You Can’t Discover Someone’s Home | Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Stuck Brains, and the Faith We Learned as Kids

In this pop-in episode between seasons, Kristen honors Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the nations who were on this land long before Columbus and who are still here today. Columbus landed here, yes. But how does anyone discover a place where people had already lived for thousands of years? That question opens a bigger one: why do our brains hold so tightly to what we learned as kids, even when new information tells a fuller story?

In this episode:

• Three simple reasons our brains resist changing our minds: we’re wired to save energy, we treat a threatened belief like a threatened body, and our beliefs are tied to our belonging
• Why the tight stomach we feel when history gets bigger isn’t proof the new information is wrong
• The Doctrine of Discovery: how church documents in the 1400s gave Christian rulers permission to claim inhabited land, how that logic reached U.S. law in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), and why the Vatican didn’t formally repudiate it until 2023
• How we do the same thing with what we learned about God in Sunday school, and why questioning it can feel like betrayal even when we’re moving toward Jesus
• Metanoia, Romans 12:2, and Peter in Acts 10: Scripture expects us to change our minds
• Honoring the Indigenous peoples of this land, whose story didn’t end in 1492

Reflection question: What’s one thing you learned as a kid, about history or about God, that your body defends before your mind has a chance to weigh it?

Share your answer with me on Threads or Substack. Find the post for this episode (86) and join the conversation there.

Whose land are you on? Text your zip code to (907) 312-5085 to learn which Indigenous nation’s land you live on. Then go learn directly from Indigenous voices, not just about them.

Referenced: Kaplan, Gimbel & Harris (2016); the Doctrine of Discovery (Dum Diversas, 1452; Inter Caetera, 1493); Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823); Vatican statement on the Doctrine of Discovery (2023); Acts 10:34; Romans 12:2

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

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Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

RESOURCES:

www.kristenabrock.com