Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

By Kaitlin B. Curtice. Brazos Press, 2023. 208 pages. $22.99/hardcover or eBook.

Friends can learn a lot from Indigenous peoples and their worldviews. In very broad terms, most Indigenous people see the cosmos not only as circular but more as a web with countless interconnections (“web” being the term Kaitlin B. Curtice, an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, employs throughout her latest book). Thus, a change made to one part of the web spawns a cascading effect on other parts and the web as a whole—possibly strengthening it or leading to collapse.

Curtice’s Living Resistance is about the many connections that exist across time, distance, and space. Her concern is that we are letting those connections wither to the detriment of us all. And so we must resist in all ways possible.

She breaks down her argument into four parts or “realms”: Personal, Communal, Ancestral, and Integral. Each of the first three expands her orbit, while the fourth encircles it, pulls it all together, and establishes the wholeness referred to in her subtitle. Rendering this wholeness visual, the intriguing cover art by Alanah Astehtsi Otsistohkwa Jewell (Bear Clan, Oneida Nation) portrays Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon overseeing the realms in the form of a wreath surrounding a Venn diagram that unites them.

Within these four parts are 20 short chapters that cover different means of resistance: Art in the Personal realm, Kinship in the Communal, Generosity in the Ancestral, Prayer in the Integral, and so on. Curtice defines “resistance” as “the way we use our everyday lives to exert energy against the dangerous status quo of our time.” And the resistance she proposes is positive; it “cannot only be about what we are against.”

There are other elements to which Quakers can relate. Curtice believes we are all seekers, bringing to mind that one of the early names for the Religious Society of Friends was “Seekers of (or sometimes ‘after’) the Truth,” and reminding us that this is what we should be. A refrain in her book is “I am a human being. I am always arriving.” Whether “arriving” connotes a conclusion to that implied journey (another frequent metaphor) can be debated, but “always” suggests there is never really an end to it.

The author concludes each chapter with one or more “Resistance Commitments” that are clearly reminiscent of Friends’ advices and queries. For example, wrapping up the “Solidarity Work as Resistance” chapter is the following: “Dive deep into your online spaces, your bookshelves, and the gatherings and institutions you’re part of. How are disabled people treated? How can you speak to that?” An attentive reading of this book will prompt serious introspection: What do we believe, and what are we doing about it?

I would have appreciated more thorough and precise definitions of frequently used “50-cent words” like liminality and decolonization, and Curtice sometimes detours into abstractions and repetition. But there is much here for Friends to ponder, absorb, and act upon. She ties a bow at the end with a prose poem whose opening line is “How do we resist?” Here are some of the ways: “by telling the truth . . . meditating when things get hard . . . challenging what we think we know . . . sending flowers to a tired friend . . . honoring this moment, this time, this embodiment. This is living resistance.”

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A member of Ottawa (Ont.) Meeting, a semi-retired writer, editor, reviewer, and journalism teacher, Neal Burdick attends Burlington (Vt.) Meeting and lives gratefully on Abenaki ancestral lands along Lake Champlain.