Cultural Appreciation Article Series #3 The Importance of Reciprocity

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Cultural Appreciation Article Series #3

The Importance of Reciprocity

Joaquin Muñoz, Aiyana Masla, And Masumi Hayashi-Smith

Introduction To The Series

We at Alma Partners have noted that many teachers carry similar questions and concerns related to cultural appreciation and appropriation. Some are holding back from taking risks that could lead to growth, afraid that they will cause harm or that they have already caused harm, and concerned with how to move forward. Some teachers have heard the term cultural appropriation, but don’t know exactly what it is, or how it relates to their work. Some teachers feel overwhelmed by the task of working with the concept. Through this three-part series of articles, we hope to offer support, structure, and resources for teachers to authentically deepen their inquiries and expand their offerings.

In our first article (Lilipoh, Fall 2024),[1] we looked at how power impacts cultural appreciation and appropriation, using the SEEDS definition of power: “the ability to decide who will have access to resources; the capacity to direct or influence the behaviors of others or oneself, and/or the course of events.” In our second article (Lilipoh, Spring 2025),[2] we explored the importance of relationships when moving from cultural appropriation to appreciation. From here, we will dive into the notion of reciprocity, and the many ways we can lean into reciprocity as we build or bolster relationships and move into interactions that center appreciation and exchange. Our hope is that by deepening understanding and engaging in these practices, we will be able to offer students and families respectful, authentic portrayals of the beautiful and diverse world in which we live.

As we conclude this series on cultural appreciation, we are entering the season in the school cycle where many teachers have begun to plan and prepare for the next school year. As you strive alongside your colleagues to meet the students in front of you, in the times we are living in, we hope to offer supportive frameworks that are built on themes of respect, reverence, and the necessity of a humble approach in order to repair, create, make changes, and offer something intrinsically important to our students: something new.

 

Reciprocity - The Key Concept of Connection

Verna J. Kirkness and Ray Barnhart articulated core values of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility in their 2001 article describing how to support First Nations students in higher education.[3] At the heart of their description is a reliance on expansive and generative definitions of these values, grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The authors point out that relationships that are personalized and human are at the heart of good teaching.

We can borrow from their articulation to explore the notion of reciprocity as a response to appropriation. Whereas appropriation relies upon extraction and exploitation, reciprocity centers connection. The incorporation of diverse understandings and worldviews comes from a deliberate, intentional, and patient process of engaging with individuals and communities. Reciprocity centers relational dynamics. It focuses on, and privileges, human connection. Reciprocity views these human connections as generative, caring, and complex. This means that above all else, connections and ongoing relationships are the orienting objective, and not the transaction of knowledge or resources. And, when knowledge or resources are offered, they are received reverentially, in a way that the spirit of care and responsibility remains active and in motion.

 

Practices of acknowledgment, recognizing harm, and repair

In aiming to create and imagine a kinder world, we have to take risks in our classrooms and schools. Inevitably, as we try and as we learn, we will make mistakes. This is how change happens! Without courageous effort or risk taking, there will be no mistake-making. Without mistake-making, there will be no learning, no healing, and no change.

 

Energy follows attention. – Otto Scharmer.[4]

 

It is important for us to consider how our attention shapes our reality. While new processes may be accompanied by feelings of fear, there are pitfalls to centering fear. If we orient from fear, we are also choosing not to orient from joy, celebration, generativity, and relationship. In choosing reciprocity as our anchoring point, it is important for us to explore where our energy is going and not going – and to consciously choose to orient ourselves in courageous relationship.

Cultural appreciation is a practice that asks us to bring inquiry, research, critical thinking, and questions as foundational practices, noticing who we are and how our identities relate to the content that we share in our schools and classrooms. Inherently, power imbalances and nuances of violence or harm will be uncovered in this research. As honest searching and learning can often yield painful information, these truths and dynamics in our global and collective history or context may cause us to freeze in guilt, trauma, shame, or fear of causing harm. On the contrary, it can also inform and bolster us to invest in repair, responsibility, respectful relationship-building, and ultimately help us create new, meaningful connections that uplift culture bearers and present a different, more authentic pathway.

As we learn, grow, and inevitably make mistakes, we practice cultural appreciation by acknowledging our errors, recognizing harm caused along the way, strengthening our capacity to receive feedback, bringing curiosity to discomfort, and taking responsibility. These practices strengthen our integrity, deepen our relationships with others, and help keep us accountable to the social power that we may carry.

 

Acknowledgement

Truth, reconciliation (if indeed there was a positive relationship to begin with), and healing will only come with acknowledgment as a first step. Acknowledgement can be a formal process, such as creating and reading a land acknowledgment at the beginning of a faculty meeting or school event. Acknowledgement can also happen as a part of everyday teaching. This can look like acknowledging the sources of our stories and songs or the local history of the land we live on in our history blocks. Acknowledgement is the ground before action can be taken - it is not the end of the healing or the full work of repair. It is followed by cultural and economic reparations, alongside other restorative and sustained actions that are informed by being open, offering care, and putting energy towards building genuine connections, which take time to grow and must be consensual and mutually beneficial.

 

Recognizing and Repairing Harm

It is important to emphasize that the focus isn’t on if we will make a mistake, but how we respond to realizing a mistake was made. Cultural appreciation requires taking responsibility, time, and curiosity to repair relationships, as we heal a lineage of colonialism and harm (far older and deeper than anything personal or interpersonal) through how and what we teach the next generations. Two types of recognition and their subsequent pathways of repair are at the heart of this process. In the practice of cultural appreciation, one may cause immediate harm or historical harm, and sometimes both occur. Identifying and recognizing which kind of harm took place can inform the actions needed for repair, which will build relationships that have the potential for sustained reciprocity and exchange.

Immediate harm occurs when, considering power imbalances, we have done something harmful in the present moment. This can be unintentional, and is an opportunity for learning and growth. Immediate harm necessitates personal as well as interpersonal healing and repair work. Initially, we will move through all of the feelings that occur when we are made aware that we have caused harm (especially when we did not intend to): humiliation, defensiveness, embarrassment, anger, sadness, and so forth. These feelings can be processed in the appropriate places, with others who have agreed to support us as we practice self-forgiveness and free up energy for deep listening. When we are able to pause and process our emotions before recognizing and responding to the harm caused, we can see impact as distinct from intention, reground in our values, and work towards repair without asking for additional energy from or putting a burden on those who’ve been harmed. We can then take responsibility for the harm caused, asking what (if anything) can be done towards healing, and even offer a few suggestions or ideas of our own for repair, seeing if anything lands as helpful or restorative.

Recognizing historical harm involves connecting back to the point in time when power imbalances, violence, and oppression severed relationships and connection across difference. It is a process that also involves deep listening, and it asks us to employ truth-telling—about historical dynamics, trauma, and a diversity of ancestral experiences—even when the truth is painful, uncomfortable, or hard to face. It involves active research and recognition into power imbalances, privileges, colonization, oppression, and resource distribution.

Oftentimes, concern about causing harm is amplified by worries related to fear of repercussions in a society that sometimes seems obsessed with punishment. We can and must respond to individual harms and the repairs that are necessary when we commit them. We must also be aware and ready to respond when the institutions we are a part of create harm or perpetuate historic harms. These kinds of institutional repairs require larger and more systemic approaches, like economic reparations, land rematriation, or significant policy transformation.

 

Centering Reciprocity

Sometimes, when we want inspiration for how to model our lives, we benefit from looking to nature for examples. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in The Serviceberry:

 

If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? I could return the gift of a direct response, like weeding or bringing water or offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. I could make habitat for the solitary bees that fertilized those fruits. Or maybe I could take indirect action, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, speaking at a public hearing on land use, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity. I could reduce my carbon footprint, vote on the side of healthy land, advocate for farmland preservation, change my diet, hang my laundry in the sunshine. We live in a time when every choice matters.[5]

 

When we take these ideas into the realm of human interaction, a question is: how do we keep the gift going? If we receive the gift of someone’s culture, what are the gestures that communicate that we are holding what we receive in reverence? How do we deepen our relationship to the culture bearer? How do we show our support and gratitude to the cultures themselves? To the deep and intertwined paths of transmission?

Perhaps the answer is something as simple as respectful monetary exchange. But often the answer is deeper, takes longer, and is specific to the situation we are in. It could mean offering a clear story of how you learned about the element of culture you are teaching, including its own context and (unsanitized) history. It could mean offering use of your land or garden to local community members. I could look like donating to a land trust, or advocating for rights and representation. It could be the deepening of an authentic, long-lasting relationship to a local community center.

 

Whidbey Island Waldorf School

One example of reciprocity within Waldorf schools is the example of a cultural sharing in the Pacific Northwest, hosted by Whidbey Island Waldorf School, where fourth graders and their families congregate with members of different Coast Salish nations. This gathering is a beautiful example of how reciprocity is cultivated through deep and slow relationship-building, reverence for culture, and the recognition of power. For this article, we spoke with Angela Wilder-Lindstrom who, in her tenure at Whidbey Island Waldorf School, evolved the cultural sharing to what it is now. When it started, it was a small gathering with little connection to the local Indigenous community. Today, it is a rich tradition that nourishes relationships between Coast Salish culture bearers and students at nine different schools.[6]

This tradition evolved out of the relationship work Angela committed to as she connected with local Indigenous elders and cultural centers. When she originally worked on the gathering, her first goal was to connect children with the wisdom of elders of all cultures in the community. Over time, as her relationships with Coast Salish elders grew, she was then able to focus on local traditions such as weaving, flute playing, wood carving, and traditional games. What stood out to us about Angela’s relationship work was that she did not connect with Coast Salish community members in a transactional way. Instead, she took time to visit the local cultural center on a monthly basis for years, so that she could build relationships with multiple people in the community and facilitate a lasting connection for them with the school. She reflects, “It's taken a while. You have to be really patient.”[7] Angela is Ojibwe and Cherokee, and her own indigeneity helped aid in building trust. However, she did not lean on that alone. She knew that she had to still approach the community with respect and reciprocity.

Additionally, Angela recognized the role of power in her work. She understood that teaching about Indigenous customs without doing cultural and historical research or committing to relationships perpetuated harmful patterns. By making the event collaborative, she was able to shift the power dynamics in a way that taught reverence and modeled reciprocity to the students. When inviting Indigenous guests and other culture bearers to Whidbey Island Waldorf School, she not only asked them to share their culture, she also arranged for the school’s teachers and Board to listen to the guests. "We wanted them to know that they are valued members of our community." Additionally, Angela mentioned the multiple schools currently taking up the call from the Lakota Waldorf School to offer Indigenous students free tuition.[8] In this example, reciprocity is the story of many gifts of knowledge, wisdom, and time; being greeted with reverence; commitment to cultural sustainability; lasting relationship; respectful compensation; and the enduring will to do more.

While all the examples we have used in our article series have focused on Indigenous cultures and relationships, we want to emphasize that these lessons and practices apply to all cultures and opportunities for cultural exchange.

 

Where to Go from Here

 

Imagine: What if we let reciprocity be possible?

You are invited to take a still and quiet moment to imagine true reciprocity. Perhaps you want to look away from this article, even close your eyes, intentionally breathing. Focus on a vision of reciprocity—daydream and lean into this daydream, resting in a picture of reciprocal relationship in your community. What arises? Take a few breaths here. What are the sensations in your body? Where do you feel them? What emotions are connected to this picture? Who is present and what energy is present? Breathing into this imagination, noticing the sensations, pictures, and emotions that arise when visioning reciprocity, what stands out to you most when you imagine what is possible?

As you forge your own path of cultural appreciation, we leave you with the following questions:

  • What is one way that the practice of cultural appreciation can be employed in your school community and curriculum work? How does this distinctly differ from cultural appropriation?
  • What bias and ideas of superiority or inferiority affect the lens through which you view your curriculum and community culture?
  • What role does power have in your explorations and practices?
  • How can you ground in real relationships so that the school community builds bridges and connections?
  • Are you orienting from respect and reverence?
  • When you practice cultural appreciation, how are the carriers of the culture you are sharing being supported and uplifted?

 

May we all greet the gifts and richness of culture with reverence. May we pass them on with care. May all of our relationships be nourished in the process.

 

Joaquin Muñoz, Aiyana Masla, and Masumi Hayashi-Smith are associates with Alma Partners. Alma Partners is a diverse, multiracial, multigenerational group of eleven experienced consultants and facilitators who offer workshops, courses, Student Leadership Conferences, individual and group consultation, strategic planning, curriculum review and development, and more for schools and other organizations, bridging the gap between ideals and actions. You can find out more at almapartners.net

 

Paintings are by Aiyana Masla.

[1] https://lilipoh.com/?s=fall+2024

[2] https://lilipoh.com/?s=spring+2025

[3] Ray Barnhart and Verna J. Kirkness, “First Nations and Higher Education: The Four R's - Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility,” in Knowledge Across Cultures: A Contribution to Dialogue Among Civilizations, ed. R. Hayoe and J. Pan (Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong, 2001). https://www.uaf.edu/ankn/publications/collective-works-of-ray-b/Four-Rs-2nd-Ed.pdf

[4] Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer,  Leading from the Emerging Future (Berrett-Koehler, 2013), 21.

 

[5] Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry : Abundance And Reciprocity In The Natural World (Scribner,, 2024), pp. 13-14.

 

[6] https://wiws.org/coast-salish-cultural-sharing

[7] Angela Wilder-Lindstrom, interview with Alma Partners staff.

[8] Angela Wilder-Lindstrom, interview with Alma Partners staff.