**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Kaitlin B. Curtice|Kaitlin B. Curtice]] # Book Overview ![[Native Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Author Kaitlin B. Curtice is a Potawatomi woman of European descent, born in 1988 in an Indian hospital in Ada, Oklahoma. Her father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; her mother taught her to appreciate opera and poetry. She grew up moving between Oklahoma and New Mexico, raised in Baptist churches, and didn't begin to reclaim her Indigenous identity until adulthood -- an epiphany that arrived while nursing her one-year-old son at Sweetwater Creek in Georgia. She's married to Travis, a political science PhD, and has two sons, Eliot and Isaiah. She lives in Atlanta on Muscogee Creek and Cherokee land. *Native* is her second book, after *Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places*. ## Central Thesis Identity isn't something you receive passively. It's something you journey toward, and for Indigenous peoples in America, that journey runs directly through the wreckage of colonization. Curtice argues that to know who she is as a Potawatomi woman, she has to decolonize -- to peel back the layers of whiteness, assimilation, and institutional Christianity that have obscured her Indigenous identity since birth. But decolonization isn't just for Indigenous peoples. It's for everyone. The book insists that the American church is complicit in centuries of cultural erasure, and that true spiritual wholeness requires confronting that history rather than glossing over it. The path forward isn't abandoning faith -- it's reclaiming a version of it that honors the land, the ancestors, and the Mystery that existed long before European Christianity arrived on Turtle Island. ## Why This Book Matters Published in 2020, *Native* arrived at a moment when conversations about race, colonization, and institutional Christianity were intensifying in American culture. Standing Rock had happened four years earlier. Rachel Held Evans had died the year before. The book speaks directly to people who are deconstructing their faith and wondering what's left -- and to anyone who's never considered that their church has a colonial history. Curtice doesn't write as a theologian or an academic. She writes as a woman working through her own identity in real time, which makes the book feel closer to memoir than manifesto. For readers in predominantly white Christian spaces, it's a direct challenge to the assumption that Christianity is culturally neutral. For Indigenous readers and other people of color navigating dual identities, it's a mirror. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Introduction Curtice frames the book as a journey backward that's actually a journey forward. Born to a Potawatomi father and a mother of European descent, she grew up in an America built on whiteness -- a system that forces assimilation and rewards those who stay assimilated. As an adult with children of her own, she felt the urgent need to know herself outside of whiteness, to teach her sons who they are. She introduces the Potawatomi flood story as the book's structural frame: Kche Mnedo floods the earth, and from the muskrat's sacrifice and the turtle's shell, new land is created. The flood story is about beginning again, and Curtice positions it as a metaphor for the present moment. ## Chapter 1: Land and Water The book's origin story. Curtice describes hiking at Sweetwater Creek with her family and having an epiphany while nursing her one-year-old -- a sudden, embodied understanding of the Potawatomi women who walked the 660-mile Trail of Death from Indiana to Kansas, nursing their own babies. She felt her feet press into the earth and understood for the first time what it means to be Indigenous. The chapter moves from this personal moment into a wider argument about land as sacred, water as lifeblood, and the Western tendency to treat both as commodities. She introduces Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi concept of women as water protectors, and thirteen-year-old Autumn Peltier's address to the United Nations. ## Chapter 2: Journeying Stories Curtice weaves together her own journey with an email from a Dine woman who grew up in a church shaped by colonial missionary thinking. The chapter traces the thread of whiteness through American history -- from Columbus through the enslavement of African peoples to present-day hate crimes -- and positions decolonization as the ongoing work of dismantling that thread. She references Austin Channing Brown's experience finding belonging in a Black church and connects it to her own late discovery of Potawatomi identity. The Seven Grandfather Teachings (humility, honesty, wisdom, bravery, truth, love, respect) appear here as a framework for identity formation. Curtice is candid about her uncertain relationship with Christianity, calling herself a "loose" Christian whose faith is "ever evolving, ever creating." ## Chapter 3: Creation Stories Curtice places Potawatomi creation narratives alongside the Hebrew creation story and the Epic of Gilgamesh, arguing that these stories connect rather than divide us. She tells the story of Skywoman and Original Man, the Potawatomi's origins in the Great Lakes region, and the forced removal -- the Trail of Death of 1838, when over 850 Potawatomi were marched from Indiana to Kansas under General John Tipton. She recounts Tipton's condescending letters to the governor and the lies settlers told themselves about removal being good for Indigenous peoples. The chapter introduces land acknowledgments as a practice of remembering, and closes with a personal moment -- saying goodbye to a pine tree in her backyard that reminded her of her Grandma Avis. ## Chapter 4: My Own Beginning A childhood memoir chapter. Curtice reconstructs her early years in snippets: born in an Indian hospital, moving between Oklahoma and New Mexico, her father working for the BIA, living on the Pojoaque Pueblo reservation, her parents' divorce when she was nine. The move to Missouri with her mother and stepfather Steve brought Baptist church culture and distance from her Potawatomi father. She was baptized at nine, saved at eleven, and grew up in a church world that rewarded compliance and punished questions. The chapter is honest about poverty, displacement, and the quiet erasure that assimilation produces -- not a single dramatic act but a slow, generational wearing down of Indigenous identity. ## Chapter 5: The Problem of Whiteness Curtice takes on white supremacy directly, arguing that it's not just the KKK but a system embedded in DNA tests, church culture, and everyday assumptions. She addresses the Elizabeth Warren DNA test controversy as a case study in how even progressive white people misunderstand Indigenous identity. The chapter traces how whiteness works in the church -- how it centers itself, rewards conformity, and treats everyone outside its boundaries as other. She connects this to her own experience as a white-coded Potawatomi woman who can pass but chooses not to. ## Chapter 6: Stereotypes and Survival The daily reality of being Indigenous in America: people saying "You don't look like an Indian," the Pocahontas comments, the assumption that all Native Americans disappeared. Curtice addresses blood quantum -- the federal system designed to eventually eliminate Indigenous peoples by defining them out of existence -- and the way stereotypes like sports mascots reduce living cultures to caricatures. She includes the microaggressions Native peoples hear constantly and connects them to larger patterns of erasure. ## Chapter 7: A Heart Language Language as identity. Curtice describes the moment she first heard the Potawatomi language over her laptop speakers while making dinner -- a language she'd never been taught because of generations of assimilation. Only about ten fluent speakers of Potawatomi remain. She learns that the Potawatomi word for America, *kchemokmanke*, means "white person with long knives." The chapter covers Indian boarding schools and Richard Pratt's genocidal motto, "Kill the Indian, save the man." Curtice positions language revitalization as an act of resistance and spiritual renewal, learning Potawatomi words before she writes each day. ## Chapter 8: Gifts of Prayer Prayer as embodied practice rather than institutional ritual. Curtice describes praying with tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass -- four sacred medicines given by Creator -- and how this practice sits alongside and enriches (rather than contradicts) her Christian faith. The chapter pushes back against the idea that Indigenous prayer practices are idol worship, arguing that they represent a connection to Creator that predates and transcends institutional Christianity. ## Chapter 9: Ceremony The communion table as a political space. Curtice describes attending powwow for the first time and weeping during Grand Entry, and tells the story of her friend Shelley's handmade Lakota communion set. She connects Indigenous ceremony to Christian communion, arguing that both are about returning to something sacred and communal. The chapter includes her practice of cooking Potawatomi wild rice dishes for holidays -- from Mariah Gladstone's Indigikitchen -- as a form of ceremony and resistance against the Thanksgiving myth. ## Chapter 10: Ancestors Curtice explores what it means to be visited by ancestors -- in dreams, in the wind through tree branches, in the faces of her children. She visits the Citizen Potawatomi Nation headquarters in Shawnee, Oklahoma, with her sons and husband, and feels both grief and gratitude at being on the land of her birth. The chapter covers her return to Oklahoma for the tribe's summer reunion, pulling out her tribal ID at the registration table. She addresses the responsibility we carry to our ancestors -- both the oppressed and the oppressors -- and the work of making amends. ## Chapter 11: Self, Examined Curtice begins trauma therapy at thirty and starts reconstructing her childhood. She describes a silent meeting with her father at a coffee shop in Taos, years after he left -- not the child wanting to be seen anymore, but a woman sitting in the space after forgiveness. The chapter addresses intergenerational trauma directly: diabetes rates 189 percent higher for Native people, suicide rates 62 percent higher. She attends a spiritual retreat on Pueblo land, studies under Richard Rohr, and confronts her own complicity in the mistreatment of the earth. Self-care, she argues, isn't a luxury commodity -- it's a survival necessity, and it looks different for Indigenous women than for middle-class white women in Beverly Hills. ## Chapter 12: The Pain of Church Spaces The most emotionally charged chapter. Curtice describes attending compline at a monastery and weeping as monks sang -- realizing that for generations, her people were forbidden from singing to Kche Mnedo in their own way. She walks through the purity culture of her youth: True Love Waits rallies, Joshua Harris's *I Kissed Dating Goodbye*, princess conferences, purity rings, and the shame machine that taught her body belonged to God, the church, or her future husband. The chapter pivots to Indigenous feminism and the concept of *kwe* (Anishinaabe woman), connecting purity culture's control of women's bodies to the broader colonial control of Indigenous bodies. She addresses Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) and the Doctrine of Discovery as the theological root of the church's violence. ## Chapter 13: Wake-Up Calls Standing Rock as personal and collective awakening. Curtice watched the 2016 pipeline protests on livestreams from her couch and felt intergenerational trauma crack open inside her for the first time in a way she could name. She took her sons to the Standing Rock protest in downtown Atlanta -- their first protest, ages three and five, marching and shouting "Water is life!" A Palestinian man nodded and said, "I know what you're going through. I stand with you." The chapter connects the pipeline fight to broader Indigenous resistance, patriarchy, and the daily reality that Indigenous rights activism is among the world's most dangerous forms of activism. ## Chapter 14: When the Church Gets to Work A chapter about what it looks like when the church actually confronts its colonial history. Curtice attends a conference where Brian McLaren presents on the Doctrine of Discovery, and she finds herself pulled back into her Indigenous identity despite trying to compartmentalize for the weekend. The chapter's emotional center is Rachel Held Evans -- friend, advocate, and the person who first saw Curtice as a *Potawatomi* woman rather than just a woman or a writer. Evans died on May 4, 2019, and Curtice's grief saturates these pages. She calls Evans someone who didn't just lead -- she was a "reach-across-the-table-and-build-something-new-together" visionary. ## Chapter 15: Keeping Watch Tahlequah, the orca whale who carried her dead calf for seventeen days, becomes a meditation on grief and environmental destruction. Curtice connects the orca's mourning to her own therapy journey and to the broader question of whether humans even know how to mourn anymore. The chapter covers Original Man and the wolf as partners who keep watch together, climate change as a consequence of the church's "subdue the earth" theology, and the concept of watching as both spiritual discipline and political act. ## Chapter 16: Fighting Invisibility The most practical chapter on what daily resistance looks like. Curtice describes using her Citizen Potawatomi Nation tribal ID at airports -- sweating through the TSA line, not knowing if she'll be detained, enduring agents who don't recognize the ID as valid. One agent said, "Why would I look for an expiration date? You are forever." She addresses the Covington Catholic confrontation with Nathan Phillips, the 573 federally recognized tribes, the way Christianity erases other religions by treating the world as a mission field, and the Christchurch mosque shooting as a manifestation of the same white supremacy that targets Indigenous peoples. The chapter includes a letter to Alicia, a mixed-race woman, about the cost and necessity of refusing assimilation. ## Chapter 17: Finding One Another Intersectionality as practice, not just theory. Curtice joins a Be the Bridge group at her Atlanta church and discovers what happens when people of different races actually sit in a room and listen to each other's stories. She traces the concept of intersectionality from Anna J. Cooper in 1892 to Kimberle Crenshaw's 1989 framework. The chapter covers the Chief Lady Bird tattoo Curtice got on her forearm -- seven flowers representing the Seven Generations prophecy -- and how starting therapy at thirty helped her name trauma that had been buried in her body since childhood. ## Chapter 18: The Future of Decolonization Curtice visits Lake Michigan for the first time -- the original homeland of the Potawatomi people -- and stands on the shore whispering *Migwetch, Mamogosnan* (Thank you, Creator) while laying tobacco on the water. The chapter addresses the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, the Nathan Phillips/Covington Catholic incident, and the practical meaning of decolonization: if you're a teacher, read Indigenous authors; if you're a church leader, stop treating Indigenous peoples as a mission field; if you're a parent, teach your children that Native peoples are still alive. Decolonization, she writes, "is always an invitation." ## Chapter 19: Returning Curtice returns to Sweetwater Creek two years after her first epiphany and finds the water still speaking. The chapter circles back to the book's beginning -- the prodigal son story, the work of returning home -- and extends it to Black men wrongfully imprisoned, LGBTQ+ youth kicked out of their homes, and Indigenous peoples separated from their communities through boarding schools. She describes finding a community of Indigenous women in Atlanta, watching her son Eliot learn beading from two of them, and understanding that healing happens in relationship, not isolation. ## Chapter 20: A New World for Our Children The book's final chapter centers on Curtice's sons as the seventh generation -- the Potawatomi prophecy that young people will return to Indigenous ways and put things right. She describes a Seder dinner at her Jewish friend Daniel's home, where her boys dipped parsley in salt water and learned about liberation alongside Jewish ritual. The chapter closes with a vision of children as liberators who see the face of God in the diversity around them, and a quiet insistence that the church's future depends on whether it can let the most marginalized lead. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## Decolonization as Spiritual Practice Decolonization isn't a political project that happens alongside faith -- it *is* faith. Curtice treats decolonization as inseparable from her relationship with Creator, arguing that every act of reclaiming language, ceremony, or land is also an act of prayer. The colonial church didn't just steal land; it stole the spiritual practices through which Indigenous peoples knew God. Until 1978, Indigenous ceremonies were banned in the United States. Recovering those practices is how Curtice finds her way back to the God her ancestors always knew. ## Land as Teacher, Not Commodity The Western view of land as real estate -- parcels to be bought and sold -- runs directly counter to Indigenous understanding. Curtice treats the earth as a living being, *Segmekwe* (Mother Earth), who speaks and teaches and grieves. Trees have social networks. Water is lifeblood. The dirt carries memory. This isn't metaphor for Curtice; it's ontology. When she lays tobacco at the base of a pine tree, she's praying. When she listens to Sweetwater Creek, she's receiving revelation. The church's "subdue the earth" theology is, in this framework, a theological justification for environmental destruction. ## The Church's Colonial Complicity Curtice doesn't leave the church, but she doesn't let it off the hook either. The Doctrine of Discovery, Indian boarding schools, purity culture, patriarchy, the centering of whiteness -- these aren't aberrations in church history. They're the pattern. The chapter on church spaces is the most painful in the book: weeping at compline because her people were forbidden from singing to God in their own way, bringing her Potawatomi coffee mug to church as a small act of resistance, and asking whether the institution can change at all. Her answer is conditional: the church can bear good fruit, but only if it stops centering itself and starts listening to the people it's harmed. ## Identity as Journey, Not Destination Curtice doesn't arrive at a settled identity. She's still journeying at the end of the book, still asking questions, still "loosely" calling herself a Christian. Identity, in her framework, is layered and evolving -- Potawatomi and European, Christian and Indigenous, angry and hopeful. The refusal to resolve these tensions is one of the book's strengths. She doesn't offer a clean reconciliation of her dual identity because there isn't one. The journey *is* the point. ## Intergenerational Trauma and Healing Trauma doesn't stay in the generation that experienced it. Curtice carries trauma from her father's departure, from the Trail of Death that happened in 1838, from boarding schools she never attended but whose effects shaped every generation since. Starting trauma therapy at thirty gave her a framework for naming what had been buried. The book treats therapy, language learning, ceremony, and community as different forms of the same healing work -- and insists that this work can't happen in isolation. --- # Analytical Reading ## Main Arguments 1. Decolonization is not a political add-on to Christian faith -- it's essential to genuine spiritual wholeness. 2. The American church is directly complicit in the erasure of Indigenous cultures through the Doctrine of Discovery, boarding schools, and ongoing assimilation pressures. 3. Land, water, and the creatures of the earth are sacred teachers, not commodities to be exploited. 4. Identity is a journey that requires looking backward (to ancestors, to trauma, to origin stories) in order to move forward. 5. Intergenerational trauma is real, embodied, and transmissible -- and it requires intentional, communal healing practices. 6. Intersectionality demands that Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and other marginalized communities work together against shared systems of oppression. 7. The seventh generation -- children raised with truth about history and identity -- holds the hope for a decolonized future. 8. Anger at injustice and hope for change are not opposites; they're collaborators. ## Methodology This is memoir with a theological argument running through it. Curtice builds her case through personal narrative -- childhood memories, epiphanies at Sweetwater Creek, encounters at airports and churches -- layered with references to Indigenous scholars (Nick Estes, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Vine Deloria Jr.), Christian thinkers (Richard Rohr, Rachel Held Evans), and womanist/feminist writers (Austin Channing Brown, Barbara A. Holmes). There's no data-driven argument here. The persuasive method is testimony: here is what happened to me, here is what happened to my people, and here is what it means. The Potawatomi flood story provides the structural frame -- beginnings, searching, struggling, working, bearing fruit -- which gives the book a liturgical progression rather than a linear argument. ## Strengths The book's greatest strength is its specificity. Curtice doesn't write about decolonization in the abstract. She writes about using her tribal ID at the airport, cooking Potawatomi wild rice for Christmas, hearing the Potawatomi language for the first time over laptop speakers while making dinner. These concrete moments carry more weight than any theoretical framework could. The purity culture chapter (Chapter 12) is the book's sharpest writing -- connecting True Love Waits rallies to the Doctrine of Discovery in a way that makes the colonial thread visible in everyday church practice. The Rachel Held Evans tribute (Chapter 14) is genuinely moving without being sentimental. And the refusal to resolve her relationship with Christianity -- staying in the tension rather than leaving the church or making peace with it -- feels honest in a way that most faith memoirs don't. ## Limitations The book covers enormous ground in 180 pages and sometimes moves too quickly. Chapters on complex topics like intersectionality, the future of decolonization, and the church's colonial history get compressed into short treatments that don't always go deep enough. The prose style leans toward the devotional -- recurring phrases like "sacred," "Mystery," "beloved," and "journey" can feel repetitive over twenty chapters. Some of the political commentary (references to Trump, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) dates the book to its specific moment in ways that may reduce its shelf life. The chapter structure is loose; several chapters cover similar territory (land as sacred, the church's failures, the importance of storytelling), and the boundaries between them can blur. The book would also benefit from engaging more directly with Indigenous scholars who push back on Christianity entirely, rather than primarily citing thinkers sympathetic to a both/and approach. Curtice acknowledges her white-coded privilege but doesn't always interrogate what it means for her arguments about Indigenous experience -- a tension the book names but doesn't fully resolve. --- # Personal Reflection ## Key Takeaways The most striking idea isn't any single argument but the insistence that decolonization is a gift for everyone, not just the oppressed. Curtice frames it as healing work that benefits both the colonized and the colonizer -- though the costs fall disproportionately on those who were never given a choice. The concept of identity as a backward-looking journey that moves you forward is practical and transferable beyond Indigenous experience. And the social operating mechanisms analogy (to borrow from a different book) applies here: Curtice shows that the church's culture isn't shaped by its stated values but by what actually happens in its meetings, conferences, and everyday interactions. When the church prays for its evangelism training on the Sunday after a mosque shooting, that *is* its culture, regardless of what its mission statement says. ## Questions Raised - How does the both/and identity Curtice describes -- Potawatomi and Christian, Indigenous and European -- work for Indigenous peoples who see Christianity and colonization as inseparable? She nods at this but doesn't engage with it deeply. - What does decolonization look like when it isn't led by someone with a public platform? The book's practical suggestions (read Indigenous authors, do land acknowledgments, cook Indigenous food) can feel insufficient for the scale of the problem Curtice describes. - How do you build institutions that don't replicate colonial patterns? Curtice is better at diagnosing institutional failure than prescribing institutional alternatives. - The book's political references are rooted in the Trump era. How does the argument shift when the political context changes? - What would Curtice's Potawatomi relatives who reject Christianity entirely say about her project of indigenizing Christian faith? ## Connections to Other Works - [[Braiding Sweetgrass]] by Robin Wall Kimmerer -- Kimmerer's work on reciprocity with the land is the scientific and ecological complement to Curtice's theological argument. Both are Potawatomi women writing about what it means to belong to the land. - [[The Universal Christ]] by Richard Rohr -- Rohr is the most frequently cited thinker in the book, and his framework of the "universal Christ" gives Curtice theological permission to hold Indigenous spirituality and Christianity together. - [[I'm Still Here]] by Austin Channing Brown -- Brown's journey to find her identity as a Black woman in white spaces mirrors Curtice's journey as an Indigenous woman in white churches. - [[An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States]] by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz -- Provides the historical foundation for Curtice's arguments about land theft, forced removal, and the ongoing effects of settler colonialism. - [[Our History Is the Future]] by Nick Estes -- Estes's analysis of Indigenous resistance, particularly at Standing Rock, directly informs Curtice's Chapter 13 on wake-up calls. - [[As We Have Always Done]] by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson -- Simpson's framework for Indigenous resurgence and her analysis of heteropatriarchy as a "foundational dispossession force" runs through Curtice's chapters on feminism and church spaces. --- # Reading Notes - The Sweetwater Creek epiphany -- nursing her son and feeling the presence of Potawatomi women who walked the Trail of Death -- is the book's strongest single scene. It's specific, embodied, and earns the weight Curtice puts on it. - The phrase "white-coded Potawatomi woman" does important work. It names a specific kind of mixed identity that most readers haven't considered and complicates the usual frameworks for talking about race in America. - The Potawatomi word for America -- *kchemokmanke*, "white person with long knives" -- says more about colonial history in four syllables than most textbooks manage in a chapter. - Only about ten fluent speakers of Potawatomi remain. That number sits in the background of the whole book as a measure of what assimilation actually costs. - "Credenza-ware" for churches: the Doctrine of Discovery isn't ancient history. It's the theological operating system still running underneath contemporary American Christianity, and most churchgoers don't know it exists. - The TSA agent who said "Why would I look for an expiration date? You are forever" is the book's most quietly powerful line. It's an act of recognition from someone who didn't have to give it. - The purity culture material in Chapter 12 is the sharpest writing in the book. Connecting True Love Waits to the Doctrine of Discovery through the thread of bodily control is the kind of move that makes a reader see both things differently. - Rachel Held Evans's death clearly shaped the book's final form. The tribute is personal without being indulgent, and the grief gives the book emotional stakes that a purely intellectual treatment of decolonization wouldn't have. - The Potawatomi flood story as structural frame works well -- beginnings, searching, struggling, working, bearing fruit -- though the connection between the frame and the chapters within each section is sometimes loose. - The book is at its weakest when it tries to be comprehensive about political events (Trump, Covington Catholic, Christchurch). These sections read like op-eds inserted into a memoir and don't carry the same weight as the personal material. - Curtice's recurring question -- "What kind of ancestors will we be?" -- reframes the conversation about justice from a political obligation to a generational responsibility. It's the question that gives the book its forward momentum.