11. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

I finished rereading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies last night. It’s the third time I’ve read it, and the second time I’ve taught it. I think it’s incredible: smart, bold, strange, experimental. What makes it those things? Well, the way it brings prose and poetry together, for one thing. The position of its narrator, Mashkawaji: they are at the bottom of a lake (I’m guessing Rice Lake, near Peterborough, but I could be wrong), frozen, decomposed, but also able to experience and/or remember the lives of their friends. The fact that it presents a collective experience, rather than the story of a single individual. Its focus on Indigenous resistance and resurgence, which isn’t surprising if you’ve read Simpson’s theoretical work. The way it uses Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibway language, without explanations or apologies. The way it uses plural English pronouns to convey what it might be like to experience the world through a language which, like Anishinaabemowin, doesn’t use gendered pronouns. The chapter in which geese consider what it means to migrate, which becomes an allegory (I think) for what forms Indigenous resistance and resurgence might take. The final chapter’s focus on communal experience. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that Mashkawaji is the narrator of those last two chapters, and I don’t think that it matters, because Noopiming isn’t just Mashkawaji’s story. In fact, we need to pay close attention to the text if we’re going to going to learn how they ended up in the lake. (Hint: it’s not a happy story.) The mix of tenderness and biting satire. It’s all quite amazing.

And, yes, it’s difficult because it’s strange. I know that my students have never read anything like it, and I walk them through the text, slowly, encouraging them not to try to domesticate its strangeness by thinking of it as a ghost story, for instance, or a dream narrative. Those interpretations might fit parts of the text, but by seeing it through those frames, we end up whittling away the features that make Noopiming so radical. Let the strange be strange: that’s my motto. Don’t make the strange be normal. That creates distortions.

That word in the title, Noopiming, means something like “in the bush” in Anishinaabemowin. That word, and the reference to White Ladies, and Simpson’s geographical location in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Ontario), and the note in the novel’s acknowledgements, indicate that in part this book is a response to the writing of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, two English sisters who were settlers nearby in the 1830s and wrote famous memoirs about the experience. The land where they homesteaded belonged to the Anishinaabe, Simpson’s ancestors. I’m not sure why I’m using the past tense in that sentence; it still does belong to the Anishinaabe. One way to think about Noopiming is to consider it a response to their accounts of homesteading, their easy acceptance of their right to the land–and by extension the easy acceptance we settlers have in relation to our right to the land we occupy.

This is likely the last time I’ll get to teach Noopiming, and I’m sad about that, but I’m also happy I’ve had a chance to read and reread it, and to introduce students to it. And, maybe to introduce readers of this blog to it, too.