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A genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force-water-through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers
For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing-in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water?
So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience-and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.
Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet-one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Listening in Our Present Moment
Sintering
Gizhiigokwe & Chi'Mikinag
Mappings of the Liminal
Un-mappings Leading to Everywhere and Nowhere
Pinery Road and Concession 11
"Where My Mother Held Me"
Bull Frogs, Cattails and Water Lilies
Flooding: Scaling Up Our Dreams
Maps to Statelessness
Gizhwewaatiziwin
Twenty Years A Blockade
Recapturing
Nibi as Coalition
Nibi and The Practice of Unknowing
Escaping the Container
Seeing the Forest from the Lake
Gchi Gaming
Betrayals
Incommensurability
Melting, Freezing, Sintering, Sleeping
Theory of Water
About the author
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and artist who is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh. For the past two decades, as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured extensively at universities across Canada and the United States. She is also the author of eight books, including the nonfiction A Short History of the Blockade; the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize; and the novel This Accident of Being Lost, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, was a national bestseller and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.
