Native

            This book recommendation does not primarily fall in the category of creation care or environmental justice, as most of my book reviews do.  In this book Kaitlin Curtice explores her identity as coming from a white parent and a Potowatomi, indigenous, parent; with the main focus on what it means to be indigenous in white dominated United States.   Along the way she calls attention to native American views on the earth and environment, and how her indigenous heritage reframes her view of God.  Since I am more and more curious about how indigenous voices help all of us address our relationship to the earth and climate, I am including this for your consideration. 

            “I wanted to write a book that would bring together my own reality as an indigenous woman and the reality that I belong to the people around me, to humanity.  We are responsible for the way we treat one another and the way we treat the earth, and the aim of this book is to display my journey toward what it means to be human in all its nuance and fullness.”

            Curtice does spend time criticizing the white culture she grew up in, including the Christian church, while rediscovering her Potowatomi heritage.  In doing so she uses words like colonization, Americanized, exploitive, to describe how American white majority has treated indigenous peoples and the earth, which whites have treated as a commodity instead of partner in the creation. 

            The book is divided into five sections:  1) Beginnings; 2)  Searching for meaning;  3)  The struggle for truth;  4)  Working;  5)  Bearing fruit in a new world.  Each section ends with a summary that can help reflect on its content.  I am doing a book study on zoom now, and there are questions available from the author on line.

            In a chapter entitled, “Land and Water,” the author points out that Potowatomi women are water protectors, (as are many women in indigenous tribes.)  Then she reflects her Christian heritage by saying:  “What if our stories of baptism in the church were rooted in that same idea of new beginnings, of person hood, just like the new beginnings after the flood, after everything is drenched and overcome?  What might we learn from the water?  What might we learn if we listen, if we wade in – unafraid, untethered, and uninhibited – ready to become the ones we were created to become?”

            In the concluding chapter the author states:  “When I don’t really know what I believe about the world, about God, about who Jesus really is in the mess we’ve made of history, I look at the kids….But if we let them show us the world they see, a world diverse and full of the mysteries of God, even our adult lives can change, and we can learn to be better people in the process.”   (seems Larry Rasmussen, in his latest book would agree.)

            And ends with this prayer:

Prayer is only a whisper

of what could be,

what is,

the memory

of what was yesterday,

ten minutes ago,

when we last blinked and realized

that what you are

is something we cannot grasp,

but long to know

in the depth of us.

Make room,

for we are simply beginning,

the sprout that will grow

and form the landscape of tomorrow.

Breathe on us, we pray.

Iw, Amen.

John Hanson