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.

About the Author

LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician, and is a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Leanne is the author of eight books, including A Short History of the Blockade and the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies which was short listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize. This Accident of Being Lost was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Rehearsals for Living, a collaboration with Robyn Maynard, is a national bestseller and was short listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction.

Reviews

"Leanne Simpson's Theory of Water offers quiet meditations on what it means to believe in water, Nibi. Water has its own time, ontology, and theory and practice of change. If we listen carefully, as Simpson does, it can teach us to be patient. The transformations of water from solid, liquid to gas are sometimes quick, like snow melting in the Spring, and other times, unfold over countless generations like a glacier carving its way across the land. The answers water provides are healing, regenerative, and flowing in ways that breach and dissolve the rigid social hierarchies of colonialism and capitalism. Simpson asks herself and thus the reader, do you believe in water?"
-Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

"Theory of Water builds a case for deep relationality. Rather than a law-like form of kinship, or model and theory of interdependance or an account of transactions apportioning material and social worlds, this is a leaky, boundary defying and rich account of how we come into being through water and sinter; attach to, stay alive with this crucial, transitional and shifting fractal form. Grounded in Anishnabe thought and history Simpson scales up from the fractal to offer us a theory and model also of internationalism, of social and political intercommunalism and permeability occasioned also by water, as mode of transport, as a connector of worlds, regions, life forms. This is a model of Indigenous political thought that refuses all enclosures. Theory of Water enacts an intellectual and political history and diplomacy of the present that calls for shared journeys and shared futures."
-Audra Simpson, author, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

Praise for Rehearsals for Living:

"What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book."
-Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough

"Rehearsals for Living is a profound and sublime work of memory, witnessing, refusal, dreaming. In the trenchant tradition of Black and Indigenous feminisms, this brilliant book moves us away from the language of crisis or victimhood to the precise and intimate encounters of kinship and liberation. The letters between Maynard and Simpson magnificently shapeshift and engage on multiple levels, and in doing so, rigorously demand an accounting for horrific violences while illuminating lives and worlds anew. A masterclass in literary form, ethical orientations, and collective futures."
-Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

"The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world."
-Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

"This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking."
-Dionne Brand, poet, novelist, and essayist

"Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they've enacted in their labors and loves for years-this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations-retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again."
-Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem

Book Information
ISBN 9798888903681
Author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Haymarket Books
Publisher Haymarket Books