A Golden Rule

“Is there any one word that can serve as a principle for the conduct of life?” Confucius was once asked, according to The Analects. “Perhaps the word ‘reciprocity,’” replied the sage. “Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you.” This too, without the “perhaps,” is the most basic charge to Christians, their Scriptures say time and again.5 The logic is simple, turning an internal, natural feeling outward to produce a social ethos. In the American Indigenous context, this outward world often includes not just humans but all that is other than human, including spirits. Western notions of this ethical reciprocity rely on the notion of subjectivity, on clearly defined boundaries that delineate “others” in a way that Indigenous notions do not always demand.

Perhaps it is not surprising, given the reach of spiritual reciprocity, that almost everywhere one turns in the sciences, too, the concept appears as a crucial plank, either of methodology or ethics. “Reciprocity” is a key term in disciplines across the academy and the professions, including economics, environmental ecology, sociology, behavioral science, political science, marketing, game and risk studies, and medical ethics. In those fields, it tends to be (but is not exclusively) pivotal for studies of altruistic behavior, including unrewarded participation or sharing in any number of contexts. Reciprocity is also still fundamental in the fields from which it originated as a technical term, mathematics and physics. As a consequence of this widespread use of the term, an analysis of the concept of reciprocity as it functions in the study of the relations between Indigenous people and the natural world or other social groups, including colonizers, takes place within a complex semantic landscape in which the term is controversial in some areas, de rigueur in others.

Reciprocity is a key concept in three domains of Western thought and praxis that particularly bear on the use of this term in discussions of cross-cultural relations in early America. In the domain of philosophy, and in particular those strains of thought grappling with questions of recognition, multiculturalism, and globalization in democratic societies, it descends principally from Hegel’s discussion of recognition and its basis in reciprocity in The Phenomenology of Spirit.6 In anthropology, scholars like Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss in the last century invoked reciprocity as a way of understanding everything in Indigenous societies, from wealth distribution to spiritual behaviors. In the political sphere, the term took on particular weight at the imaginative core of geopolitics in the wake of the treaty leading to the Peace of Westphalia, in which it was the ideal, if circumscribed, relation at the heart of treaties, whether to end war or to begin commerce between nations that, by virtue of such agreements, mutually constituted each others’ sovereignty. Of course these domains do not exhaust its discursive landscape, but already this is a heavy heritage for the word to bear. The uses of this term in Native American and American colonial studies today draw on all three of these genealogies, sometimes in conflicting ways.

The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of this form of the word “reciprocity” in 1753, but there are instances of it earlier. It is a small but significant semantic shift from reciprocation or the idea of the reciprocal to “reciprocity,” and the areas of political and commercial treaty making catalyzed the connotations of the nominal form. Reciprocity was a technical term in English mercantile endeavors, to describe, in the words of one early seventeenth-century treatise, “Reciprocal and Double Exchanges, made betweene Merchants for several places, without disturbing of any money on either side where the said Exchanges are made, but being meerely depending upon the paiments to be made in forreine parts.”7 The Peace of Westphalia is perhaps the best-known example of the application of the reciprocity concept to political agreements. The documents and proceedings associated with this negotiation brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in October 1648. Article 3 of the agreement declares a “Riciprocal Amity between” the warring sides, which other articles more particularly name a “Reciprocal Obligation” to prevent hostilities and to render unto “Oblivion” the grudges both preceding and produced by the war.8 Reciprocity also forms the architecture for the settlement of material differences across the treaty, each concession and each “Restitution of possess’d Places” by one sovereign being mirrored by another in the language of reciprocation.9 This treaty played a role in crystallizing the nation-state as the framework of justice and sovereignty; it did so by codifying specific mutual expectations such as noninterference and respect for territorial borders. As this chapter’s second epigraph suggests, the notion was being used prior to the Peace of Westphalia in English arguments about both the internal obligations between subjects and leaders and the external responsibilities of states. In short, the concept of political reciprocity, rooted in the mutual recognition of states, was foundational to the conception of sovereignty in the West and beyond today.10

In the eighteenth-century Anglophone world, the term was increasingly used in reference to treaties or other agreements; it also began to take on a philosophical dimension. In such agreements (in the case of trade, in the nineteenth century often known as reciprocity treaties, and today still sometimes referred to as reciprocity agreements), the term made reference to specific rights that would be allowed to each party by the other. For example, nations might agree to allow each others’ ships access to ports or to trade in specific goods. Reciprocity in these instances was and is usually in kind: the objects, privileges, or punishments on either side are agreed on in advance and have an explicit equivalence, rather than being dynamically defined in ongoing acts of interpretation or negotiation.11

Robert Keohane suggests a distinction between this kind of relation, which he calls “specific reciprocity,” and “diffuse reciprocity,” in which an agreement gestures to a broader basis of trust and equality of exchange.12 This distinction is key to an analysis of the evolution of the term “reciprocity” and its entry into writing about Indigenous-to-European colonial relations because the more diffuse version of reciprocity was linked to a philosophical or theoretical discussion of the concept. An early moment in the intertwining of these discourses occurs in John Locke’s second treatise on civil government. A state “of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another,” is the “state of nature,” Locke claims. In this sense, it was Locke who first posited Native American reciprocity as a social foundation because he had also famously declared that in the beginning, all was America—and thus America was definitively a state of natural equality.13 Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, suggests a transactionalist bent of reciprocity in the maintenance of the unequal social relations attendant on man’s entry into the unideal world of governance: “to receive benefits, though from an equall, or inferiour, so long as there is hope of requitall, disposeth to love,” he writes. Without hope of such reciprocation, depression or even hatred would be the natural consequence.14

Similarly, in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, reciprocity is for the most part not a moral principle, spiritual duty, or political necessity. It describes relational mechanisms, both internal to the mind and between minds—a term not distant from its mathematical sense of describing equal and opposite or equal and parallel effects, such as consciousness of the self, or one person recognizing another in the relation of marriage, or, notoriously, in the struggle of master and slave. The nuances of recognition that resulted from reciprocal identification were more Hegel’s concern. For Hegel and the seventeenth-century English philosophers, however, the term describes the basis for an ethical community.15 This sense of reciprocity has come crucially to influence anthropological analyses of Indigenous groups (to which we will return in a moment) no less than contemporary discussions of Western democratic principles of social belonging.

“Reciprocity is widely recognized as a core principle of democracy in its many moral variations—liberal, constitutional, procedural, and deliberative,” the political philosophers Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson write. That claim might raise eyebrows among some Native studies scholars, for whom it is precisely the absence of reciprocity as a binding democratic principle that characterizes the republican colonialism of the United States.16 For Gutmann and some other advocates of deliberative democracy, reciprocity is less a spiritual principle or something that determines policy in any direct way, and more a moral and procedural regulator. “Reciprocity holds that citizens owe one another justifications for the mutually binding laws and public policies they collectively enact,” Gutmann and Thompson argue.17 This moral commitment means members of a polity must, for the laws or policies they advocate, offer reasons sufficient to justify such regulations to any person or group in that society potentially affected by them. Such a stance entails cultivating other principles in order to provide that common basis for judgment of the reasonableness of a proposition—basic liberty, for example, and a public sphere, along with accountability and equal opportunity. As a spur to the development and evolution of such principles, reciprocity for the deliberative democrat is a regulatory principle as well as a moral one, but not a fundamental and unalterable plank of social justice and governance. Compared to its description in Native North American contexts, then, this sort of reciprocity is limited in its scope of operation, functioning as an individual moral stance that in turn requires its operation as a regulatory mechanism in the establishment of other sociogovernmental principles. It is also profoundly individualist and human focused in its conception, requiring reason-bearing individuals as its most basic unit of agency, rather than collectives, and excluding other-than-human agents except as objects to be regulated.18

Beginning in the early twentieth century, anthropologists would put post-Westphalian and post-Hegelian conceptions of reciprocity to their own uses. Reciprocity was vectored into conversations about the history of Native–European relations by Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Bronisław Malinowski, and other European and non-Native scholars reflecting on the general condition of human society through study of Indigenous ones in the Americas and elsewhere. One way to describe the result is that a profoundly diverse and multimodal set of Native attitudes toward exchange, obligation, and balance—operating in spiritual, political, economic, and other modes—became contained within the explanatory logic of Western economics, in which there is no such thing as free giving.19

For Malinowski, free gifts—love—within the Indigenous family constituted the model and engine of social reproduction. Mauss agreed that social solidarity depended on exchange and on an ethos of reciprocity, but he disagreed about altruism: there was no such thing as a free gift (Mauss tended to use the term “obligation” rather than “reciprocity”). “Reciprocity” is an explicit but nuanced descriptive term in Lévi-Strauss’s analyses in his influential Tristes Tropiques. It is not holistic there; nor is it a system generalizable to all Indigenous groups. Still, his use of it to analyze the cultural “style” of Native Brazilian societies has shaped many subsequent anthropological readings of cultural systems. In these societies, Lévi-Strauss writes, contradictions in social structure are resolved by “a double antithesis”: “Social mechanisms based on reciprocity are opposed to social mechanisms based on hierarchy. In the effort to remain faithful to these contradictory principles the social group divides and subdivides itself into allied and opposed sub-groups.”20 Here reciprocity is described as governing activity within the community, not between it and other-than-tribal entities. Lévi-Strauss concludes that it is all part of a grand illusion:

For the moralist, Bororo society has one particular lesson. Let him listen to his native informers: they will describe to him, as they described to me, the ballet in which the two halves of the village set themselves to live and breathe in and for one another; exchanging women, goods, and service in a kind of shared passion for reciprocity. . . . Try as the Bororo may to bring their system to full flowering with the aid of a deceptive prosopopoeia, they will be unable, as other societies have also been unable, to smother this truth: that the imagery with which a society pictures to itself the relations between the dead and the living can always be broken down in terms of an attempt to hide, embellish or justify, on the religious level, the relations prevailing . . . in that society among the living.21

Here the purpose of the supernatural world is to maintain the inequalities of the material one. The “other societies” Lévi-Strauss mentions are of course not too far afield; Lévi-Strauss often positions himself as a Cassandra, denouncing his society’s ways, yet with a tinge of doubt about his criticism’s efficacy. At times, however, he also praises Western ways. “The relationship between Man and the soil,” he writes of soil erosion on plantations in Brazil, “had never been marked by that reciprocity of attentions which, in the Old World, has existed for thousands of years and been the basis of our prosperity.”22 Reciprocity here modifies “attentions,” but it leans toward a cultural-historical accusation: reciprocity as a function linking land and people is a thing that has failed to appear in Indigenous Brazil. Whether as the window onto a universal indictment of human cultural illusions or as praise for Western agricultural tradition, reciprocity remains, for Lévi-Strauss, a European property.

When in 2009 a group of anthropologists asked themselves if the “anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love,” they described a panoply of culturally specific definitions of love, but they never defined “reciprocity.”23 Part of a long rethinking of basic anthropological terms (such as kinship, culture, and love) along with the positional bias of the observer, this debate exhibited cultural anthropology’s now characteristic reflexivity—and in no small measure the influence of the debates about recognition and democracy mentioned earlier. Strategically or not, the debate did not make clear what reciprocity means or does. Rather, reciprocity as an analytical tool seems to have become part of the binding imaginary of the social-intellectual realm of anthropologists themselves. This fact ironically refracts how anthropologists once described Native societies. What is agreed on is that to anthropologists, reciprocity matters, as a term used to frame largely but not exclusively human transactions, exchanges of information, money, goods, and so on, and the rules that govern them or the patterns of expectation or evaluation that these exchanges create.

The term “reciprocity” by this path—and before the flowering of cultural anthropology—made its way into the mainstream of Native American studies, where it is now commonly used by theorists, linguists, literary scholars, and historians. Among the early influential uses of reciprocity in North American Native studies after John Collier’s discussion of it was David Aberle’s, in his 1966 book The Peyote Religion among the Navaho. Barre Toelken made the term the axis of an essay in an important 1976 collection on Native religion, Seeing with a Native Eye. Citing Toelken, Kenneth Lincoln used the term in his field-shaping book, Native American Renaissance.24 In recent scholarship, the word is used in a range of ways. Some scholars refer to reciprocity as the foundation of all Native American religions, usually to distinguish Indigenous beliefs from those of European settlers and their descendants. Others use it more cautiously in reference to the specific ethics of a tribe—in David Silverman’s case, for example, the seventeenth-century Wampanoag, among whom he finds kinship to have been a more crucial framework than reciprocity for understanding both individual commitments and broader historical transformations in the group. Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks uses it in her book The Common Pot, usually in its nineteenth-century political sense, of equal obligations between nations. In her essay “Locating an Ethical Native Criticism,” Brooks focuses on the term “relationality” as a basis for ethical critical work, rather than “reciprocity.”25 Legal historian Robert Williams argues that reciprocity is the basis of Indigenous approaches to treaty making both over a long spread of time and across tribes, and as Ned Blackhawk, Daniel Richter, Neal Salisbury, and many others argue, Indigenous diplomatic protocols based in reciprocity were first learned and later neglected or deliberately ignored by North American colonizers.26

Given the term’s history, however, the use of “reciprocity” to describe Native cultures of the early settlement era is attended by at least two problems, one historical and one philosophical. The first involves the question of what forms of reciprocity European cultures brought with them—that is to say, whether reciprocity can in fact name a basic difference between human groups, or translate without distortion across contexts. The second, on which the entailments of the first can help us reflect, is philosophical: what do we, or could we, want of reciprocity as an idea?

A Doing One for Another

Whether regarded as an infracultural or intercultural phenomenon, what scholars of colonialism seem to be talking about when they invoke reciprocity as a social principle could be found equally in Native and European settler communities. While the settler religious world featured some of the most important articulations of an attentiveness to mutual giving and to achieving a balance of duties that involved both the visible and the invisible worlds, other realms of English colonial activity could also be described as guided by an ethos of reciprocity.

The English conception of “sympathy,” for example, and particularly that brought over by the nonconformist settlers of New England, was rooted in a notion of reciprocity. This vision was of mutual bonds among Christians, premised on biblical injunctions such as Romans 12:15, to “rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” “Scripture,” Abram Van Engen summarizes, “commanded the godly to unite and cohere, and many Puritans understood that concord and harmony to require an imaginative reciprocation of affections that involved putting oneself in another’s place and feeling as that person felt.”27 The golden rule not only asks Christians to put reciprocity first in their thoughts and deeds, but also, like Confucius’s saying, embeds reciprocity formally through its chiasmus: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Such commands had complex implications, including the temptation, often indulged by English settler Christians, to judge and at times condemn the outward evidence or lack of evidence of complicity with these reciprocal bonds. For a community premised on Christian unity, the violation of the reciprocity requirement could spell disaster, especially given the immediate presence, in the early years of settlement, of a whole population of Indigenous people, imagined by many colonists to be unassimilable to that regime of reciprocity. Because the people of God also owed reciprocal attention to the Almighty for his provisions, however scanty, a greater disaster loomed should they fail in their obligations: eternal damnation. The regulation of reciprocity involved attention not just to the heart and to the flow of charity but also to the signs and wonders emanating from the natural and invisible worlds.28

The most important loophole in this theory was the matter of the gift of grace. An unreciprocable grant from God, through Christ’s sacrifice, to humans (or, in most sects of the time, to a select few humans), the gift of grace introduced a remainder, an irreducible fraction on the supernatural side, outside of reciprocity’s emotional or spiritual economy. From the debates over the veracity of Algonquian “Praying Indian” conversions to Christianity recorded by John Eliot to the Antinomian controversy and beyond, the question of whether a subject had been demonstrably granted this exception was debated—or, probably more commonly, quietly suppressed by communities seeking concord. This gap between what could be owed to the human and what could be owed to the divine also ultimately placed the regulation of reciprocity in the hands of God. As John Cotton put it, in a characteristic passage discussing the concept of the covenant between God and his people:

And there is also a Covenant of Friendship between God and us, A covenant of Salt, 2 Chron. 13.5. A covenant of Salt is to be fed with the same salt, as it were, to eate many a bushel of salt together, that is a covenant of friendship; Didst not thou give the Land to the seed of Abraham thy friend for ever? 2 Chron. 20.7. therein he fitly expresseth the nature of a covenant of salt, by friendship for ever; salt eaten together expresses familiarity, and durablenesse, now God expresseth himselfe thus, to enter into a covenant with his people; he takes Abraham as a friend for ever, and Abraham takes God as his friend for ever; and this league of friendship implyes not only preservation of affection, but it requires a kinde of secret communication one to another, and a doing one for another. God he grants our Petitions for us as a friend, and we doe his Commandements as a friend out of the integrity of our hearts; John 15.14. Ye are my friends if ye doe whatsoever I command you.29

Reminiscent of the Algonquian “common pot” (or what John Smith called the “common Kettell”) as this sharing of salt may be, Cotton’s insistence that the covenant “implyes” and “requires . . . a doing one for another,” no less than that fulfilling “whatsoever I command you” proves such reciprocity, demonstrate the element of necessity, governed by a hierarchy.30 What at first implies ultimately requires. At the heart of Christian discussions of reciprocity is the element of benevolently proffered surrender, of a willingness to hand over the reins to a higher power—a willingness so deep that it cannot appear as coercion. Preserving the mystery of Christianity, its potentially humane sense of the limitedness of our knowledge of God, meant hedging the spiritual economy of reciprocity. Reciprocity functioned, then, both within and among English communities, but in ways limited by the imagined community of Christian souls, by cosmologic constraints on man’s knowledge, and—it would come as no surprise to Lévi-Strauss—by a deep-seated hierarchicalism.

In addition to religious forms of reciprocity, settlers also thought their world governed by the natural relations among the elements and humors and the Aristotelian great chain of being. As Ann Bradstreet writes in her quatrain “Of the foure Humours in Mans constitution”:

One settler who mastered these amicable logics of physical interdependence was John Winthop Jr., governor of the Connecticut Colony and one of the better negotiators of his place and time. He may have been so successfully diplomatic in part because of his studies in alchemy. A Paracelsian, Winthrop pursued his experiments with minerals and medicines through a dazzling (and sometimes dangerous) combination of intellectual methods, bringing Baconian experimentalism, mystical traditions, astrology, magic, and alchemy to bear on his work. Far from contradicting his godliness, all of these labors proceeded under a divine plan. “The mission of the Paracelsian,” writes Walter Woodward, “was to bring purity to a world enveloped in ‘a darkness that strives for light’; mankind was divinely charged with obtaining ‘the understanding and the fulfillment of the world.’ Such fulfillment would come about as the result of careful experimentation and firsthand observation of the natural world.”32 Such understanding and fulfillment could be achieved by tracing sympathetic correspondences between the inanimate world and celestial objects. Animism was fundamental to the Paracelsian logic of correspondences, a notion not unfamiliar to Indigenous Algonquians: the spiritus mundi, a living force that infused every part of the universe, was reminiscent of the Algonquian manitou. Understanding was the mission of the Paracelsian, and reciprocity was the secret key to obtaining it. An alchemist like Winthrop was, perhaps as a consequence, more open to Indigenous people, working from a rational platform broad enough to inspire hard negotiating with Puritan leadership on behalf of his Pequot neighbors.

Yet one could not make gold out of lead without the approval of the Christian god. The subtle mysteries of alchemical thinking created in- and out-groups, relied on a Christian eschatology at odds with Indigenous modes of spiritualism, and were founded on a mystical kind of reciprocity that was hard for many people to comprehend. This reciprocity was not just social and religious, like that of the nonconformists more generally, but theoretical and philosophical. As in the case of God’s command to live in reciprocity (and embedded in the hierarchicalism of the great chain of being), balance was an ideal in these domains, yet there was always what Georges Bataille, reflecting on the Indigenous North American potlatch ceremony, calls the “accursed share”—an unresolved fraction owed, whether this be the unpayable debt of Christ’s sacrifice, the invisible bottom of the great chain of being, or the endlessness of the alchemical quest to turn dross into gold.33

Rethinking Reciprocity

The social history of settler reciprocity and the genealogy of the word since the seventeenth century suggest incommensurate conceptual vocabularies at work. Could we agree on how the boundaries of reciprocity-bearing entities are defined if reciprocity is to be both a moral principle, as in Gutmann’s vision of democracy, and a broader one embracing the invisible world and other-than-human persons, as among Native peoples? Who would be the “we” to do so? Do state or tribal forms of obligation take precedence over individual or familial ones? Does reciprocity operate differently at different scales? Is a nation only sovereign once it has been accorded reciprocity by an entity of equal status—and what, given competing ideas of reciprocity’s structure and agents, would guarantee such an arrangement? To fail in reciprocal duties to a squirrel or to a stone—is this the same order of moral failure as to violate a treaty? The answer may seem obvious, yet if we take seriously a wide-ranging set of definitions of reciprocity, we must be prepared to address these questions—to follow the squirrel to its nest, if you will. Four difficulties with reciprocity, moving from the concrete to the abstract, help outline the limitations of the concept for analysis, and perhaps more broadly: the dilemmas presented by violent forms of reciprocity and by hierarchicalism; the difficulty of defining frameworks or boundaries within which reciprocity operates; and the conceptual limitation presented by the ideal of balance.

The history of intertribal relations in the early colonial period was, after all, not one of unbroken harmonious coexistence under the starlight rule of reciprocity and mutual respect. Protocols for violent reciprocity were established among Native people long before the arrival of Europeans.34 The northeastern woodlands of the 1670s, however, bore witness to an unusually massive settling of accounts, the killing of Goodman Wright among them. King Philip’s War, a conflict that caught up communities from Long Island to Wabanaki country and beyond, sprang from a range of causes, but the actions of many Native people during it were guided by an attempt to restore balance both between peoples and with the land and the ancestors. In one of those events, John Wakely and two of his children were killed in a raid in Casco Bay. Wakely was among several settlers who had recently encroached on Wabanaki lands in violation of earlier agreements, and the resulting series of raids destroyed both lives and the sawmills that had led to deforestation in the region. “Protectors,” Lisa Brooks writes of these warriors, “strove for rebalancing at the falls by targeting traders.”35 Viewing the history of European depredations, deceptions, and mortal violence against the People of the Dawnland, it is hard not to feel that such actions were justified. “Europeans and Algonquians followed strikingly different rules regarding exchange, which frequently altered overall intercultural relations,” Seth Mallios writes, expressing a sense common in the scholarly field. When Native protocols were repeatedly violated by Europeans, “the resulting Indian attacks against the European settlers were culturally justified and effective.”36 Effective they were. But does not adopting this position, while establishing cultural relativism in one area of judgment, call for a balancing sense of what would have been “culturally justified” actions from the standpoint of the Europeans?37 Even in asking such a question, we may be depending on a kind of internalized methodological reciprocity that we have not adequately interrogated.

For scholars writing these histories, the old and hard question remains: where is the line between hagiographic presentation and culturally sensitive depiction when it comes to violence? Can deeper understanding of war and its causes, or its enacters’ motivations, lead us past the point of deadlocked claims about what was right or wrong in colonial history? One group’s balance is another group’s terminated future; one group’s hand of God is the death of another’s beautiful creation. It is surely a good thing in this latest moment of surging resistance, from antifa to #MeToo to the Water Protectors of Standing Rock, to regard warriors as protectors, and Brooks meticulously depicts the mixed motives of most of the individuals whose stories are woven into her account of King Philip’s War. Yet that question concerning the inheritance of violence in which we all share remains on the table. The achievement of balance through war is a limit case of reciprocity’s ethics. How are we to know how that balance is achieved—from both sides? Whose terms, whose weights, whose scales?

A related difficulty is the degree to which reciprocity as it has been described in seventeenth-century Native communities functioned in relationship to human authority hierarchies, such as sachemships, matrilineage, and pawwaw-ing. Lévi-Strauss, as we have seen, warns that social systems “can express, not only mechanisms of reciprocity but also relations of subordination.”38 Just such a system among the English is perfectly witnessed in the now-famous sermon known as “A Modell of Christian Charity,” which begins from the Pauline premise that some people are ordained superior and they should be generous to their underlings even as underlings toil quietly to their benefit. But such was the case in Native communities too. “While there is no question that sachems assumed some responsibility to provide for the needy,” David Silverman writes of the tribes of southern colonial New England, “the main purpose of tribute was to fund the sachem’s political activities. . . . Eyewitness observations and the archaeological record agree that Indians of sachem status enjoyed better nutrition, less physical stress, and greater material comfort than their people.”39 Jenny Pulsipher points out that hierarchy and inequality were sometimes the very goals of an ethics of sharing, as leaders gave gifts in Maussian ways, in order to bind other leaders or to induce commitments among their own people. In addition to signifying relationships using kinship terms, Algonquians had core status conceptions as well. The word for “under” in Massachusett, agwa, “is at the root of the words for ‘subject’ and ‘subjection’” and distinguishes these relationships as “vertical, rather than equal.”40 There were nested relationships of inequality, signaled by tribute patterns among communities and perhaps more importantly by the ways in which alliances rapidly coalesced in times of armed conflict. There were also layered or contested relations, emergent situations in which ties of family or proximity and those of trade, tribute, or respect could be at odds.41 Multiple coexisting structures characterized Indigenous governance in the Dawnland. What goes by the name of reciprocity could describe both mutual exchanges that we value today and violent forms of social regeneration, such as redemptive warfare or adoption. Reciprocity can be a bit like family in The Sopranos: we like it, but it sometimes comes with grim obligations. Or, as evolutionary anthropologist Joan Silk puts it, “Mutualism does not necessarily make you nice.”42

Even if one accepts not-niceness as a consequence of reciprocity as an ethos—indeed, even if not-niceness is embraced as a sometimes necessary trait—there are more abstract difficulties with reciprocity. The logic of reciprocity as ethical governor does not have a natural or inherent limit, either in time or in space. That is to say, both its component interdependencies and the time frame within which exchange could happen are conceivably infinite. A society has to define reciprocity’s reasonable boundaries, either explicitly or implicitly. Those boundaries in Indigenous culture vary from group to group, though there are some common threads of convention. Among the entities to be considered are the people, the sky, the land, the water, the animals, the spirits; among the things to be exchanged are love, time, food, drink, human-made objects, songs, speeches, writings. These components are also subject to creative manipulation; indeed, the figures of coyote, Iktomi, the spider, crows, ravens, and many others in Native storying all remind us that manipulability and transformability must also be considered in satisfying mutual obligations. The question of what obligations must be met and how to meet them are often subject to interpretation—as for example in the case of the dream soul’s encounters with manitou in the lives of Algonquian people.43

Yet what counts as a thing to be valued, as the foundation of reciprocity, is not just a matter of convention. It can also come into being in the very act of exchange. The implications of this dynamic value generation are crucial for thinking about the possibility of reciprocity as a political ethics because the role of economy in such an ethics becomes hitched to potentially radically divergent notions of time as history and of time’s impact on exchange. Scholars emphasize the distinction between commodity-based exchange in European society and gift exchanges among Native peoples. On the one hand, can reciprocity be based in commodity exchange at all, in its indigenist elaboration as a community ethics? On the other hand, is commodity exchange utterly unsusceptible to a foundational ethos of reciprocity? Arjun Appadurai wryly suggests that the anthropologist’s fetishization of reciprocity as an analytical model obscures “the common spirit that underlies both gift and commodity circulation” when these are understood as emergent, as the result of moments of transfer, and consequently as transformable into each other in both prospect and retrospect.44 What seemed a gift may in retrospect not be best interpreted as such; what one intended to trade under the banner of commodity exchange might turn out, in the moment, to be better presented as a gift. Sociality is key to exchange of any kind, and its modes and specificities are an important analytical lever against the tendency to describe—or prescribe—societies in economic terms.

The question of time in the economy of reciprocity, too, is unavoidable, because the effect on human beings of regimes of reciprocity depends on it. To put it starkly: are you willing to wait a thousand years for your people finally to get their due? Some might say yes; others might say there is no redeeming past sins that resulted in irrecoverable lives lived in misery. In any case, equality does not happen in a temporal vacuum. There is an assumption or fantasy, in even the more technical invocations of human reciprocity, that the moment or condition of exchange will not affect the value of the thing exchanged. Yet consider one of the most storied examples of a Native people’s insisting that a moment of exchange can remain open as long as necessary to bring the other side into its logic of reciprocity: the Oceti Sakowin and their refusal of payment for the loss of the Black Hills. The United States, rich though it be, cannot seem to afford to return the Black Hills, and a monetary exchange falls short of balancing the scales, in part because such a payment would redefine what is perceived as balance, what counts, in relating to the land. Perhaps in exchange, equivalence is neither possible nor ideal; reciprocity functions in a mixed-up economy, but more fundamentally is a mixed economics. The deal well sealed is never independent of an imagination of the future.

This future-oriented quality of reciprocity means that balance is never quite achieved and indeed is never even really desirable. Yet “balance,” both in and out of the academy, is one of the most common ways people think about what reciprocity can help humans accomplish. Consider one of the West’s foundational allegories of retributive justice, the Oresteia of Aeschylus. In the contest between Clytaemnestra and her son, Orestes, over the murder of Agamemnon, justice and pure reciprocity are at odds. In order to end the cycle of retributive violence, the gods transform the bloodthirsty Furies’ supernatural remit from revenge to fertility. Even when all humans in the dispute have made their sacrifices to the sustaining gods, human customs and desires leave a remainder that must be tamed arbitrarily. The people of Athens split on the question of whether Orestes should be put to death for killing his mother, and Athena casts the deciding vote to leave Clytaemnestra’s claim unfulfilled. The Oresteia asks its audiences to consider the impossibility of balance without divine intervention.

The Haudenosaunee diplomatic metaphor of “polishing the chain” captures this temporal open-endedness in a different way, thinking of a treaty as not merely a document or an event but rather as the beginning or the maintenance of a relationship. The Irish GoFundMe campaign for the Hopi and Navajo nations in 2020, which has raised millions of dollars in relief aid as an act of reciprocation for Choctaw assistance to the Irish during the famine of 1845, was not meant to settle a debt but to create a bond between “brothers and sisters” in “solidarity,” as organizers and contributors describe it.45 Imbalance is a spur to an ongoing exchange, a relationship that must be curated, renegotiated at times, and interpreted by the community. Even an ideal act of altruism between two individuals may be understood differently when regarded at the scale of the relations between their families, communities, or nations. Nicholas Thomas expresses the consensus scholarly position: colonialism has always been simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural process, and “even what would seem its purest moments of profit and violence have been mediated and enframed by structures of meaning,” such that cultural mediations are “constitutive of colonial relationships in themselves.”46 Rather a process than a system, in this account, reciprocity upsets an intelligibility based on balance, and it privileges attentiveness to inequality and endless, open incommensurability—not justice, but always trying to do justice.47

Other Words, Other Worlds

“It’s easy to talk about sovereignty because I look at it as a state of mind,” says Mohawk political scientist Taiaiake Alfred. “It means you think like a nation, like a sovereign people, or a sovereign person.” Because the term has its roots in European law, however, Alfred says it is also “an exclusionary concept rooted in an adversarial and coercive Western notion of power.”48 So it is with “reciprocity”—easy as a state of mind, difficult as a colonial semantic and political inheritance. What other concepts or terms might help us talk about the past while opening new paths in the present?

Vine Deloria Jr., reflecting after twenty years on the influence of his book God Is Red, lamented that his predictions about the religious roots of global conflict had come true, but he also noted that a larger framework of failed mutual care had risen to international visibility in the meantime. With chagrin, he wrote that he did not “look forward to paying the penalties that Mother Earth must now levy against us in order for Her to survive.” Deloria did not use the term “reciprocity” in his introduction to God Is Red; he writes of having “as a structure a set of relationships in which all entities participate” and “a recognition of the sacredness of places.”49 In this formulation, recognition is shifted from the Hegelian domain of human relations into a mode that links humans and the earth, such that the form of universal participation Deloria describes includes nonhuman agents.

Back in 1970, in his book We Talk, You Listen, Deloria had described the ethos governing such a shift in this way:

The Indian lived with his land. He feared to destroy it by changing its natural shape because he realized that it was more than a useful tool for exploitation. It sustained all life, and without other forms of life, man himself could not survive. People used to laugh at the Indian respect for smaller animals. Indians called them little brother. The Plains Indians appeased the buffalo after they had slain them for food. They well understood that without all life respecting itself and each other no society could indefinitely maintain itself. All of this understanding was ruthlessly wiped out to make room for the white man so that civilization could progress according to God’s divine plan.50

Not reciprocity but respect and relationality, as in Brooks’s arguments about ethical Native criticism, are privileged here. Each creature’s or landscape’s economy, after all, might function differently, but sustained relations are indispensable, whether to maintain an information loop about changes in the environment or to grasp the chance to combine forces. The emergent quality of exchange and its values, the situatedness in time of any act of giving or returning, is accommodated by this stance.

Paula Gunn Allen did not use the term “reciprocity” in her influential book Off the Reservation, but respect is a key term in her thinking too. In writing of the enactment of democracy, which Allen insists cannot be merely a concept, she posits these values, taken from Indigenous ways: “It is a matter of the way persons go about being in the world—both interiorly and exteriorly—and a matter of social and institutional interactions that cannot but mirror this way of being. These behaviors are characterized by a sense of harmony, respect (or reverence), balance, and kinship (relationship)—which qualities are the basic values that govern (underlie) democratic life.”51 The parentheticals here enclose alternative vocabularies for key concepts in Allen’s vision, a rhetorical approach that opens up a dialogue about the basic elements of an ethics of mutuality. Whether or not her demand for balance and that a person irresistibly “mirror” a particular way of being is achievable, the sensibility Allen describes would, through its emphasis on respect and relationship, encourage a dialogic stance with one’s fellow beings and the earth, as well as with the past and future.

Consider another example, this one from the work of First Nations political theorist Glen Coulthard. In Coulthard’s thinking, reciprocity is not an exclusive cultural property, but its entanglements offer a spur for the instantiation of a new politics. One of his fundamental warnings is that settler states do not mean by “reciprocity” the same thing Indigenous people mean. Coulthard defends an Indigenous “unwillingness to reconcile” with settler governments such as Canada’s. For justification, he draws on the ethics of reciprocity he finds at the heart of his Yellowknives Dene people’s cosmology. “Humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time.”52 Such a relation “ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.”53 Here, as for Deloria and Allen, respect emerges through a sense of mutual responsibility incumbent on appreciating the complex spiritual and physical relationships that inform the imagination of survival, and broader well-being, into the future.

Simultaneously concerned with the political and economic architectures of Canada–First Nations relations and with their cultural and psychological effects, Coulthard leverages reciprocity not just to highlight how irresponsible and exploitative Canada has been in its material relations with Indigenous people but also to insist on the need for a more fundamental transformation in the logic—not just protocols—of nation-to-nation responsibility. It is a tricky line to walk. The engine of colonialism must be transformed, yet at the same time, the Western ethics that ground the stories settlers tell about their pasts, their versions of reciprocity, cannot be completely ignored in the process. Reciprocity as a principle of liberal governance is inadequate to what Coulthard proposes because ultimately the framework of cultural valuation and political representability would still be determined by a settler colonial state. The reciprocal recognition proposed by the theorists of multiculturalism, which would yield acknowledgment of cultural specificity and place in the national identity, can only function as reciprocal within the limited terms required by a capitalistic, individualistic, settler-controlled government. Coulthard emphasizes political modes of “honoring . . . interconnection,” modes that do not necessarily prescribe civic reciprocity but rather speak to the more basic means of accomplishing broader material and psychological well-being. Coulthard, drawing on Frantz Fanon, crucially adds “respectful coexistence” to reciprocity as a principle to guide our lives.54

Scott Richard Lyons pursues a similar interrogation of cultural recognition within Native communities. In one part of a kaleidoscopic reflection on moments of public contest over Native cultural authenticity, Lyons responds to Eva Garroutte’s arguments for what she calls radical indigenism in her book Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America.55 Lyons, in the spirit of Garroutte’s insistence that her work is an invitation to more dialogue, admires attempts to reinstill traditional tribal values, but he questions their prescriptive tendencies: “Garroutte’s second criterion for indigenous identity is ‘responsible behavior,’ which means adhering to certain principles like reciprocity and caring for others. One gets the sense that what Garroutte calls responsible behavior is in fact a universal human longing for functional communities, and the particular behaviors she discusses (caring, sharing, helping, being honest, etc.) are certainly worthy of esteem.”56 Lyons’s question for us is “not whether the criterion is valuable” but “whether it is traditional,” and he concludes that responsible behavior constructed as mandatory reciprocity is not traditional, at least among the Ojibwe. “Ojibwe identity words describe certain behaviors but they do not prescribe them,” he points out. “They do not speak of ethics. They speak of ethnics.” This point about the translatability of reciprocity could be made of other Native North American languages. Lyons argues that among the Ojibwe, there is little evidence that “people would lose their identity because of bad behavior,” at least until today’s “age of banishment” for transgressions of authenticity. Lyons, by examining both Ojibwe history and language as history to think traditionalism through a material linguistic basis, sifts out presentist or anthropologically derived terminologies from Ojibwe ones and reconsiders the bases of community belonging. “Defining our identities in ways that promote tradition,” he argues, rather than “using tradition to define identities,” promotes a creative two-way path between past and present, between roots in language and contemporary conditions and ideas.57 This is an agonistic yet mildly messianic relation to the past, one deeply contingent on cultural context, and one that Lyons argues can guide definitions of tribal citizenship for the future.

All stories about what gifts mean, all interpretations of the act of exchange, are themselves part of the overall politics of exchange in any given moment. This fact looms each time one is tempted to use the term “reciprocity” to talk about Indigenous ways and the potential for building an analytical community at the nexus of the cultures wrought under colonialism. It is true for the stories we tell about what happened in the events associated with Don Luis de Velasco and the Jesuits in Ajacán, with John Smith, Pocahontas, and Powhatan, or the “first Thanksgiving,” no less than it is true for describing or enacting exchanges happening in our daily lives. The act of theorizing about reciprocity participates in the potential for people to live imaginatively within its ideal manifestations, in part by asserting that a debt from the past is still payable, or that it is not, or that it was never a debt at all.

What is the economics of reciprocity if its matrix must include the idealism—or the skepticism—of the scholar? As surely as responsibility does not come without a past, openness does not come with a set of instructions. If the full historical relation between past and present must be factored into reciprocity’s descriptive function, perhaps economy malfunctions as a way of thinking about responsibility. Instead, the unknowability, temporal suspension, and heterogeneity of domains of exchange (human, world, gods, society) become primary. Whether another vocabulary is called for, or whether a strategic redefinition of reciprocity might be the path, the history of the term may be of use for considering whether it is working to elicit or to constrain not just the imagination but also actual conversation among us—whether or not it promotes an entanglement, a potentiality, however idealistic or agonistic, that moves us toward creativity, happiness, freedom, and justice.

In a 2015 interview, Gerald Vizenor used the term “reciprocity” as a way of breaking down the centrality of sovereignty in debates about Indigenous self determination. In the Native past, Vizenor asserts,

you see trade items all the way from Canada and the Canadian plains, trade from Mexico and Central America. Even from—possibly—some things from South America. There were extensive trade networks. That’s a dynamic, reciprocal system carried out by trade. That is transmotion, that’s not sovereignty. It was complicated; warfare existed just about everywhere and maybe almost all the time—but there’s warfare now, and there always has been, all the time. . . . But it’s about resources and it’s about trade, and in fact the same kinds of principles that are fraught with disagreement and misunderstanding are present today, and they were present earlier on.58

“So I challenge you, as I’ve challenged myself,” Vizenor concludes, “to find a new language that’s more emotive, that allows history to include theory and emotive possibilities for which there are no documents and that are critical in understanding a people.”59 In giving some deeper sense of the history of the word “reciprocity,” I have hoped to offer a stimulant for that more emotive and creative way of thinking about mutuality and the imaginations of relation among people and with the other-than-human world.