The Maternal Gift Economy

10 min readJan 17, 2024

Reviving Sacred Reciprocity

Among several efforts to educate and advocate for a paradigm shift to an equitable, stable, and just economy is a women led movement for a Maternal Gift Economy. It is about raising up the suppressed wisdom of women, and the traditions and ethics of Indigenous societies, a culture grounded in the values of nurturing and care rather than competition and greed. As a white cis man, I want to be clear that I think creating an Economics of Care is our best way forward based on my basic understanding of history, psychology, and economics. I think this movement is significant and I think it is a hopeful sign for the future. I know I value all the gifts of my mother and I am eternally grateful for them. I mean who would not be eternally grateful for fresh made donuts for breakfast before school? My mom loved to bake, and she taught me to swim, taught me to care, to love animals and to not be racist. She had a great sense of humor as well. Memories of her are gifts I cherish.

The Maternal Gift Economy, as practiced by matrifocal indigenous societies, is largely ignored in western thought as primitive at best or discounted completely as a mode of economics even though the origin of the word referred to household management. However, according to economist Neva Goodwin the care economy is actually the “core economy” saying that “It comes first every day, sustaining the essentials of family and social life with the universal human resources of time, knowledge, skill, care, empathy, teaching and reciprocity.” These things are all about maintaining good relationships.

The concept of a Maternal Gift Economy also refers to the gifts of our Earth Mother on which all life and human economy depends. Unfortunately, the capitalist economy is about exploiting those gifts in a wasteful linear system to maximize the short-term personal gain of a few powerful men. These are the modern representatives of a patriarchy that long ago pushed the Great Mother Goddess out of the Temple, replacing her with an all-powerful male sky-god. However, the divine feminine concept endures even in Christianity.

Religion evolves, not to say it gets better necessarily. Religion is about one’s relationship with the whole, the universe, God, but organized religion is more political, which is the art and practice of influencing others. Mary, the largest icon in the orthodox church, is revered in Christianity as the Mother of God. It is a nod to the indigenous matrifocal beliefs in the divine feminine. The Mother Goddess bore the whole world, the whole universe, her womb “more spacious than the heavens.” Even the protestant church has recognized this.

Of course, the people did not acquiesce immediately to the Goddess being replaced by an all-powerful male God and it required a couple thousand years of murder, mayhem, kidnapping and torture to get our ancestors to forget their spiritual roots in the Earth and eliminate the Great Mother archetype from the “civilized” human psyche. It seems to me that made us less human. This explains the gulf in understanding between indigenous and modern humans. The Great Mother represented love, abundance, generosity, sustenance, and money. The western psyche is lacking this vital archetype having only its shadow characteristics of fear, greed, and scarcity. Western scientists often deny her existence, despite the evidence presented by James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, that the Earth is a living organism.

The worship of the Great Mother Goddess was a common belief before the more recent development of the patriarchal society (c. 3,000 BC). Here Elisabet Sahtouris tells the story in her wonderful book, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution.

“Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively — at a distance from ourselves — and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism. This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real’ world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God’s geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.

This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present. Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.

What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate? What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander’s theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus’s celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?

The sooner we recognize and respect Gaia as an incredibly complex and demonstrably intelligent self-organizing living being, the sooner we will gain enough humility to stop believing we know how to manage her.”

A matrifocal society is not simply the reverse of patriarchy where public power is held only by men. Instead, it is an egalitarian society in which power is shared.

As Mattias Desmet explains in his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, this mechanistic view of the universe is the taproot of the world’s problems.

Egalitarian societies were always matrifocal, worshiping the divine feminine, the Great Mother Goddess, the nurturer, the giver of life. Also, while women were held with great respect, matrifocal societies were not matriarchal, that is societies where all power rested with the women. A matrifocal society is not simply the reverse of patriarchy where public power is held only by men. Instead, it is an egalitarian society in which power is shared. Sharing is not a concept valued by patriarchy while domination is.

To learn more and hear what the proponents a Maternal Gift Economy were saying, I watched some videos, one of an online conference was titled Maternal Gift Economy Movement: Breaking Through. It was excellent but there were two concepts that I thought antithetical to a Maternal Gift Economy. I could be wrong, but it seemed like among some of the proponents there was a misconception of exchange and money. These are not deeply rooted problems we need to get rid of, rather we need to dig down into what are the problems with exchange and money.

EXCHANGE

Exchange was and should be regarded as sacred. All life depends on exchange, nature is in constant exchange, life could not even exist without it. Life is cycles of constant exchange. Exchange is about reciprocity. Reciprocity is about maintaining good relationships. We make an exchange with every breath we take just as the trees symbiotically exchange the C02 we exhale for the oxygen we inhale. The oceans and soil are in constant exchange with the atmosphere. As Vandana Shiva pointed out our economy today is an extraction economy, not one of exchange, it is linear. What does the Earth Mother get for her gifts in this economy? It’s a concept absent from our consciousness. Reciprocity withheld.

Reciprocity is about maintaining good relationships.

MONEY

Money too originated as a sacred connection to the Earth Mother. Money was originated as sacred reciprocity for the gift of life from the Great Mother. I hire a native surveyor who prayerfully pays the Earth Mother for the things he will have to cut out of the way for getting his transit readings. Over time the practice became an abstract social power embodied in custom, and later law, as a payment system facilitating trade. This worked well for a very long time. As Penobscot native Sherri Mitchell said, “It was a mutually beneficial exchange,” and was considered sacred, the whole process from beginning to end is done in a sacred way. The animals they hunted too were considered a gift. As Sherri said, “receiving the gift but also taking responsibility for giving back to that population.” It is sacred reciprocity.

Vandana Shiva said “Everything flows, and colonialism makes it all flow to money”, but money is supposed to flow with everything else, that is why it is currency, a current, a flow. When it doesn’t flow it becomes a problem. As she said, “We have gone way beyond exchange; we’ve gone into one-way extraction.” Indeed, 40–50% of the cost of the things we buy is interest paid to the banks. The patriarchal system (which is imperialist and colonialist) creates money as debt to divert that flow to itself, to the few at the top, extracting wealth from people and planet. Let’s not forget too that debt is slavery. This has been going on intensely for over 400 years.

USURY

Usury is often defined as excess interest on a loan but this is a somewhat sanitized definition. Usury is the abuse of monetary authority for personal gain, using money to accumulate more money. Certainly, charging excessive interest is an abuse but it goes much deeper than that. There are psychological consequences of usury. Native cultures characterized usury as an evil cannibalistic spirit they called Wetiko or Wendigo. A psycho-spiritual disease making people selfish and greedy, destructively turning their intrinsic creative genius against their own humanity.

All religions once banned usury, for both its physical and psychological effects on society but the wealthy usurers were able to corrupt the clergy and today Islam is the only religion that still maintains a ban on usury.

The extractive money system dominating the world is based on usury. I think it is the sin of sins, the progenitor of the 7 deadly sins which Dante put in the lowest circle of Hades in his famous poem, The Divine Comedy. He considered usury the “Anti-art,” an extraordinarily efficient form of violence by which once does the most damage with the least effort. This brings us to the psychological consequences of monetary system design. A system based on usury is driven by fear, fear of there not being enough to go around. The psychological consequences have a devastating effect on society, alienation, loneliness, as well as greed and criminal behaviors. That system needs to be replaced with one where money is issued publicly exclusively for public needs which makes it a care based monetary system. This paradigm shift would reverse the negative psychological effects of usury.

HISTORY

There is so much monetary history that we have not been taught in our schools for selfish reasons. US history is full of stories about the monetary struggle, from the American Revolution and the Civil War to the Great Depression and 2008 crash, patriarchal debt-money has played the major role.

The positive psychological effect of money has been demonstrated numerous times in history, especially in monetary systems using a demurrage currency. The most recent during the Great Depression was in Wörgl, Austria where $2.5 million in public works were accomplished issuing only $6000 due to the high velocity of circulation of the stamp scrip. It also had a profound psychological effect due to the dynamics of net present value. That is a mathematical equation that shows how the demurrage currency increases the value of things in the future. This shifted the thinking of people from short-term to long-term. Ancient Egypt and the High Middle Ages are two other examples. Of course, people were unaware of this equation and did not make such calculations in their heads, it was a subconscious psychological effect. Our most ancient ancestors, the indigenous people, practiced long-term thinking, considering the impacts of their actions on 7 generations into the future. We have a tool to help get us get there once people know what the task is.

Usury was only able to take hold and go viral because of the patriarchal mechanistic view of the universe foisted on us for selfish reasons. This view too needs replaced by one that acknowledges, as Vandana said, “the intelligence of the plants and the microbes and the animals and the Earth as a living intelligent system and the universe as a living intelligent self-organized system.” I think by right action we can collectively create a new economy, an Economics of Care, one that sacralizes the Earth Mother from which all life and economy must flow, a sufficiently prosperous Maternal Gift Economy.

Resources:

Maternal Gift Economy Movement

New Money for a New World by Bernard Lietaer and Stephen Belgin — Qiterra Press — 2005

John Trudell — DNA — Descendant Now Ancestor — 1999

James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis — 1972

EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution by Elisabet Sahtouris — University Press 2000

Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet — Chelsea Green 2022

Money of the American Indians by Don Taxay — Nummus Press 1970

Interest and Inflation Free Money by Margrit Kennedy — Seva International 1995

The Psychological Consequences of Money — Kathleen Vohs et al 2006

WETIKO IN A NUTSHELL by Paul Levey, Author of Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus that Plagues our World. — Inner Traditions 2021

The Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga — American Monetary Institute 2002