fauna and education, reintroducing giant condors, contracting to revegetate the lands left in the wake of dam removal on the Klamath River. I listen to Nez Perce Tribal leaders negotiate with US officials over dam removal on the Snake River. We read books of indigenous history and culture by Indian professors at Yale and Harvard—places and subject matter deemed important in those illustrious history departments only recently. We watch Lilly Gladstone, the Blackfoot-Nez Perce actress, playing a starring role in a historical drama about the insane and greedy plots and the killings of Osage women to steal their oil inheritances in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” We marvel at Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary in history, as she seeds the Department of the Interior with Native talent—and, importantly, brings the disgraceful practices of the Indian Boarding Schools to national attention.Read Rich’s Post →

Indians and Indians

This blog post is dedicated to my new friends from India: Ritesh and Yojana Jindel; Biswajit and Anjali Pati; Raj Dubey, Siddharth Varvandkar; Anjana Miatra; and Sidhu Kuljit. They are from Rourkela in Odisha State and Raipur, the capital city in Chhattisgarh State in central India. They were here briefly this week on a Rotary Friendship Exchange with clubs in Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. Four men, four women, ages from forties to seventies, from states and cities populated by millions in a country with 1.4 billion people, almost one-fifth of the world’s population!Read Rich’s Post →

Caitlin Clark, Rez Ball, and the Pros

Caitlin Clark will play her first pro basketball game tonight for the Indiana Fever of the Women’s National Basketball Association. In her four years at the University of Iowa she had already broken records and helped create a storm of interest in the women’s game. And she already has endorsements—now legal for college player—which make her a millionaire, but her starting salary as a WNBA rookie number one draft pick is set at $76,000.

This—and the millions of dollars that the men receive as rookies, and the hundreds of millions they receive as stars—is cause for conversation in the world of women’s sports. So too is the fact that Caitlin Clark is white in a game of African-American stars. The press is comparing this to the coming of Larry Bird—another white Midwesterner—into men’s professional basketball more than four decades ago. Bird and his rivalry and friendship with Magic Johnson vaulted professional basketball into the mainstream of men’s professional sports. Until then the NBA was an afterthought to major league baseball and football. Some see Caitlin Clark doing the same for the women’s game.Read Rich’s Post →

A Good Wallowa County New Year’s Story

About twenty years ago, a group of us started swimming at the foot of Wallowa Lake in June. We swam almost every day, some with wet suits, some bare-skinned. I was always the slowest swimmer in the group, and my distances didn’t match those of my friends. But I was relentless, and soon gave up the wobbly wet suit and still get in over 60 days of summer swims each year!Read Rich’s Post →

Lillian Bounds Disney–Lapwai, Idaho

I recently had a fascinating discussion with Steven Branting, Institutional Historian at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. As a result, he sent this wonderful photo of Lillian Bounds Disney as a member of the Ft. Lapwai Rural High School basketball team. He says the following:

“Date: 1916-1917 is listed in some credits, but the ball seems to say “1914, when Lillian was a sophomore. Two other girls in the photo graduated in the class of 1917 with Lillian, who is standing on the far left.”Read Rich’s Post →

more on co-management with tribes

I received a response to my blog post about Deb Haaland and cooperative management of government lands. The writer was Roger Amerman, currently “USFS Native American Outreach and Recruitment Specialist” on the Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forests.

Roger is enrolled Choctaw, but married to a Nez Perce woman and living on the Nez Perce Reservation. He tells me that in his (Choctaw) culture, children are raised in the culture of the mother. Roger is dutifully raising their son a Nez Perce man.Read Rich’s Post →

December 2022

How could my 80th year have been so good when the world went reeling with craziness and self-destruction? Do I need to list the events? The famines, droughts, floods, fires– volcanoes! And then, in the words of that old Kingston Trio song from the 50s, the human-caused tragedies.

“They’re rioting in Africa, there’s strife in Iran/ What nature doesn’t do to us/ Will be done by our fellow man.” Read Rich’s Post →

Indigenous Peoples Day, General Howard and the Mountain

Columbus Day has not been an important holiday in my life. Maybe we got out of school. Maybe friends of Italian ancestry celebrated—and I laughed or applauded. Even now, as I think about all the negative things we have learned about Columbus, and think about the nation-wide effort that has made this day “Indigenous Peoples Day,” I have a soft spot for the descendants of Italian immigrants. They have often been mistreated by immigrants who came on earlier boats. And Italians were Catholics—the Republic, formed on lands stolen from Native tribes, was built by Enlightenment free thinkers, deists, and some from various Protestant denominations. Christianity was not written into our founding documents, and Catholics were a further minority from the outset.Read Rich’s Post →