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

Author:Kaitlin B. Curtice [Curtice, Kaitlin B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Living, Spiritual Growth, Spirituality, General, Spirituality;Kaitlin B. Curtice—Religion;Potawatomi Indians—Ethnic identity;Indian women—Religious life—United States;Christian women—Religious life—United States;Identity (Psychology)—Religious aspects—Christianity;Racism—Religious aspects—Christianity;REL062000;REL012120;REL012000
ISBN: 9781493422029
Google: E9fIDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Brazos Press
Published: 2020-05-05T23:49:59.548814+00:00

11

Self, Examined

THE JOURNEY OF ADULTHOOD requires so much looking back, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s strange to look back over our childhood memories with a new lens. It’s strange to remember things we didn’t think we’d stored deep inside ourselves.

Living in New Mexico as a child brought memories I will never let go of, memories that will not let go of me. I recognize that hope in the land, in the dirt where I played, the Russian olive trees that would drop their fuzzy fruit on the ground. I’d roll them in my fingertips, marveling at their soft presence.

One fall while in New Mexico, my family met up with my father, who I hadn’t seen in a few years, at a coffee shop in Taos. We didn’t talk much that day. My father has always been pretty easygoing and not much of a talker. He just hovers in a room, giving space in case someone needs it. His presence doesn’t demand much from others, and I’ve always appreciated that about him. The trauma passed from one generation to the next in Indigenous communities cannot be ignored; I carry trauma that my father and his mother carried, whether we know how to express it or not. It should not surprise us that trauma is carried in our bodies because systems of oppression after oppression are stacked against us. The effects of oppression are many, one being increased health risks that cause Native people to die at higher rates than any other group in the US. For example, diabetes rates among Native people are 189 percent higher and suicide rates are 62 percent higher.1

We don’t talk about our trauma, so my father and I were content to watch my boys in silence, every now and then accented by a chuckle from the both of us. My partner, Travis, sat quietly, engaging with grace. My half-brother was there too, a Malaysian-Potawatomi young man who I’d spent time rocking to sleep as a baby, singing to him in the early morning hours when I stayed with my dad and stepmom on weekends. He’s looking ahead to college in a few years. He’s growing up under the roof of my father, a roof that I didn’t always have.

That afternoon, I didn’t need much from my father. I was no longer the child who wanted desperately to be seen and known by him. I was no longer the mother who wanted to process parenthood. I didn’t need to know right then from my father what it’s like to be a Potawatomi man in America.

I just wanted to sit in silence with him. I just wanted the presence, because the truth is, I’d forgiven him for leaving a long time ago. The difficulty is sitting in the spaces after forgiveness, into which forgiveness itself leads us, because we do not often know what it looks like. It is a space in which love somehow both fills and lightens when it’s with us.

After an hour and a half, we parted ways.

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