We Can Do Hard Things
Ways to Be More Present: Indigenous Wisdom from Kaitlin Curtice (Best Of)
Sun, 30 Mar 2025
1. How to listen to the signals our bodies give us, and other concrete strategies to hold on to being human. 2. The healing power of honoring and reconnecting with our little girl selves and with our Mother Earth. 3. How, if all else fails, we can practice presence and embodiment by talking to a house plant. 4. The traumatizing effect of purity culture, colonization, and assimilation, and how to come home to the wholeness of our core nature, desire, and wisdom. 5. Concrete, everyday acts of rebellion that help us regain what we lost, and restore us to who we really are. About Kaitlin: Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity. She is a wise and vital voice on decolonizing our bodies, faith, and families, and the freedom and peace of embodiment - finding wholeness in ourselves, our stories, and our lineage. Her new book, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, examines the journey of resisting the status quo by caring for ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth – and is available now. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @kaitlincurtice. If you want to hear more about Embodiment, please listen to the We Can Do Hard Things episode 168 Sonya Renee Taylor: What If You Loved Your Body? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Kaitlin Curtice and what is her work about?
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is, as our friend Allison says, a real TR. which means a real treat. Her mom used to say, this is a real TR, which was supposed to be short for treat, but actually it's longer than treat. It's a little confusing. Anyway, today we have a real TR. Our dear friend, Caitlin Curtis.
Caitlin Curtis is an award-winning author, poet, storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Pottawatomie Nation, Caitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity. She is a wise and vital voice on decolonizing our bodies, faith, and families, and the freedom and peace of embodiment, finding wholeness in ourselves, our story, and our lineage.
Her new book, Living Resistance, An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, examines the journey of resisting the status quo by caring for ourselves, one another, and and Mother Earth, and is beautiful and is available now. Welcome, Caitlin.
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you. We are delighted.
Chapter 2: How does assimilation impact personal identity?
I learned so much from your story about assimilation as a violence that disconnects us from ourselves and that compels us to erase who we are. And then... The process of deconstruction that you walk us through, that seems to me to be kind of the digging through the rubble to unearth and remember who we are. And you offer so many concrete tools because all of that seems so...
aspirational and wonderful, but it's really hard to find an inroad there. If the whole world is a relentless effort to separate us from our humanity, then it's almost like our whole life needs to be a relentless fight for the wholeness. Yes. So can we start at the very beginning, before we need to remember, before we got dismembered, can you talk to us about your life before you were nine?
Yeah. And yes to what you were just saying. It's so hard. And I just want us to learn to be human together. That's what I want more than anything. And that really involves every aspect of who we are. When I was young, I learned how to balance a checkbook, but I never learned how to listen to my own body. I never learned how to engage with Mother Earth. And those are the things we learn.
We come to a certain age and we're told, okay, here's how to be an adult. Here's how to enter the capitalist system that we have set up here for you to be successful. And right at that moment, that is a disembodiment because we're taught to sort of enter into that harshness of the world and lose the softness of who we are, even as kids. And So I was a sensitive little kid.
I was the baby of my family. My sister's nine years older than me. My brother's seven years older than me. My family moved a lot. My father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So he was an indigenous police officer. And so I was born in Oklahoma. And we moved back and forth from Oklahoma to New Mexico multiple times.
And then we ended up in Missouri, in this very small conservative town in Missouri. And so it was really interesting. But my childhood was marked by... By poverty, we lived in trailer parks. We lived in a lot of different places that were difficult. We ate commodity foods as an indigenous family.
We had all of those markers of poverty, but we also, my siblings and I would make like news shows and we'd make up commercials and we loved music. Our whole family loved music. We loved movies. We loved art. So it's always a mix, right? It's always a mix of these things that you remember.
And when I was young, I also just remember, I love to reenact the scene from Beauty and the Beast, the Disney cartoon, where she's like out in a field, like blowing the dandelions into the air. So I would just go into my backyard singing the same song over and over, waiting for the wind to take the seeds off the dandelion, which it didn't.
So then you spend like two minutes blowing it out, getting... lightheaded, but I just kept singing. It was my life. And so having this interaction with magic and nature, and then it just kind of begins to get away from you or trauma enters. And then for me, I realized that television, these characters on these movies and TV shows that I loved were like my safe space.
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Chapter 3: What is the impact of purity culture on individuals?
It's so interesting because I remember as a kid, when that particular trauma happened, what I wanted more than anything was to feel close to God, to feel close to myself, to feel close to my family, like some sort of safety to hold me. I remember just sitting in my room praying like, God, I need a physical touch right now. Is there a way?
Is there a way you can just become real arms for a second and give me a hug? I'd really appreciate it. I had those moments. And it's so interesting now trying to practice embodiment, recognizing how my body all these years has given me signals. Our bodies give us signals. They're always saying something. And We don't learn how to listen to that. So my parents divorced. My dad moved to Oklahoma.
And so we did visitations with him. But it was hard. It was hard for me as a kid. I didn't feel connected anywhere, really. And so it really was just this continual severing. And then severing and grasping at the same time. You're losing things. You're losing yourself. you're losing pieces of safety and then you're, you're just grasping at the same time for anything.
And so a few years after that, my mom got remarried to my stepdad and he was at the time a Baptist pastor at this little church in our town. And so I grew up in the church. We grew up going to Baptist churches. Both of my grandmas on each side were Southern Baptist secretaries. It was a part of our life, but yeah, Becoming a pastor's kid is at a whole nother level. And it just is what it is.
And I was already like well into the people pleasing stage of my existence. So I was ready. Like I was ready to be the best, the best kid.
And you were grasping. You were grasping for new things. Yeah.
Yeah. The best little worship leader, the best specials music singer. I was ready. I was doing it all. So the church did become my safe space, but also my space of assimilation and pain and severing the the ties to understanding what it means to be Potawatomi and just in a family that doesn't know how to talk about it. Colonization has taken those healthy conversations from us.
It's taken that presence away of figuring out who we are as indigenous people. So a lot of us have to find our way back again as adults. That happens a lot.
It's so fascinating that the medicine becomes the disease. If you are disconnected, you've lost the connection to your dad, you've lost the connection to your native culture and you're yearning for that. You need it. So you're reaching out and here comes the evangelical church that's like, we'll give you every connection you want.
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Chapter 4: How does colonization relate to modern disembodiment?
How did specifically purity culture, because when we talk about disembodiment and then we talk about evangelical way of life, purity culture seems to be Mm-hmm. A factor? What is purity culture?
Yeah. Everyone rain blessings upon yourself if you don't know what purity culture is.
Yes, yes. Memorial Hall in our town was the big... biggish building where our true love waits rallies were held and it was always like the event but the purity movement as i experienced it was this it well it's connected also to the whole abstinence until marriage even in my public school we learned very christian things there's so many resources we could have had that we just didn't get um
So the purity movement, there was a popular book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by a guy named Josh Harris. I remember laying in my living and reading this book and saying to myself, I will not kiss anyone until I am ready to marry them. My first kiss will be on the altar at my marriage and I will not have sex. All of the things. So you stay pure, right? You stay pure.
If you're a girl, that means you dress appropriately and you don't show your shoulders because it's always on you. You're impure. Yeah. Anyone lusts after you. Yeah. And ironically, my name means pure. Caitlyn means pure. Oh, you were screwed from the start.
I was like, yes, I am pure. Purity culture reminds me of the credit card machines. You know how you look at the card and it's like, do not, do not remove, do not remove, do not remove. And you're watching it and you're like, so I shouldn't remove. And then remove now, remove now, remove now. Right? It's like purity culture is like, don't have sex, don't have sex, don't have sex. And then-
The minute you get married, have sex, have sex, have sex. But you're still traumatized from trying not to have sex because you thought it was so bad.
It's horrible. It's a horrible thing. And your body is bad. And your body parts, you don't know how they work. No. It is so traumatizing. Not just for women either. For young boys, what they're taught about their bodies. It's so insidious, but... add on top of that being an indigenous young woman, but I wasn't connecting any of that until adulthood.
Now connecting that indigenous women's bodies, how they have been treated by America, by the government, the things that our bodies have been through. So to put that, that layer of colonization on top of it and woven throughout it is just such a Uh, I don't know. It just amplifies the grief and the violence. Yeah. I still have my ring. You still have your ring? Yes. I just can't get rid of it.
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Chapter 5: What role does Mother Earth play in healing and connection?
There's just a softness I want to hold for her because she didn't know. She didn't know a lot. She didn't know that she had grief and trauma. She didn't know how to communicate the things she needed. Sometimes I just want those reminders. to be softer toward her and toward myself now.
Caitlin, to me, the perversion, no pun intended in the purity conversation, but like the perversion of such a beautiful connection with God, with spirit. And so many of us can relate to the fact of, you know, being taught to be ashamed of our bodies, be ashamed of what our bodies want. We'll of course, inevitably distance ourselves from our bodies.
If we think our bodies and our desires are evil, we have to distance ourselves from ourselves. And then that becomes disembodiment. But for you as a native woman, the whole additional giant layer of God being used as a basis for the theft of your ancestors' land and bodies. And that is actually God's will. Talk to us about the doctrine of discovery.
Yeah, it's so painful. And I always point to Sarah Augustine and Mark Charles have both written on this extensively. Sarah Augustine, her book is called The Land Is Not Empty. And she writes specifically about this through a Christian lens as well.
Men are given in the name of God the command to enter any lands that are deemed unchristian, are deemed not worthy of God, and they can take what they want. And so it came from a... called a papal bull. It was a document given by kings and queens or by royalty to allow these men, these conquerors to come and take the land.
And so to have that as a basis of we will literally remove these bodies from this land. And if you already have a basis of not honoring land as a being, we don't honor land. Earth as Mother Earth, as a being. Sigal McQuay is what we call her in Potawatomi.
having a relationship with her, which I think is so much of the trauma, the collective trauma we carry in our bodies today, all of us is that we don't have a reciprocal relationship of care with the land anywhere, anywhere we step, anywhere we exist, a relationship with the earth. And so that doctrinal discovery gave permission in the name of God to do this, to, um,
to cut up the land, to separate the people from the land. And it just has continued an ongoing colonization to this day. We know that. And whether we recognize it or not, we do carry it in our bodies, all of us. We all do. Naming that is really important.
And it shows us the connection between colonization and disembodiment. Because even when you hear that language, the way you're using it, Caitlin, it sounds like sexual assault to me. It sounds like you- powerful men have the right to enter and conquer any unholy. That is so directly connected to purity culture. In American, in Christian, in patriarchy, what is an unholy body?
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Chapter 6: How can we foster kinship with Mother Earth and combat climate change?
I agree completely with just the massive paradigm shift that that creates. When you even say Mother Earth, when you even say her, because it reminds me of the podcast we did with Jen Hatmaker when she was talking about how she learned from Hilary McBride to instead of say it about her body, she started referring to her body as she. And just that shift changed.
she talks about how that the empathy and the gentleness that she thought about her body with even just personalizing as she, as opposed to it. And the way that you talk about the earth and personify her, that gentleness and empathy is there. It's not, it's not a commodity. It is living.
And it's wild that it's a leap to think of the earth as a living, breathing thing when it literally is, but that's beside the point. Another part of your work when you talk about the earth in terms of the climate emergency, you say you think of the earth as a mother screaming that she's done.
We are telling her again and again that she is beautiful and resilient while we pillage and take from her, while we push her back down and tell her to keep getting up. And it reminds me so much of how mothers across this nation and the world are overwhelmed and overburdened and overtaxed. And as a culture, we give them this kind of empty praise. You're a superhero. Here's your greeting card.
You're not even a human. Instead of doing the thing that will actually reduce their overwhelm and reduce their burden by... treating them better. We just call them a hero. And it just makes me think of that connection between the earth and mothers. And what is the lesson that we need to learn about kinship with mothers and with mother earth to start to have that respect to treat them better?
Well, that the line that you quoted from my new book, this is my problem with the term resilience is that resilience is should be us choosing our resilience, not an oppressor saying you're resilient and then shoving you back down. And then you get up and they say, look, you're resilient. And then they do it again over and over again.
And so I share about that through this, also this lens of how we treat the earth. Look how resilient you are. You've lasted all these years as we continue to take from you, as we continue to hurt you, as we continue to harm ourselves and harm you. but look how strong you are. You just keep taking it and you keep getting back up again. And so you must be resilient because we say you are.
And at a conference a few years ago, I was on Pueblo land in New Mexico and I was the only indigenous person at this entire conference. And I took some time outside and the land just called to me. Now I had grown up in New Mexico. And so that place is really special to me for many reasons, but it was this moment where mother earth was like, I need you to feel something.
I need you to stop for a second. And so I sat on the ground and I put my hand on the ground and I just started weeping and I couldn't control it. And it was as if for just a second, she was like, this is how much it hurts. So feel it for a second because that's all you can handle as a human. Like feel this pain for a minute and then go on and do what you need to do.
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