Open Access: A Gift?

At UTA Libraries, staff members like me are privileged to have opportunities to attend many events that encourage us to think about our work in new ways. Just such an opportunity came in November 2022 when Nico Albert Williams (ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ Cherokee Nation), chef and Founder/ Executive Director of Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness from Tulsa, joined UTA Libraries for a Maverick Kitchen event.

Nico prepared a delicious traditional stew and discussed what food means to her as a Native woman. An insight from Nico sparked a new way for me to think about the open access-focused work that I do at the Libraries. I contextualize and describe this insight below and how it has helped me to reconsider for myself what open access can/should be. This blog post is part of the Open @ UTA Libraries series.

As Nico was cooking the stew, she described the ingredients and ways she was incorporating them. She also shared a series of visual slides with diagrams that relate to Cherokee conceptualizations of the land/universe, including the identification of Turtle Island. Her discussion of ingredients was specifically contextualized through the land. For example, she described many specific locations from which important ingredients derive. These are native plants and resources that Native American peoples have used for thousands of years. Nico incorporates these traditions into her contemporary culinary practice.

Nico also discussed the gift economy. This term is an anthropological concept developed through seminal ethnographies like Bronislaw Malinowski’s study of the ‘Kula Ring’ within the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific, entitled Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Anthropologists like Malinowski developed this term to describe an economic system wherein people primarily exchange goods and services without any immediate expectation of reciprocation. Gifting is the primary means of exchange.  

Gift economies focus on social redistribution, relationship building, and the longevity of those relationships, despite the length of time one ‘waits’ for a gift. Kula Ring participants develop partnerships across distant islands and practice cyclical ritual exchange of items that are valuable (made of shells and other locally precious materials) but not functional. These relationships focused on prestige gifts ensure wealth redistribution and build social contacts across island populations.  

There have also been long-established practices that function like a gift economy in the North American indigenous context. One well-known example is the Pacific Northwest Coast (of both present-day Canada and the United States) tradition known as potlach (from paɬaˑč, “to give away” or “a gift” in the Chinook Wawa language).  

Many First Nations peoples practiced potlaching, including the Kwakwaka’wakw (made famous by another well-known anthropologist, Franz Boas (1895). [FYI: He erroneously called this entire group the Kwakiutl]). A potlach is a feast and festival organized by a man/his family to garner the loyalty and support of community members for his continuance in or elevation to socio-political leadership. The host family gives away a portion of their wealth to support an important social event for their neighbors, extended family, and even external community ties. These relationships are the key factor in this socio-political-economic practice.

As Nico was describing gift economy and how it relates to food in her experience, she noted that while it feels like an exchange of food at an event like Maverick Kitchen is ‘free’ (from a market economy/capitalistic perspective), free is not real. Just like in the Kula Ring and in potlaches, gifts come with responsibility and relationships.  

Food comes from the land. ‘The Land’ is a type of ‘commons,’ shared resources available to all members of society, such as air today and water or land for many historical societies. While the scholarship on this concept has focused on historic contexts of the UK and Europe (see Hardin’s 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons”), the land as a commons is central to Native American/First Nations’ and other indigenous traditions’, such as Aboriginal Australian, ways of life.  

The land is available to everyone, but it is not infinite, and it is not indestructible. ‘The tragedy of the commons’ is that sometimes individuals do not ‘buy-in’ to the relationships and responsibilities required of a shared resource (i.e., our selfishness takes over). In her presentation, Nico was encouraging and reinforcing the message that she has learned as a member of the Cherokee Nation and a Native woman, through the experiences of generations upon generations before her: that the land and its gifts, like ingredients for a stew, require of us to accept the responsibility to treat it well, to not overuse and abuse it, and to be committed to the social and personal relationships that that responsibility implicates.

As I was listening to Nico and smelling that beautiful stew simmering, I was struck by the parallels to what open access scholarship and publishing is/should be. Open access resources like open access journals and open educational resources published by UTA are part of the ‘commons’ of shared and freely available global resources. The internet itself, through which we share these resources, is a ‘commons.’  

I was struck by the opportunity to reframe the open access commons through the lens of a gift economy. Open access resources are gifts. Being a recipient (or user) of such a gift requires recognizing a relationship with the giver/creator of the resource and the responsibility to not overuse/abuse the gift. We must treat the commons well, and all the participants in the commons, to be able to sustain the commons.  

This means that anyone who chooses to use the commons has a responsibility to understand their rights and expectations. This is lacking in the current open access landscape. Many people use open access resources, to the point of abuse sometimes, without recognizing the responsibility they have to creators, infrastructure developers, and other users.  

If open access was considered a gift, perhaps more relationships would flourish to sustain the commons. Users who access resources through UTA Libraries, for example, might feel a (deeper) relationship with, and potentially even reciprocity towards, this and other libraries as the institutions that enable the open access commons to continue. Could commercial publishers be convinced to develop different kinds of relationships with readers and users if the idea of gifting was centralized in our approach to open access? 

There are lots more questions to ask. To be honest, I think these ideas are already embedded in the concept of open access, but I’ve never seen them stated in this way. Nico’s Cherokee stew helped me to formulate this analogy and a tastier way of thinking about what opportunities the open access landscape (see what I did there 😉) actually offers to us. Perhaps this way of thinking about open access could also ensure that this communal open landscape is more sustainable over time.

Boaz, Franz. “The social organization and the secret societies of the Kwakiutl Indians.” In Report of the United States National Museum for the year ending in June 30, 1895, 309-738. Washington D.C.: United States National Museum, 1895.  

Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243-1248.  

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge, [1922] 1992.

The cover image for this blog post is "Remix of Burning Cedar Indigenous DSC_0035" by Leah McCurdy, licensed CC BY 4.0. It is a derivative of "Burning Cedar Indigenous DSC_0035" by UTA Libraries, licensed on Flickr, and was modified to add the "Open @ UTA Libraries" banner.