Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

"In a moment in which ‘resistance’ is a hashtag and ‘wholeness’ is an industry, Curtice’s Living Resistance—a reckoning, reclaiming, and remembering—is a lifeline reconnecting us with our human calling. Curtice beautifully honors the ancient and eternal promise of liberation as not only our sacred birthright but our marching orders."

—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed; founder of Together Rising

"Living Resistance forges a path to a more whole now and a more whole tomorrow. It shows how healing ourselves, our communities, our Earth, and our society are all inextricable, and how to gently integrate all levels of being and doing so that our daily acts of living become ways of resisting oppressive forces and bringing new possibilities into being."

—Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of On Repentance and Repair

"For those who have been hearing the call for a more equitable, compassionate, and humane world, Living Resistance is the road map we have been looking for. Curtice invites us into a multilayered understanding of resistance with love and justice at the center. Through a tapestry of ancestral, personal, and collective wisdom, she shares both practically and poetically. In a time where we are being invited to rise up and move toward liberation for all of our kin, this book reminds us of the fire we hold in our bellies and the spark we carry in our souls. I am so grateful that this book exists; it’s a must-read for all."

—Asha Frost, Indigenous Medicine Woman; bestselling author of You Are the Medicine

As a rabbi, as a Jew, and as a human, I am profoundly grateful to Curtice for inviting us into the sacred realm of Indigenous wisdom. For all of us rooted in a faith tradition that seeks healing for a broken world, this inspiring book offers an accessible path of resistance to oppression. May every reader of every background find joy in journeying toward liberation and wholeness together.

—Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director, Religious Action Center; senior vice president, Union for Reform Judaism

Previous Books by the Author

Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God

Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places

© 2023 by Kaitlin B. Curtice

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.brazospress.com

Ebook edition created 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-4032-0

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Published in association with Gardner Literary, LLC. www.gardner-literary.com.

Cover art and interior illustrations © Alanah Astehtsi Otsistohkwa Jewell / Bear Clan, Oneida Nation.

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

To Trav

One January day you wrote to me:

You are a writer.

You love God.

There are many forms of God and they all love you.

Write.

Thank you for reminding me.

Thank you for being my partner and constant.

Thank you for living resistance with me, always.

Contents

Cover

Endorsements    1

Half Title Page    3

Previous Books by the Author    4

Title Page    5

Copyright Page    6

Dedication    7

Introduction    11

Part 1:  The Personal Realm    19

1. What Is Resistance?    23

2. Art as Resistance    30

3. Presence as Resistance    38

4. Embodiment as Resistance    47

5. Radical Self-Love as Resistance    54

Part 2:  The Communal Realm    63

6. Childcare as Resistance    67

7. Ethical Practices as Resistance    76

8. Solidarity Work as Resistance    84

9. Protecting the Land as Resistance    93

10. Kinship as Resistance    101

Part 3:  The Ancestral Realm    111

11. Decolonizing as Resistance    115

12. Generosity as Resistance    124

13. Intergenerational Healing as Resistance    132

14. Liminality as Resistance    139

15. Facing History as Resistance    147

Part 4:  The Integral Realm    155

16. Integration as Resistance    159

17. Interspiritual Relationship as Resistance    166

18. Prayer as Resistance    172

19. Dreaming as Resistance    178

20. Lifelong Resistance    185

Acknowledgments    193

Notes    195

Author Bio    203

Cover Flaps    204

Back Cover    205

Introduction

Were you born to resist

Or be abused?

The Foo Fighters,

Best of You

Dear Reader, Feeler, Explorer, Un-learner, and Friend,

I want you to remember something really important as you read this book: you are a human being. You have not yet arrived, but you are continually arriving. The thing about being human is that we are born, we live, we grieve, and we celebrate, and one day we pass on, becoming ancestors and guides to those who come after us.

One of the most painful things I notice in my work is that people are scared to start the journey of transformation because they don’t know when they will be done. They think a week of reading the right books will get them there, only to find out that is not enough. They believe that following the right people on Instagram and Twitter will alleviate them of ignorance, but it doesn’t. So they give up. They stop reading the books and they go back to whatever status quo they held on to, assuring themselves that change isn’t really possible or that the effort isn’t worth it in such a hopeless world. We forget that living is our actual adventure, the flesh and blood and spirit with which we journey the Earth together into the life that waits after this one. It all matters. So take a deep breath as you read this next line:

You are a human being. You are always arriving.

The timeline of your life is not a straight line, after all; it is a series of ebbs and flows, backs and forths, heres and theres. You are nowhere and everywhere all at once, and that means that most of the time, the best you can do is be present to the moment, be open to the unlearning and the learning, and trust that you’re doing the work of Love.

As you read this book, you may get overwhelmed. When you do, come back to this page and read these words again. Repeat them to yourself as a kind of medicine: I am a human being. I am always arriving.

Now, let’s get started.

Today the old one inside you is collecting bones. What is she re-making? She is the soul self, the builder of the soul-home. Ella lo hace a mano, she makes and re-makes the soul by hand. What is she making for you?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Where does resistance begin, and where does it end?

Perhaps we need to stop thinking of our processes as linear and embrace them as a journey that is at best cyclical and often labyrinthine, with twists and turns, entrances and exits. Maybe resistance overlaps in the different realms of our life, realms that are real and connected to one another.

This book is titled Living Resistance for a number of reasons. First, resistance itself is a living, breathing being—when we enter into the flow of resistance, we enter into a sacred, embodied, connected way of being that brings freedom and wholeness.

Second, living is an active, ongoing, cyclical embodiment. When we choose to live resistance, we are choosing to practice it with all that we are and all that we have. This is what it means to be human. This is how we understand stories and histories. This is how we hold space for one another and for Mother Earth.

I encourage you to mark up this book, if you’re reading a print version. I hope you’ll doodle in the margins, highlight and underline, ask questions. And if you’re listening to the audiobook, I hope you’ll keep a journal on the side or take mental notes in some other way. This book is meant to be a journey, and I’ve included places throughout the chapters where you can stop and process, take a breath, and answer a few questions as we go.

The subtitle of this book, An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, reflects what I’ve already tried to convey—we are seekers, grabbing at wholeness, digging deeper, looking for magic, and asking what it all means.

This book is grounded in my own visions for a better world, both as an Indigenous woman and as someone who is constantly searching my personal world and the world outside of myself for evidence of God or the Sacred. Indigenous realities, visions, and practices all over the world have led people throughout history, just as they lead us today, toward kinship and belonging with Mother Earth and with one another. My hope is that this book tethers us to that conversation and to practices that help us understand how the world works in those cycles and seasons around and in us—awakening us to ourselves, one another, and this sacred world.

It’s true that many of us are awakened out of a kind of deep sleep to our need to seek wholeness in the world. Our children get bullied at school so we fight the toxic forces of racism and patriarchy; we leave the fundamentalist upbringing we grew up in because we come to honor the integrity and humanity of our gender-nonbinary and trans friends; we attend our first Black Lives Matter protest and realize that we haven’t done enough to actively fight against systems of white supremacy and to see white supremacy’s legacy lived out in ourselves; we are made aware of our ableism and begin to dismantle the systems and very staircases that aren’t accessible to everyone.

If you are here, reading this book, you may have had one of those moments, or maybe you’re in the middle of that moment right now. So how can we embody the work of resistance on physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, mental, and political levels? How can we embody solidarity not just with one another but with all the creatures of this earth, human and otherwise, and with Mother Earth herself—with, as we call her in Potawatomi, Segmekwe?

This book is organized into four parts, a framework I call the realms of resistance. They are connected but separate; they overlap to make us whole as people. These four realms are the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral. As I stated earlier, this journey is not linear. So, too, the realms in which we practice and embody resistance are not linear. We can move from realm to realm, we can inhabit more than one space, and we can journey back to a realm we thought we would never again visit—it is supposed to be this way, the way of being human.

So why realms? Traditionally we think of a realm as either a kingdom or a geographical area. I mean something closer to the second idea. I want us to think of these four realms of resistance not so much as kingdoms but as spaces and places that we might inhabit or, in a more spiritual sense, embody. We live and exist there, always, in one realm or another, or in the overlap of many.

The realms are arranged by color, season, and other characteristics. On the cover of the book, you can see the realms of resistance in their full beauty, and I hope you’ll linger with that illustration as you ask yourself how you have moved among the realms in your own life.

Here is a brief description of each realm:

Personal Realm: This realm’s color is red, to represent our lifeblood, the connection to our dé (heart center). It is the season of winter, the time when we go inward to understand, ask questions, rest, and process.

Communal Realm: This realm’s color is brown, to represent aki—dirt or earth. It is the time to honor our connection to the land and each other, and the time to plant seeds and make changes on the communal level. It is spring, the time of planting and waiting.

Ancestral Realm: This realm’s color is blue, to represent mbish (water), fluidity, movement, and the space we inhabit as we interact with our ancestors. Resistance is fluid, moving work. It is the season of summer, when we notice what grows and blooms for future generations, what comes out of the hard work of planting that we did in the Communal Realm.

Integral Realm: This realm’s color is yellow, and it is at the very center of who we are, our shkode (fire). In this realm, we integrate all the embodiment, presence, and work of the other realms. The Integral Realm, the season of autumn, is the time to harvest, to gather in all that we’ve learned, unlearned, and embodied in the other realms.

It is important that these realms reflect the gifts of Mother Earth around us. As we move between the realms in our daily lives, let’s remember to honor the gifts we’ve been given along the way, honoring one another, ourselves, and the journey toward wholeness.

Religions and spiritual backgrounds around the world and throughout time have held core values that tethered them to Earth and to one another. As humans, we are to practice kinship, belonging, and love—we are wired for resistance, for activism, for the work of shaping spaces and movements that ask for peace and hope.

In Judaism, the values of lovingkindness, of respect for one another’s humanity, and of shalom, or the pursuit of wholeness in the world, are widely held as tenets of the faith.1 Sikhism values things like equality between men and women, community service, and diversity.2 Humanists gather their values from love and hope in humanity itself, not by following any supernatural being but by being present to the life we have on Earth.3 Christians hold to the value of loving neighbor as self, a command given by Jesus in the New Testament Gospel of Mark (12:31). My Potawatomi ancestors believed in the Seven Grandfather Teachings—love, respect, bravery, honesty, truth, humility, and wisdom—among other things, and we follow these teachings today to know what it means to live in a good way, to honor ourselves, our ancestors, each other, Earth, and all who come after us.4

These are just a few of the many ways we understand The Sacred in our lives. When we draw from the richness of others’ practices, we learn more fully what it means to be human.

Our inner work is connected to our outer work, so resistance requires great care for ourselves to feel connected and whole. When we learn to care for and consider our own spiritual values, we will learn to value what others hold important as well. I value what my Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Animist, Atheist, Humanist, Indigenous, Christian, and Jewish friends bring to the table because we, all of us together, have created the world we live in today. We are a product, and we are producers at the same time. If we can learn to look critically yet lovingly at our own contexts, to ask hard questions and challenge ourselves, we will learn to do the same for one another, and the Seven Grandfather Teachings will find space in our relationships and in the work we do.

Storytelling is key to this work. Storytelling flies in the face of a Western, colonized mindset that says we must get the work done now or never. When we slow down and engage in the work of storytelling and story sharing, something sacred happens every single time. We are more fully prepared for wherever our own journeys take us, and along the way we are considerate of one another, holding kinship at the forefront of our minds and hearts. Never underestimate the ripple effects even one relationship can have on your own world and the world outside of you.

My hope is that this book provides a space for us to examine this journey together.

I believe that at the core of the human soul we are called to be