The idea goes something like this: The person who needs something from you is doing you a favor, by offering you the opportunity to give.
The giving is actually the getting, which makes it hard to figure who's the richer after the exchange. It is O Henry's lesson in the “Gift of the Magi,” and of Christmas itself.
Elmo is an hour away from Kalispell by car, but a lifetime distant. It's home to 150 people in 50 homes, a place where the median household income doesn't crack $9,000, but average home prices push $150,000 due to its lovely location on the lake.
“We're just a little community,” said Patricia Hewankorn. “We have a post office, and that's about it.”
Hewankorn is director of the Kootenai Cultural Committee, where all those parcels and packages will be delivered. There, the gifts will be sorted and stacked, prioritized for families who need.
Or families who are giving, depending upon your outlook.
“This is absolutely not a gift from us,” said Terry Welder, director at Kalispell Montessori. “This is something that the tribal elders do for their community, and it's a great opportunity for our kids to be invited to be a part of it.”
Welder's school is not unlike most others this holiday season, collecting gifts for others. But the philosophy here is something new (or is it old?), somewhat more grateful for the chance to be part of a bigger world.
Welder - who once lived on the Blackfeet Reservation - has worked at this school for a lot of years now, and also has worked in Glacier National Park, creating cultural bridges between the park's modern visitors and its first inhabitants. He has a unique insight, then, into reservation borders and what they mean to meaningful exchange.
Quite a long while back now, Welder met Gordon Coe, who for years farmed a patch of dry reservation land near Hot Springs, but who now lives not two miles from the Montessori campus.
Together, they and others have spent 10 Christmases delivering food and clothing and toys to the Blackfeet and Fort Peck reservations. This year, they're sharing with their closest neighbors, on the Flathead.
But no matter where Welder delivers, some things remain the same. “The leadership of the elders has always been based on one's acquired ability to give and to share,” Welder said.
Consider then the leadership of one 10-year-old girl, wise beyond her years, who came to school with $75 - years of accumulated birthday and Christmas money - and asked if she could buy some holiday dinners for this season's exchange.
“I told her that was a very nice offer,” Welder said, “but she should think about it. I told her it wasn't necessary for her to do something like that.”
Thing is, she had thought about it, had talked to her parents about it, had weighed it and considered it and felt it all the way through. Her mind was made up. Giving was getting, and she felt better giving than keeping.
She had, after all, an obligation and responsibility to her neighbors, just as they have to her.
“That was a tremendous response to what we're trying to do here,” Welder said. “It was a great reaction. I see this project as a great opportunity for our kids to gain a greater understanding of what Christmas is all about.”
This gift giving and getting, however, is about a whole lot more than just Christmas. It's a year-round exchange, a way to open lines of communication that can last lifetimes.
“They were here long before we arrived,” Welder said of the Native American culture. “This is their homeland, and they still live here. We really should know more about each other.”
Hanging on the school's library wall is a great circular shield, a work of art crafted by reservation kids as a gift for their Kalispell neighbors. It's hard to get to today, though, what with all the presents piling up in the lobby.
Coe, for his part, isn't so interested “in all those packages. My particular interest is in getting foodstuffs to those people who are living in poverty. What damn little bit we can do, well, we should do it, every one of us.”
On Coe's dining room wall is a photograph of kids from Frazer, just beyond the middle of nowhere on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. It's a computer-printed collage of sorts, a half-dozen photographs of kids. One stands out among the rest, a beautiful girl of perhaps 10, smiling a bright white gap-toothed grin and wrapped in matching hat, scarf and coat, for the moment snug and happy.
Coe considers that gift of warmth, then considers what he gets from the giving, considers again the shared humanity and humility and compassion.
“This is all we have left,” he says finally. “It's the only thing we have left, the only thing that matters.”
This from a man fighting cancer and wearing a brace for a broken neck, a man with his own worries and reason enough to be thinking of himself.
“I began to see that, the way we were living, we had nothing,” Coe said. “No connection to a dying planet, no connection to each other.”
A survival with what matters intact, he said, will require “grasping, reaching, comprehending, understanding.”
Understanding not just my friends, or my school, or my town, or even my culture. Not even, Coe said, just my species.
“Native people have a very different relationship with the world at large,” he said. “That's the gift they can give to the Montessori students. Ultimately, we have no choice but to share and give. Not to try is not a choice.”
It is, finally, infectious, this idea of his. The bigger the pile grows, the faster the pile grows. Welder scrambles to find parents with trucks to make the haul.
Someone drums up the money to buy a guitar for Elmo, and the music store owner throws in a second, free of charge. Seems everyone wants to get, so they give.
“I don't know what to expect,” Hewankorn said of the exchange. “This is the first time we've been involved.”
She has the nagging feeling, though, that this is about more than turkeys and toys, that this might be the beginning of a whole new relationship.
“I think it could open a line of contact between the us and the other,” she said. “The schools, especially, they're interested in our culture. Things like this give everybody a better understanding of each other, and how we all live.”
She imagines a field trip, or some presentations maybe, or, well, who knows what Christmas will bring. Shake and rattle as she might, she just cannot imagine what this present might ultimately turn out to be.
“I guess,” she said, “we'll just have to wait and see when it arrives.”
Which, after all, is exactly what children on both sides of the reservation line are doing these days.
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