Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice

And so, I loosely call myself a Christian. And so, I also call myself Indigenous. I am Potawatomi, constantly being called to my belonging with the love that only Creator, Mamogosnan, can hold, has always held, and always will hold for all of us. It is a difficult journey, and I don't know where it will lead. Years from now, I may no longer call myself Christian, no longer engage with the church, and if so, I will still call this journey sacred as the thing it is, the truths it has taught me, the people it has brought into my life. My faith is not a faith to be hold over others or a faith that forces others into submission but an inclusive, universal faith constantly asking what the gift of Mystery is and how we can better care for the earth we live on, who constantly teach us what it means to be humble. 

"Every day I would sit on our living room couch and watch live streams," Kaitlin B. Curtice writes in Native about the standoff at Standing Rock in 2016, "from my phone, my laptop--horrified, surprised, but also coming alive to the realization that it has always been this way. History herself was coming to tell me that I belong to her, that I belong to all these stories that have been covered up in dust, covered up by  whiteness." These lines hit me with force as I read them today, the day after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The uncanny sense of watching history unfold from a distance, and trying to situate your own place into it, the understanding that whiteness has brought us to this point--well, who can reasonably deny it? It brought me low to see that the rioters had put up a cross on the lawn of the Capitol and carried signs with Jesus' name; it's enough to make you think that Christianity is not worth rescuing from the mess it's made for itself.

Curtice's story should be familiar, at least in part, to those who grew up in evangelical culture, which is toxic in ways many don't see or understand until they've grown out of it. Curtice talks about the misogyny of purity culture, and the way the American church centralizes whiteness. When it circles the wagons and acts as if its only goal is self-preservation, the church is preserving whiteness, too. For Curtice, the way out of the poison of evangelical culture is the embrace of a side of her identity she barely recognized as a young person: her indigeneity. Learning about her Potawatomi self allowed Curtice to rethink her Christian self, and to envision a kind of Christianity which is "loosely worn" and which looks outward. In this way Curtice's individual experience seems to suggest a way forward for Christianity as a whole; only decolonization can make it a worthwhile endeavor.

What kind of book is this? It's not quite theology--there's little scripture--and it's not really memoir, though the points Curtice makes are rooted inextricably in her own experiences. The word that kept coming to my mind is testimony, a genre I recognize from my own evangelical upbringing and which has no real analogs, I think, in the secular world. Testimony shares the same root as the word witness, and though that word makes slightly different demands on evangelicals, it seems to rightly emphasize the first-person. Testimony emerges from identity, it is an expression of one's indelible and irreproducible experience. Strange to observe that when so much of the Christian world has become inimical to the word identity at all. There are a lot of books like this, I bet, in the testimonial mode, but I don't think I've read any. I was touched--sometimes quite deeply--but I didn't ever quite feel invited into the deep thinking I was hoping for.

One of the things that will stick with me, though, is Curtice's interpretation of the story of the prodigal son. The church, Curtice tells us, think of this as a story about itself: a boy returns home to God's people. But there are more kinds of returning than this. We can return, perhaps, to the land we have brutalized. We can return to the identities that have been repressed and made invisible, like Curtice's Potawatomi self. We can return at last to each other--not merely the "church" but brothers and sisters of all kinds. Just to hear that such a return is possible was comforting in these difficult times.