Ep 111: Living Resistance: A Call for These Times with Poet Kaitlin Curtice

In a world heavy with heartbreak and injustice, I’ve been searching for ways to stay grounded in my humanity…ways to resist not only despair, but also the systems of harm and oppression around us.

My guest today, Kaitlin Curtice, calls this practice living resistance. Kaitlin is an award-winning author, poet, and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation who writes and speaks at the intersections of spirituality, identity, and collective healing. Through her work, including her book Living Resistance and her upcoming release Everything Is a Story, she invites us to become more fully ourselves, to honor the gifts we already hold, and to let those gifts ripple out in love, courage, and care for the world.

Her life has been shaped by liminality, existing between her Native American heritage and a Southern Baptist Christian upbringing. This in-between space has given her a unique lens on how we find belonging and move toward healing in a fractured world.

In our conversation, Kaitlin shares how resistance is not a single act but a continuous practice of becoming and being. She reflects on how it can be gentle and fierce, personal and political, and she offers practices for grounding ourselves in the midst of life’s spiral journeys. We closed with her Resistance Commitment—a poetic call to action that reminds us that living resistance means tending to our inner lives while courageously shaping our collective future.

I’m so grateful to my friend and former guest Rachel Macy Stafford, who first connected me to Kaitlin. Rachel’s dedication to Kaitlin in this episode captures what Kaitlin offers the world—a call to link the best parts of ourselves so we can move forward together.

Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• Growing up in liminality, navigating the complexity between Native American and Southern Baptist cultures
• The cyclical, spiral nature of growth and how we revisit challenges with new wisdom
• Discovering your unique voice and purpose through what has “always been there for you”
• Living resistance as a daily practice, using our everyday lives to push back against injustice and nurture a sense of  wholeness
• Embodiment practices that can reconnect you with your body after trauma
• How rock climbing became Kaitlin’s  family’s  practice for presence and connection
• Building community in both physical and virtual spaces and the importance of “third places” where you can be fully yourself
• Seasonal living as an alternative to linear goal-setting
• The power of words, poetry, and storytelling as forms of spiritual activism and as sources of healing 

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 and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing. 

As an inter-spiritual advocate, Kaitlin participates in conversations on topics such as colonialism in faith communities, and she has spoken at many conferences on the importance of inter-faith relationships. Kaitlin leads workshops and retreats, as well as lectures and keynote presentations, ranging from panels at the Aspen Climate Conference to speaking at the Chautauqua Institution and at universities, private retreat centers, and churches across the country. 

In 2020 Kaitlin’s award-winning book Native: Identity, Belonging and Rediscovering God won Georgia Author of the Year in the religion category. Native explores the relationship between American Christianity and Indigenous peoples, drawing on Kaitlin’s experiences as a Potawatomi woman.

In 2023, Kaitlin released two books, first, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, which examines the journey of resisting the status quo of hate by caring for ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth, and second, her first children’s book called Winter’s Gifts: An Indigenous Celebration of Nature, which is the premier book in a series of four books on the four seasons coming out with Convergent, RandomHouse Books. Her second book in the series called Summer’s Magic was released in 2024.

Besides her books, Kaitlin has written online for Sojourners, Religion News Service, On Being, SELF Magazine, Oprah Daily, and more. Her work has been featured on CBS and in USA Today. She also writes essays and poetry for The Liminality Journal and spends her time supporting other authors as they navigate the world of publishing. Kaitlin lives near Philadelphia with her partner, two dogs, and two kids.