Kaitlin Curtice on resisting with integrity
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Kaitlin Curtice on resisting with integrity
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In the past few years, resistance has been a live issue for many of us, whether we’re wondering for the first time how to bring about social change, or realising that we need to find new ways to be activists.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Welcome to the True Stories Book Club, and I'm thrilled tonight to have a very special guest, Kaitlin Curtice.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Hello.
Katherine May:
We were just saying that your book has sold out Kaitlin, and you're waiting for new ones to come in on Amazon. If anyone hasn't been able to get one, please do click that pre-order button because it will come back. But that's every author's worst nightmare, isn't it?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes. Well, it's a great problem to have. On one hand I was like, "Wow, that's great." Then realizing that people might not order it because of that. I'm like, "Please keep ordering. It'll come back."
Katherine May:
Well, it's such a lovely book. I'm not surprised. We're going to be talking tonight about Living Resistance and maybe a little bit about Native, as well. You can see I've been bookmarking pages that are useful. Maybe we'll just do a little passing.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Sure.
Katherine May:
But you've got a poem to read to us from Living Resistance to start with.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Kaitlin Curtice:
I'm a poet and storyteller, and thankfully my publishers have let me just be myself. My books are often essays, chapters, and then there'll be poetry just sort of thrown in there. I think of poetry as just like a deep breath in the midst of difficult content sometimes. I always throw my poetry, sprinkle it throughout my books, because I want us to just stop and take a breath. This is the poem from the second part of my book, Living Resistance.
Maybe you don't know strength until you've rested beneath the branches of a magnolia tree feeling the weight of her regal, waxed leaves. Maybe you don't know community until you've watched ants rebuild what was broken by a world much bigger than theirs. Maybe you don't know fortitude until you've noticed geese fly to the furthest border of warmth to protect their children. Maybe you don't know compassion until you place your hands in the dirt and feel the pulse of the earth, her heart and soul welcoming you. Maybe you don't know time until you run your fingers over a river rock, their skin softened by generations of magic. Maybe you don't know yourself until the mirror of the water reminds you of your goodness and brings you home again.
Katherine May:
Thank you. I was just hearing so many resonances of all of the news that we've all been paging through over the last couple of weeks that speaks to such a lot of, I suppose, what we've all been feeling of reaching for that empathy and that solidarity and wondering what we are in this moment as human beings and how helpless we suddenly are. I think for that reason, it's a great day to talk about your work, actually. There's so much of it that speaks into this moment. I suppose for me, it talks to me about that feeling of "What on earth do I do in this time?" Can you speak to that a little bit?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah. It's interesting to be a writer in times like this, or we could say in any time really, but in times of unrest and where pain is more visceral and it's more seen and noticed and being a writer and being someone who tries to help deal with words helps. I say that words are my medicine. I often write about that. I was at a speaking event this last weekend as so much was happening in Gaza and Israel, all the things that have been going on in the world in Haiti, there's stuff going on everywhere and just thinking about the pain of the human experience and it makes me feel so ill-equipped. Then at the same time, what else would I possibly do besides write words and write poetry and lean into the power of storytelling and how we are connected to one another and our human condition is one of reciprocity and kinship somehow.
A lot of my work, of course, is helping us connect back to Mother Earth and even to our child selves because that is a way of healing our connection to each other as well. It never fails that every time, this feeling of not doing enough, not being enough, what can we do? Then when I can pause and realize that my job is to write and I need to write, my job is to speak at these speaking events or lead a retreat and not just teach people to love themselves well, but to carefully and in the vein of kinship lean into the work in the world that is theirs to do. I think that that's what we have to remember, instead of getting overwhelmed, because it is overwhelming and every time I'm like, "Of course I wrote a book on resistance. Of course I did." That's great.
Katherine May:
Well, taking responsibility for the entire world is really hard, and I think that we're surprised all the time that we find that hard. But Living Resistance is not a book that tells us to do more than we can. It's actually a book about really, I would say small gestures, but they're not small, but they're integrated gestures in lots of ways. They're personal and they're manageable, and they're part of a life, rather part of a urge towards global action, direct action, which is actually more in reality we can do even though we feel like we ought to do, maybe.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes. Yeah, I think when I wrote the book, I struggled with the whole micro versus macro. Some of us say that "We need to start in the micro, we need to start in our everyday lives and our minds and our hearts, and that change will ripple out of us." Others say, "No, we need to be in the macro. We need to be at the mass protests, at the institutional levels, at the government levels. We need to be changing laws." Then there's everything in between. When I studied social work in my undergrad, I often struggled with this exact same question. "Do I want to study micro social work or macro? Do I want to study one-on-one with people, or do I want to help groups?"
I couldn't decide. For me, I've recognized that it's all important and that we have to talk about living into our own form of resistance in our everyday life, at the dinner table in our homes, because that will feed into our communities, which feeds into the macro. It is all connected instead of people... Sometimes we make it seem like those two things are a war with one another, and instead we should remember that it's all a loop that's just repeating. How are we making things better on every level? How are we tending to these wounds on every level? I think that's important to stop and ask ourselves that question.
Katherine May:
Yeah, beautifully said. Before we dig into the book in detail, I'd like to talk a little bit about Native, which is your previous book, which I described very badly as a memoir in my book club summary. But it's so many things, isn't it? What's the one word for that? Because it's about your personal story. It also, there's a lot of a huge amount of history there that maybe people don't know about being indigenous American or what's your preferred language for that, first of all? Because I'm English, and I'll just blunder into it.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, indigenous. Yeah, no, indigenous is perfect. A lot of people in the US don't even use the word indigenous. Sometimes I'll say that word and they'll look at me like, "I don't know what that word means." Then I say, "I'm Native American," and they're like, "Oh, okay." Either one of those works because trying to communicate who we are, who I am is difficult, but indigenous is great.
Katherine May:
It's good to know that. It seems to me that you came into an understanding of your indigenous identity as you got older rather than necessarily having It through your life. Would that be fair to say?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, in the sense that it wasn't like I discovered I was indigenous later, which I think some people think that that's what I'm saying. But I grew up in and out of my culture, but also grew up in a family that was... Because of genocide and assimilation and colonization, many of us whose grandparents or great-grandparents were part of the boarding school era, so forced away from their homes and forced into these government run and often church run boarding schools that happened in the United States. So many of our ancestors, so many of our elders learned to be very silent and scared to talk about their culture. In my family, that silence was also there in many indigenous families. Even though we knew we were Potawatomi and it was there, there was no conversations about celebrating who we are and leaning into who we are.
We didn't know how. I think as I got older, as I had children and came to a point where I was starting to deconstruct, ask all these questions about my upbringing, I grew up Southern Baptist, so conservative Christian. When I got to college and a bit after that and having children and asking, "What do I want them to know about being Potawatomi," that I just didn't get to know these things I was young and experiences with my own ancestors speaking to me and reminding me of who I am, that like many of us who decide how important it is a little bit later in life or as we get a little older and wanting it to be more a part of my life. Starting to learn the language and learn our stories and be part of that in a different way.
Then, of course, it just completely changes the whole way you see the world. It was always there, but I just didn't understand. I didn't have a context to see it or to celebrate who I am as a Potawatomi woman, that's such a journey, because colonization is ongoing. The whole point of colonization is to silence and oppress. When we choose to be embodied and healing and caring about who we are and being vocal, it is a form of resistance in every way. It's an honor for me to get to write stories, and share my own stories, and share the stories of what it means to be Potawatomi in our world today. That's a real gift, and I don't take it for granted.
Katherine May:
In fact, there's so many layers of not understanding to cut through there. In the population at large, there's so little real knowledge about what it means to be an indigenous person in America as opposed to a white person or to anybody that's come later.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Right.
Katherine May:
You write really eloquently about the moment that you began to realize that your Christian faith was not fully respecting your indigenous ways of knowing. How has that developed for you now? What's that relationship like now? That sounds like it was a really wrenching time.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. It was the natural questions that I was already starting to ask, but then I think a big thing that happened as well was the events that happened at Standing Rock in the United States. Basically, a confrontation of this pipeline and peaceful indigenous protestors and all their allies. It was a huge event in 2016. For me, it was like I was deconstructing and asking these really difficult questions and I was writing, I was a brand new author. Then also seeing the suppression happening live on television, seeing these dogs were attacking protestors and they were being arrested and they were being shot at with rubber bullets and hosed down with water hoses. Just seeing indigenous resistance on the frontline in front of me in our present day life and then having to try to figure that out with the Christianity that I grew up knowing, just really intensified the dissonance for me.
Then around the same time, I started writing more pieces about that, writing for Sojourner Magazine, which is a Christian social justice publication here in the United States. Being with them, writing for them was really helping me find my voice and not be so scared to name these things for myself. It has been really difficult. I am moving a lot more toward more interfaith dialogue and more of that advocacy, because I've always valued it and I'm seeing more and more how much hope is held in conversations with all of us who are from different cultures and ethnic racial backgrounds from different religions and faiths.
But I don't attend church anymore. I'm not part of an institutional body, and that's a part of my story that I want to be open with people about because a lot of people from my generation are questioning these things and doing the same for whatever different reasons. I think that we need to talk about the changes we want to see in American Christianity at least, but in religion and faith spaces that are often toxic, often abusive. There just came a point for me, and I still speak in Christian spaces a lot. I travel and spend time with a lot of, especially progressive churches and at conferences sharing my work. I believe it's really relevant within the church because I know that people are trying to ask, "What has colonization done and can we be better than we have been?" I appreciate that. I'm grateful to be part of that movement and that conversation. But it has definitely been a lot of grief and a lot of therapy, a lot of-
Katherine May:
Thank goodness for therapy.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes. Yeah. I am so grateful I was in therapy as I wrote Native, because it was such a hard book to write, and I crashed so hard after I wrote it. I don't think I realized what I was pouring into it.
Katherine May:
Yeah, you're preaching to the choir here.
Well, we've had these conversations backstage, haven't we? About, I don't know what it is to be a writer who shares personal information and to carry on shepherding that work in the world when it feels so deeply personal. I don't know. My experience is that you go out there having to pretend that what you're talking about is something that's quite distant from you. "Oh, yes. I would love to talk about that passage from my book where I had a complete meltdown. That sounds... Yeah, let's talk about that," when you're actually like, "Oh, this is..."
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes. It's triggering.
Katherine May:
It's really hard. Yeah.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
It's real. It's real. It's not a character. Actually, when there's a critique of an institution as part of that, that must have a whole other spicy dimension of other people's reactions, I'm guessing.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah. At some point I had to come to the realization that it's not my job to give people the answers that their particular community needs. I'm there to name the truth, to name some of these things, to share my stories, but the rest of the work, they have to do it. It took me a little while to kind of come to terms with that. The people pleaser in me had a hard time realizing, "I get to speak and share this with you, and I write the books. Now, you can read the books and you can consult the right people and do the work you need to do, but I'm not responsible for that work." We all are responsible for our own lane, and I had to be able to distance myself from that, the critiques, or the questions, or the demands for me to help solve the problem. That's been interesting and a good thing for me to learn.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Oh, it's such a hard boundary to set, isn't it? To say, "This was my portion of the work and that's it. I've made my offering and I've let it out into the world. Actually, I acknowledge that it's now separate from me to some extent, that I've birthed it and I feel very connected to it. But also now you are going to feel connected to it in whatever way that might not be a positive connection, and that's going to be hard for both of us, but you don't get to call me back over it. I wasn't making any more offering them this piece of this." Here it is right now. That was the deal. That was the deal right up front.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Which is hard. I don't think a lot of audiences quite understand that the role for us because of the digital social media world we live in, I think has made it a lot worse. "Well, if I can just slide into your DMs and ask my question or give you my critique, or if I can just post this critique online somewhere, surely you'll see it and you'll engage with me on some level." That's asking too much, honestly. Boundaries and stepping away from that is so hard, but it's really important. That's a hard lesson to learn.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Actually, there's a neat segue into talking about Living Resistance because it's a form of resistance to protect your... Boundaries are too bland a word for it actually, to protect your whole emotional core from being pulled every time you log in. Even if that's being pulled by people who are in need of help. For me, a big part of the journey has been learning that I can't always be the one to give that help as much as I would love to. It can't always be me. I'm limited. I'm limited as a weak human being.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes, it's difficult. I think for me, writing Living Resistance was my next... Here with Native, this was really hard to write. Here are all these truths. Here's my own trauma, my own triggering all these things. Then I needed the next book to get me through that and into the hope. Living Resistance is still an intense book in a lot of ways, but it's also, I think, a really hopeful book and a book that is meant to help us move forward together. I hope that people feel that as much as I felt writing it, I really enjoyed writing this book and wanted to bring people into that world of resistance in a new way.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I love the way that Living Resistance opens with a caution. I wrote it down in my notes actually. It says, "You're a human being. You're always arriving." I love the way you advise us that this is not going to be a momentary act of learning. You can't read this, swallow it whole and have done the work.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes.
Katherine May:
That's not the beginning and end.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes. I think that's one of the most consistent things I tell people because especially when I'm speaking to an institution or a group of people, we see the problems in the world, of course we want to fix them quickly. They're worth fixing. They're real problems that deserve a quick response sometimes. But that's not the way our resistance can work or we will burn out. It's not sustainable the way that we're often doing this. The whole "Buy these four books and read them, attend this book talk or go to this event and you will now be an expert in this," or "You'll now be prepared to have every conversation on this topic." That's not... Our resistance is lifelong work that we are human beings that will mess up and we have to start all over again or take a few steps back or ask deep questions. That's all okay. It's literally written into our DNA. We're humans. We can't get away from ourselves, so don't force this change. Don't force it so hard all the time.
Katherine May:
I don't know if it's a very modern thing, but there is this sense that we just want to have done stuff. We don't like to be in process. It makes us feel vulnerable and uncomfortable and we don't like the uncertainty. I also feel like as writers and as teachers, everything in our training... I've trained as a teacher, I've trained in marketing and things like that, as well. All of those things have always said to me, "Tell people what they'll have learned by the end of this, make them an offer based on the end result." I give people a terrible end offer. I'm like, "Oh, you will have maybe felt a bit more scrambled about who you are."
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah. Some of the biggest critiques of some of my books I remember there have been a few online where it was like people were like, "She didn't give us the answers to the questions she asked." I think it's so funny, I'm like, "What if I'm just helping you ask questions? You may not know the answer yet. What if your answer is different than my answer, then what's helpful for me to give you my answer if it's a different answer for you, if your resistance looks different than mine in some ways?" In some ways our resistance will be the same end goal, like justice and peace and whatever that may be. But we're going to get to it differently. I know some people who are in a very western thought mentality, a very linear, they want me to ask a question and then they want to read a little further into the chapter where I give the answer. I think it's funny when people get upset, they wanted me to give them that, and I refuse to give them that. I know
Katherine May:
It's so withholding, but I also think there are so many other people out there who are making that offer. But we, as the audience to that work, feel let down by ourselves over and over again once we've consumed it because we can't, as it turns out, do it all in one go. We constantly turn that failure inwards and think, "Oh no, everyone else has read this book and is now making a million pounds and is perfectly fit and just okay with everything. I've read those books and I'm still, unfortunately me," that can turn inward so much. It's time to start making honest offers to our reader. I feel that so strongly.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, I really love that. I think that's why I started the book with the personal realm, which is the realm where we get to focus on us. We get to ask how we live, how we live in these bodies we have, how we live with our experiences. I struggle with anxiety. That's always a part of my life. It ends up being a part of my job is to manage my anxiety. I am indigenous, so I struggle with aspects of identity and care and how do we learn how to love ourselves, really love ourselves? How do we learn how to practice presence with our bodies and ourselves? How do we pay attention to those seasons that we find just the personal life seasons that we live through?
I knew I couldn't leave something like that out of the book because our personal resistance life is so important because it's what we start everything from. If we neglect ourselves or hold ourselves to that crazy high standard, it's just going to lead to the shame and the burnout. I hope that by starting with that, that the reader feels like, "Okay, I can breathe a little and I can start this journey as who I am, not who I think I should be."
Katherine May:
They're so gentle, those aspects of your realm of personal resistance, they're like, "Okay, take good care of yourself, feel grounded, know who you are, be a little more present in the world." I think some people will hear that and say, "Well, that's not resistance." How does that help contribute to resisting the terrible things in the world? What's that about?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, I figured that some people would think that way. I think honestly, that is such a colonial mentality that we have been forced into. In the US we have something called the Nap Ministry with Tricia Hersey.
Katherine May:
Yes.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Tricia's work is incredible. She's a black woman and she's writing about insisting on rest and how we fight capitalism. We fight these systems with rest. I know that that is controversial because we don't like rest. We don't value it. We think we have to earn it. There's so much about it. Starting the book by saying, "Actually, if you want to do any of your work well in the world, any of it, you have to learn to love yourself well." I will say, I struggle with personal boundaries and all these aspects of my personal realm, my personal resistance, I struggle all the time. I'll have two weeks where I feel completely thrown off and then a really good week. Then it's not meant to be linear. I want people to recognize though that micro beginning, even at the very center of who we are, and then letting it spread outward so we care for ourselves. Then we realize, "Oh, well, if I care about myself, I love my neighbor, too? Shouldn't I love Mother Earth? Shouldn't I love the creatures around me," because we're starting from an ethic of love, if it's self-love.
That doesn't mean we're just selfish only thinking of ourselves. If we do that and it doesn't lead to care for others, then there's something that's wrong and our resistance isn't there. But I think a lot of people who truly practice self-love, who are truly doing that work, it's this beautiful just bleeding out of them. You can sense it about those people that they're grounded and sustained in a way that a lot of people aren't.
It's a gift to be around them because you can sense that. I think that there's a wisdom in it, and it is gentle, resistance... I didn't put the raised fist on the cover of this book. I put this and I wanted people to see the cover and be like, "That's not resistance. What is that?" Because we do think of resistance as hard and rugged and strong-
Katherine May:
Aggressive.
Kaitlin Curtice:
I don't know, all these... Aggressive, yes. I wanted us to, yes, see it as that. But can it also be something else? Can it be many things at once?
Katherine May:
I had not clocked how challenging wintering would be to people in general, but particularly Americans.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
I had not expected the howls of anguish, that said, "What if I can't stop? I'm not allowed to stop. It's not possible. Then they kind of try and turn it back on me and say that's privilege. That's privilege. I haven't got the privilege to stop." I always have to say that this isn't about choosing to stop. This is about saying you will be stopped. You're not superhuman. You can't continue forever without rest. You can't keep running down your reserves. The problem is that that is really terrifying.
Once you realize how terrifying that is to not be economically productive in a country like mine that values economic productivity over literally everything else, then you start really getting how important and vital it's and how radical it is to start engaging with this basic human need, a very basic need. I'd never expected to have to articulate that. Really, it took me aback when I first heard people say, "I can't do that. I can't possibly do that." It really shocked me. I think it kind of echoed back to me in a way that really made me reflect even deeper about what I was trying to say here, which is like this is not a neutral issue by any means, at all.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, right. I think about this all the time. In the US, we have New Year's. New Year's is when you set all your big goals. I really have issues with New Year's because I change my goals when the seasons change, and I don't even necessarily mean to, but about every three to four months, I look around me, I look at my office, I look at my movement, my exercise. I look at the way I'm eating, I look at my mental health, my spiritual health. I ask some questions and I modify a little. I do that every few months. What if we did that instead of at the end of the calendar year, we suddenly panic and we haven't done any of the internal work, but we suddenly think that we need this huge checklist of all the things we want to change about ourselves, many of them unhealthy things that we probably don't need to change.
Then we burn out halfway through January. I think about that all the time that we just want to go until, like you said, we're forced to stop because we're so exhausted and there's something so beautiful about following the seasons, following the world, following the earth and letting that actually change our internal dialogue with ourselves. It's okay to just pause and reexamine your life a little bit every now and then, do it more often than not because really, it's a gift to ask ourselves those questions in a tender way instead of a critical way.
Katherine May:
It's that link between the self and others that if we can't show ourselves that compassion and if we can't have the conversation with our ego that tells us that we have to be the center of the universe or else we're nothing, how on earth do we then teach the people around us by example? How do we teach the next generation to take care of themselves? I don't think anyone who is working themselves to death literally wants their children to do that. How do we lead? This is part of resistance, isn't it? Taking leadership on a very personal level. If we cannot do something as fundamental to existence as resting, then what are we saying? What on earth are we saying to people watching us very intensely to see how it's done?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, it's difficult. It's interesting just to be a writer during this time because the publishing world feels really intense right now. I don't know if it feels that way for you.
Katherine May:
Oh, it's intense right now-
Kaitlin Curtice:
The publishing world just feels intense right now and in a way that I've not experienced with my last two books. Even in the last year and a half, to me it's felt just intense in a different way. Part of my personal ethic of doing this work is making sure that the things that I've gone through that maybe other women, other Black women, indigenous women, queer women, women of color, disabled women, marginalized women, don't have to go through some of the things I went through. Trying to hold the door open to say, "This is a problem in publishing. This is also a problem in publishing. There is no space for care and rest in publishing. It's still a capitalist institute. It's still colonial in many ways. It's still got problems."
To just be honest about those conversations has been a part of my personal resistance in helping other, especially women to not feel so alone because I have felt really alone in this industry before, where I didn't know if I was doing it right or I didn't know if I should set boundaries or those kinds of questions. I want us to be able to talk about it.
Katherine May:
Yeah, definitely. I don't know, for us to be able to again set some kind of an example that invites people in rather than repels them. That doesn't fall back on saying, "Well, I found it hard, so you're going to have to find it hard, too." I don't want to be that person. I want to say, "How do I put down the rope ladder for the next person to just give them that little extra bit of assistance that took me 20 years of work to find my way through?" Why would I not make that invitation? I don't understand.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
There's a lovely question in the chat, which I'll ask you now. Do you think that people need to hit rock bottom for the lifelong journey message to land? Yeah, in order to really understand that this is a journey, this is a process, that it's slow learning and not instant learning, where do we have to be to actually get that? That's an interesting thought.
Kaitlin Curtice:
That is a great question. I feel like Catherine, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too actually, because I feel like it depends on the person, because I think some people are aware of how they're doing, and I think that some of us are not so aware. I think sometimes we're not ready, ready, and then we totally hit rock bottom and there's this, you get hospitalized or you have something happen in your life where everything does truly fall apart and you realize, "I can't sustain this anymore." For me, a personal part of my life was a year and a half ago, I was just having a lot of health issues and my anxiety and stress, I was not managing it well in my work life and my personal life. I was seeing enough warning signs and feeling bad enough in my body that I knew if I didn't step in into my own life and do something that every part of me would suffer.
My body would suffer, my mental health, my work, my family, my spirit, and I would end up in the hospital at some point. While for me it wasn't a rock bottom, it was a big red flag wake up call.
Katherine May:
Wake up call, yeah.
Kaitlin Curtice:
I was able to make some of the changes I need to make. I'm still making them. That was the mini beginning of this particular line of my whole life that I'll now struggle back and forth to try to care for myself in this way, but it affected every part of my life. If I want to write books and bring healing and do the work that I care about for the reader, for other people, I have to care for my body and myself, and I have to manage my stress and my anxiety and these things that affect me daily. What do you think, Catherine, do you have any thoughts?
Katherine May:
I think it really varies, and I think probably for some people they have to hit multiple rock bottoms.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, absolutely.
Katherine May:
Before they... Because I've seen it all around me of people hitting a rock bottom and then going back to exactly the same thing again afterwards. That was actually me. I did that because I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand why my burnout kept revisiting me. I didn't have the knowledge or the toolkit available to get it. I almost had no choice but to keep, like a moth banging themselves against the window, returning to what I already knew would burn me out, but just doing it anyway. I think in a way, it's not people's fault that they do that because they might not have what they need in order to not do it.
I think in addition, people who are able to take care of themselves and who feel that permission to take care of themselves won't have to do that. But that's actually, again, not something we're always in control of. So many of us have been brought up to believe that we're only valuable to the world if we're earning a lot of money, if we're physically well, if we are able to take part in certain community activities very visibly. There's all kinds of values that come into that. I wonder if rock bottom's even the thing, I wonder if it's even enough.
Kaitlin Curtice:
I'll say that this is when I think about the power of storytelling and being a storyteller that, like Hillary said, the personal realm chapter is so good. I felt seen. That means so much to me because storytelling is such a portal and a pathway to one another's lives and at the same time some sort of mirror. I cannot tell you how many times some big change or some huge epiphany has happened in my life just because of something I read in a book. It could be two lines. It could be someone's personal story where it made my story click. Finally, those pieces that I hadn't put these things together, now I'm realizing why this has happened or why I can't get past this or whatever it is. I'm so grateful that we can tell stories and we can enter into one another's stories. I think it's more powerful than we understand.
Katherine May:
Actually, that connects me back to Native, in a way, because the power of that quite symbolic storytelling that we know is woven through ancient human cultures, that there is this ability to understand the world on a metaphorical level, which in some way delivers it more directly to us. It almost like skips our defenses and gets in there when we're trying to hear it. That's something that I'm always trying to sneak in my work is not telling people how to do it because I don't know. But offering people a set of images that they can use to understand it instead something much more indirect and maybe a little bit sneaky. I'm okay with it being a little bit sneaky.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah, storytelling is so subversive, and I've found that in my speaking events, sometimes I'll be somewhere and they'll be like, "We want you to speak on activism and advocacy." I'm like, "Okay." Then I show up and I do, one of my favorite talks is on becoming caring resistors. I open the talk with learning how to be a resistor for your own soul. I read poetry and I tell stories because by the middle of the talk, I will be talking about colonization. I will be talking about land theft and how indigenous bodies have been disconnected from their lands. I will be getting into all the painful stuff, the hard stuff. In the midst of being in that, I'm also going to tell you other stories and I'm going to read you a poem again, and I'm going to do it in a way that helps us settle into this.
I always find it really interesting to watch people's faces even as I'm speaking, because at first they're confused. Like, "Why are you talking about loving myself and doing this?" Then you can see them starting to unfold the layers and understand why I need to begin sometimes with a story, or a poem, and some of those gentle ways and then come into the hard stuff and then lead us back out again through another story or through another poem. Because there has to be a bit of a rhythm to it for all of us to enter in with each other.
Katherine May:
Yeah, and I think also for me, it's like how do we make this intuitive instead of didactic? How do we let it seep through the skin instead of barraging people with it? Which I don't like to learn like that. The thing that was repeated to me over and over again as a child, which I think is still true, is "I don't like being told."
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes.
Katherine May:
It's not my most endearing quality, but it's also definitely one of my qualities. I don't want to tell me anything. I want to work it out for myself.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes. I think a lot of people are like that, though. I think of my work, I think I write about it in Living Resistance, but a few years ago, I just kind of came to the realization that when I am at my best, that at the core of who I am, I am both fierce and gentle, that I am a fierce storyteller. I want to tell the truth. I want to be in solidarity with people, but I also want to be gentle and I want to practice care. In a lot of ways, people think that those things would never go together, but I'm like, but here I am and I can't change myself. This is what I do. This is how I exist in the world, in this liminal space. If I changed that, I've tried to change it before and it didn't go well because I didn't feel like myself and I didn't do my work as well. Holding that and allowing ourselves to be who we are, even when it doesn't make sense.
Katherine May:
Yeah. That's true. Let's move on to the communal realm that you talk about, because I think that anything about the communal realm is such an interesting question for our time because maybe we've become quite de-skilled in the communal. You and I have grown up in an era of intense individualism such as maybe the world has never known before. What's your toolkit? What are you telling us that we need to do in order to return to that communal sense of living and of being a person?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah. I guess I should step back and say the book's framework is these four realms of resistance. I talked about the personal realm and it's just a cyclical, I'm looking at a picture of it on my wall. It's a Venn diagram. You've got these three circles and then this... It's a Venn diagram, the overlap in the middle. We're talking about the personal realm, the communal realm, the ancestral realm, and the integral, think of integration. Each of these realms represents the four seasons. It represents these four aspects of our bodies and our spirits. But it also is like these spaces we inhabit as humans. This communal realm is, I think of it as springtime. It's like when we're planting seeds in the ground, we're planting seeds, we're doing work, we're doing the work to see what happens ahead of us.
I write about stuff, like I write about care for children, our children, all of our children, the children of the world, the children in Gaza right now, who are the children we're caring about? Are we caring about indigenous children in boarding schools? Are we caring about poor children in our communities? That kind of conversation, which is difficult. I write about our ethics of resistance. I write about yoga and the appropriation of yoga in the West, which is huge. I was like, "I have to write about this. I can't ignore this." It covers... That section was the hardest. It was the heaviest for me to write.
I write about care for the land as resistance. It covers a lot of stuff. It covers really difficult topics, but it's also beautiful to think about kinship and solidarity and those words can be so scary for us. I'm always trying to find ways to make it more real, more tangible, I guess. Because so many of these things are just these ideas or even academic ideas and they don't feel very real to us. I'm always trying to think of ways to pull it back to very real every day, even small little things like solidarity can be checking in on a friend that you know is struggling, and it can also be showing up to a protest with a friend who is fighting for something. It can be so many different things.
What is our kinship relationship look like with Mother Earth right now? What is the relationship to our bodies, to the land, to others who are protecting the lands around us? What is our responsibility in that? That's a huge question and one that we'll always be asking as human beings, but I encourage people to not be afraid to ask those questions. That is community. That's the communal space that we inhabit, even if we don't realize it.
Katherine May:
Yeah, I think what strikes me most of all about that communal realm is that it's often a really contested space that we're working in. It's often full of conflict. It's often full of people who are not behaving in a perfect way. When we talk about community, we so often portray this lovely picture of everybody holding hands together and everyone working together. That isn't how dealing with the communal aspect of life actually feels. That doesn't mean to say it's not important or the same. That doesn't mean to say it's going wrong, necessarily. That's just how it always felt. We're not used to it. We used to be able to just hide from it.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yes, that's true. It is hard to know when to stay and when to go from certain, I mean, many people who read my books have been abused by communities that they've been a part of, and they've had to leave those communities. They're trying to build new communities. There's so many deep, painful questions even about that word, that idea of what community is, and we're always trying to build it. That whole idea of kinship and solidarity, I think I write about that we don't get to escape each other. We don't get to escape one another's stories. They're always going to be there, and that's really hard, but that's also really beautiful. If we can enter into one another's stories, there's so much power in that.
Katherine May:
That feels very strongly linked to the ancestral realm, as well, because there's the aspect of kinship in community that also goes across time as well as across the spaces we inhabit. It's interesting you're using the word ancestral because I think that might be a word that people connect very strongly with indigenous experiences, is this greater honoring of the ancestral than perhaps we have in mainstream western society. Would that be?
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I write about how different indigenous cultures and backgrounds have this connection, and it's a very real just tangible relationship. I really wanted to write for anybody reading the book, whether you're indigenous or not, that there is this really beautiful, not just responsibility, but the path of our life is that we do exist in this liminal space between those who came before us and those who come after. I want to believe that the work I'm doing today can help heal my ancestors who are already passed on. Surely the work I'm doing in the world, the good things can find them and that also the bad things.
We have to pay attention to what we're doing and the good and the bad of what we practice in this life will absolutely affect those who come after us, that we're ancestors in the making, and that we do have a responsibility to care and to pay attention to history unfolding, to pay attention to the things happening in the world. The ancestral realm I knew would be hard for some people to read. It was hard for me to write just because at the same time, studying DNA and ancestry is so popular now in our world. I knew that people would connect to it in that way. I think it's important, but what world are we building now that is affecting a timeline that we don't always understand?
Katherine May:
Yeah. I think one of the big questions is for those of us who were raised without much consciousness of our ancestry, actually. I think one of the aspects of individualism has been this lack of connection between the past and thinking about the future, as well. I wonder what you would say to people who feel that they don't have that connection. Can that connection be built again? Maybe that's why people do DNA research virtually.
Kaitlin Curtice:
I think it is. I think that there's a longing for that. I think that sometimes the danger then with that is this romanticizing some of those stories without then seeing the truth of history or paying attention to the things that we're holding onto now. But I think I write somewhere that you don't have to know exactly who your ancestors are. A lot of people don't. A lot of people can't. There's many different situations in the world that make that really difficult. I think there is something beautiful about just holding that space of honoring your own life now. Because I think that individualism of, I'm going to do what I want now and this is it, and this is all mine, can be really harmful. The power of the... We have the seven generations prophecy in our culture where we're saying, "Seven generations from now, all these years past us, all these years later, what are we leaving to those future generations? What are they going to inherit from us? What have we inherited from our ancestors and no matter who they were, what beautiful work can we do in the world?"
Again, I know it can be a painful topic for people, but I want us to lean into it and maybe we rethink things and our ancestors are also the trees that were on our property years ago or these these wise beings. The rocks are our elders. The trees are our elders. These waters that they're all around us are our teachers, and if we can think of those relationships as well, I think that that's really important to honor our relationship to Mother Earth as one of, we are curious children learning from our elders, and I think that's a beautiful sentiment that can lead us a lot in our life, in our resistance, whatever that looks like.
Katherine May:
That's so lovely. We are so nearly out of time. I feel like I could, I need another hour.
I need an extension.
Kaitlin Curtice:
I know.
Katherine May:
I just wanted to finish by asking about your final realm of integration. It's actually a nice note to end on.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Can we hope for a sense of integration in our lifetime or is that a very lofty hope in reality?
Kaitlin Curtice:
I think we absolutely can. I think that the beautiful thing about this framework that I created is that to remind ourselves that we're living and existing in all of these realms all at once, all the time. Again, it's not like a linear thing where I'm jumping from realm to realm and I'll end with integration. Maybe we integrated one aspect, but then we had to start over somewhere else. That's absolutely okay. That is absolutely the human experience. I want people to feel sort of safe and held and challenged in my work, in my writing, in my words, and that last section of the integral realm is very much about what is prayer and what is dreaming? What are your dreams for yourself, for the world? What is lifelong resistance? It was these kinds of topics of the integral realm is like our shkwede. That means fire in Potawatomi.
It's like our heart center. What is at the center of who you are, and what do you need to do to find that in the world? What do you need to do to find it in your everyday life? Just in the mornings before work, while you're having coffee, wherever that space is where you can find yourself, where you can feel your own fire burning. "This is the thing that I do in the world. This is the thing that makes me come alive." I want people to keep finding that for themselves or each other or whatever that looks like. I hope my book inspires people to do that and gives them hope that it's possible.
Katherine May:
That's such a lovely note to end on. Thank you so much.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Thank you.
Katherine May:
It's been really, it's having that hope that lets you go back to the work and to keep doing it, and to keep returning it, and to let it be imperfect knowing that you can keep doing it and that the doing it is the thing that matters, I think.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Right. Thank you.
Katherine May:
Well, I'll say good night. Thank you for being here and I hope you come again soon, but for now, I will wish you good night from here because it's eight o'clock and I go to bed at nine.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone. I'll see you really soon.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Thanks, everyone.
Katherine May:
Bye.
Kaitlin Curtice:
Bye.
Show Notes
In the past few years, resistance has been a live issue for many of us, whether we’re wondering for the first time how to bring about social change, or realising that we need to find new ways to be activists.
For Kaitlin Curtice, this resistance is an ongoing practice, informed by her perspective as an Indigenous American, and imbued with gentleness, integrity and personal sustainability. In this episode, we talk about her book, Living Resistance, how her own perspective developed over time, and - appropriately for this podcast - how we can live in this unsettling moment.
Links from the episode:
Kaitlin’s website
Kaitlin’s book, Living Resistance
Kaitlin's Instagram
Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
