Cultivating Reciprocity: In Conversation with the 2021–2022 KU Common Book

For the Diné, Mother Earth and Father Sky exist in harmony and provide all that is needed to live and thrive on the earth. Father Sky’s body contains the stars, the moon, and the constellations. The body of Mother Earth radiates the life-giving energy of the sun, bringing fertility to her womb where the seeds of all living things begin.

For the Diné, Mother Earth and Father Sky exist in harmony and provide all that is needed to live and thrive on the earth. Father Sky’s body contains the stars, the moon, and the constellations. The body of Mother Earth radiates the life-giving energy of the sun, bringing fertility to her womb where the seeds of all living things begin.

Fashioning rawhide into a tree and embellishing it with beaded figural representations, artist Teri Greeves recounts the origin of the Kiowa in which the hero Saynday pulls the first people out of a tree trunk.


Greeves explains: “The story goes that one day Saynday was walking along. It was the time before the sun had come to this side of the world so he was wandering around in the dark, hands outstretched, searching. Eventually he ran into something that was rough and hard. It was the bark of an old Cottonwood tree. Running his hands around the trunk, he felt an opening and being that crazy old trickster, he stuck a hand down into it feeling deeper and deeper into the darkness. Suddenly another hand grasped his hand. A sane person would have run away but Saynday, being Saynday, grasped the hand back and started to pull. The first man emerged from the underworld through the hole in that old Cottonwood tree. He was the first Gkoy-goo K’he to come into the world. Saynday didn’t stop though. He kept reaching into the hole and pulled out several more people, men and women, from the underworld. Soon he had the hand of a woman. She was pregnant and due to her size, she got stuck in the hole. No more people could emerge from the underworld and it is said that is why the Gkoy-goo, the Kiowa, are small in number to this day.”

This miniature totem was carved by Haisla artist Brad Starr. Like many Indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest Coast, citizens of the Haisla Nation are organized into clans. Today, there are four Haisla clans—Killer Whale, Eagle, Raven, and Beaver—each of which has a unique origin story that connects with broader myths about Haisla creation. Starr, who is a member of the Killer Whale clan, depicts his own clan crest as well as those of the Eagle and the Raven. These clans are inherited through female relatives in Haisla society.

This woven rug depicts Mother Earth and Father Sky, a duo that exemplify perfection, harmony, and balance among the Diné. Here, Father Sky is shown above with stars and celestial bodies in his torso, while Mother Earth is shown below with a small figure in her abdomen, referencing fertility and the human and agricultural lifecycles. Surrounding the figures is a long-bodied yei—a supernatural being that facilitates communication between the Diné and their deities. This particular yei is often referred to as the Rainbow Yei.

In this plaque, Squamish and Kwakwaka’wakw artist Matthew Baker depicts Raven using a traditional palette of red, black, and blue-green pigments on unstained yellow cedar. Raven is an integral character in many human and animal creation stories among the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, where he often acts as a trickster. Among the Squamish, Raven symbolizes knowledge, creativity, and humor, whose misbehaviors often bring important changes to communities.

This sand painting depicts four frogs interspersed among pumpkin, beans, corn, and tobacco plants. Their positions reference the Four Directions, which particular tribes associate with different colors, plants, animals, life stages, seasons, and elements. The number four is also sacred for many Indigenous communities.

Kimmerer discusses the significance of the number four: “Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite sharply when I began my training as a scientist that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. As a young person wanting to know everything about plants, I did not question this. But it is a whole human being who finds the beautiful path.” [p. 47]

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer recounts learning how to make a basket with renowned Potawatomi basket maker John Pigeon. After harvesting the materials, he instructs Kimmerer on how to make the bottom of the round basket, explaining “’You’ve started with the four directions in front of you. It’s the heart of the basket. Everything else is built around that.’ Our people honor the four sacred directions and the powers resident there.” [p. 151]

This Akimel O’odham basket from Arizona features a “Four Directions” motif surrounded by geometric designs that recall the “Man in the Maze” pattern Akimel O’odham basket makers have used since the early 1900s. According to oral history, this design reflects the many decisions we make and paths we take throughout our lives. When one reaches the center, it offers an opportunity to look back on our choices before passing over into the next world.

This Diné rug depicts five yei—benevolent supernatural beings that fill healers with their power. Yei were historically depicted in sand paintings created by a medicine man to restore balance and harmony alongside physical, emotional, and spiritual health. These sand paintings would be erased after the healing ceremony ended. At the turn of the 20th century, weavers began translating the ephemeral imagery of sand paintings into fixed scenes on woven rugs, like this one. The elongated figure surrounding the yei on three sides has been identified as the Rainbow Yei.

This rug depicts four yei standing next to a tall stalk of corn. The link between the supernatural yei figures and corn is not uncommon, and it makes sense from an Indigenous world view.

Kimmerer writes: “Corn owes its existence to all four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. And corn is the product of relationship not only with the physical world, but with people too. The sacred plant of our origin created people, and people created corn, a great agricultural innovation from its teosinthe ancestor. Corn cannot exist without us to sow it and tend its growth; our beings are joined in an obligate symbiosis. From these reciprocal acts of creation arise the elements that were missing from the other attempts to create sustainable humanity: gratitude, and a capacity for reciprocity.” [p. 343]

This small basket is made primarily from braided sweetgrass—a material that is central to considering gifts and reciprocity. Kimmerer recalls the writings of Lewis Hyde, who notes that in a gift economy a freely given gift cannot be made into someone else’s capital. She writes, “This is the same reason we do not sell sweetgrass. Because it is given to us, it should only be given to others.” [p. 26] This reciprocity is uncommon in our relationships with the more-than-human-world, and Kimmerer wonders, “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?” [p. 31]

“In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows. Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row. Only if that circle is in place can we weave the second. The second reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs. Economy built upon ecology. But with only two rows in place, the basket is still in jeopardy of falling apart. It’s only when the third row comes that the first two are woven together. Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together.” [p. 152–153]

The names Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham mean “river people” and “desert people,” respectively, and that can be seen in the materials used for making baskets. Akimel O’odham basketmakers often use willow, as seen in this example, a plant that prefers moist conditions. In contrast, Tohono O’odham baskets are often made of yucca, which favors full sun and dry, well-draining soils.

The names Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham mean “desert people” and “river people,” respectively, and that can be seen in the materials used for making baskets. Tohono O’odham baskets like this one are often made of yucca, which favors full sun and dry, well-draining soils. In contrast, Akimel O’odham basketmakers often use willow, a plant that prefers moist conditions.

“[The first three rows of a basket] represent recognition that our lives depend on one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future.” [p. 153]

Elaborately carved horn spoons such as this one might be used during a potlatch, a gift-giving feast practiced by the Northwest Coast peoples. When contemplating the power of gift-giving and of ceremony, Kimmerer asks, “What can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.” [p. 38]

Elaborately carved horn spoons such as this one might be used during a potlatch, a gift-giving feast practiced by the Northwest Coast peoples. When contemplating the power of gift-giving and of ceremony, Kimmerer asks, “What can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.” [p. 38]

The Rocky Mountain Bee Plant (Cleome serrulata) depicted on this vase is an important cultural plant for Cochiti people. It has been used medicinally as a tea for fevers and other ailments. A concentrated form of dye made from boiling the plant into a thick black resin can be used to paint designs on pottery.

The Coast Salish use the bark from cedar trees, which are plentiful in the Pacific Northwest, to create baskets for cooking, carrying, storage, and more. In the late 1800s, basket makers started expanding their repertoire and began to make basketry cradles, or p’oth’es, to hold, carry, and protect their infants. This practice exemplifies the strong connection between humans and the environment.

This whistle alludes to the ritual importance of cedar among the Kwakwaka’wakw. In addition to being made from cedar, and the top of the whistle is carved in the form of a woven cedar hat. It was also used in the annual T´seka dances—which are also known as “Red Cedar bark dances” because most regalia is made from the roots and bark of this tree. During the T´seka, dancers—known as Hamatsa—would be possessed by Baxwbakwalanuksiwe’ (Man Eater at the End of the World), an important figure in Kwakwaka’wakw oral history. When possessed, the Hamatsa dancers wear red-dyed cedar costumes while other participants blow whistles such as this one, which is meant to represent Baxwbakwalanuksiwe’s many mouths.

Cedar is abundant in the Pacific Northwest, where Indigenous communities use its bark to make basketry, clothing, dwellings, and more. Harvesting cedar bark is a complex process undertaken only during certain times of the year. Basketmakers carefully choose particular trees, taking care only to remove bark in places where the tree can heal and continue to grow. This tool would have been used to cut cedar bark into long, thin strips for weaving garments and baskets.

A unique property of cedar is that the wood can be split easily into one continuous plane for very long lengths. The four sides of this box are made from one single piece of wood that has had kerfs cut into the bends and then the wood was steamed to make the wood flexible enough to shape into a square. At the corner where the sides meet, the ends are held together with thin strips of cedar withes. Bentwood boxes would be used to store food, household items, or regalia.

Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest used a variety of plant materials to create fibers for weaving, including cedar, spruce, stinging nettles, and cattail. This tool was used to flatten rushes when weaving cattail mats and baskets.

Indigenous communities from the Midwest recorded plant-based recipes on prescription sticks like this one. Read from left to right, these recipes could be used to concoct herbal remedies for illness and injury. This particular stick was carved after the federally forced relocation of the Potawatomi from their ancestral homelands in the Great Lakes to what is now Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Unfortunately, changing plant morphology and a sharp decline in Native language speakers due to colonization and assimilation make it impossible to identify the plant species or recipes recorded here. This object serves as an example of the importance of the plant world to the Potawatomi—but also as a reminder of the vast loss of Indigenous healing knowledge resulting from colonial practices.

In Exit, Andrea Carlson alludes to the loss of Indigenous cultural history via settler colonialism. Her large print references Native American effigies from the Middle and Late Woodland Period (collectively 200 BCE–1000 CE), including a mica bird talon excavated from the Hopewell Mound Group in present-day Ohio and the Man Mound earthwork in present-day Wisconsin.

By 1900, the United States federal government began funding off-reservation schools for Native American students. Although created in the name of education, these institutions forcibly removed children from their homelands, families, language, and customs. These boarding or residential schools aimed to assimilate Indigenous children into settler society and accelerated the cultural erasure of many Native beliefs, practices, and identities. This loom-woven beaded strip was made by Diné (Navajo) and Apache students at the Theodore Roosevelt School in Fort Apache, Arizona. Fort Apache’s administrators sold these pieces to fund the school’s daily operations.

"The powers of assimilation did their work as my chance of hearing [Potawatomi], and yours too, was washed from the mouths of Indian children in government boarding schools where speaking your native tongue was forbidden.” [p. 49]

Orville John Green was a white male teacher, principal, and superintendent in the United States Government Indian School Service. Between 1894 and 1918, Green and his wife Evaline lived and worked at 11 Native American boarding schools. During their time at these institutions, the Greens photographed the scenes and people around them, providing intimate views of young students and their activities. Boys were taught Western agriculture and trade skills such as tailoring, wagon making, blacksmithing, harness making, painting, and shoe making, while girls studied cooking, sewing, washing, and homemaking.

Sioux star quilts are a symbol of honor and generosity, often given to people to mark important life events such as births, marriages, and graduations. After the painful history of Native American boarding schools, star quilts mark education as an accomplishment worthy of pride and demonstrate that the cultural history of Indigenous students should be celebrated, not erased.

This print offers a different perspective on the Four Directions symbolism that is integral to many Native American beliefs. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith writes that “Indian women create inner mysteries and self mythologies in order to reinforce their identities. Because the work is often mysterious and unexplainable—it leaves a lot to the imagination of the viewer. In this way we enter into a dialogue with the work. A feather, a piece of beadwork, a stone, a pictograph, or a mark are not used for decorative purposes only, but function as symbol to convey a great meaning and tell a story for the artist.”

Molly Murphy’s print appears on first glance to be a traditional Native American parfleche design, except the designs have been replaced by commercial logos. Murphy writes, “Advertising and lifestyle branding are the keys to contemporary market expansion in contrast to the historic need for physical control over a geographic area. Now instead of the cavalry fighting for land we have cola companies fighting for brand loyalty.”

Kimmerer wonders if it is possible to practice the “Honorable Harvest” in a market economy, concluding that “We have constructed an artifice…where we perpetuate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.” [p. 199]

Landing appropriates a 16th-century image of European contact with Indigenous peoples in the “New World,” a map of the Osage Indian Reservation, and images of Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in UFOs as invading aliens. Norman Akers creates a visual narrative from these historical, cultural, and geographic references, which acts as a continuation of the Native American storytelling tradition.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work often presents, in her own words, “narratives on ethical treatment of animals, humans and our planet. My work is philosophically centered by my strong traditional Salish beliefs.” Kimmerer suggests that addressing these issues no longer requires separating Indigenous beliefs from those of Western science, writing: “But true to the circle of time, science and technology are starting to catch up with Native science by adopting the Nanabozho approach—looking to nature for models of design, by the architects of biomimicry. By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we are starting to become indigenous to place.” [p. 210]