Oct 2025 (with/at the Hopkinton Historical Society) - The Serviceberry

The Hopkinton Historical Society and the Hopkinton Town Library invite you to a special, town-wide discussion of the book,  

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (2024)

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Thursday, Oct. 16, at 7pm, at the Hopkinton Historical Society on Main Street.

for more details on the event, see the Hopkinton Historical Society's website.

A bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

Resources for the book:

• More details about the book at the publisher's website. 
• The author's homepage. 
• A conversation with Kimmerer on Emergence Magazine's podcast. Emergence is the magazine that published the original article "The Serviceberry" on their site as well, which was expanded for the book. 
• To find out more about Serviceberry / Shadbush, see the Maine Forest Service's illustrated guide to Forest Trees of Maine. On that page, click "search for individual species" and type "serviceberry" for a PDF.
• Discussion questions (not necessarily the ones we will discuss on Oct 16)
• NPS's website on Indigenous Knowledge or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (site appears to be unchanged since this 2024 archive of it) 
• An article about Kimmerer's talk at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center last winter. 
• NPS's site on Anishinaabe culture and language. 
• Learn more about Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrum (page 60) 
  
  

Keep reading:

• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard  
• World of ­Won­der­s: In Praise of ­Fire­flies, Whale Shark­s, and Other As­ton­ish­ments, by Aimee Nezhuku­matathil 
• Abundance, by Ezra Klein 
• Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein (cited in The Serviceberry, p93)