Month: April 2026

21. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead

Theory of Water is an important, often beautiful book that outlines a Nishnaabeg theory of relationality, using water, or Nibi, in all of its forms (liquid, solid as ice or snow, gas) as its primary example. It thinks about the fundamental importance of connections between humans, and between humans and other creatures, all of whom have agency and spirit, and between humans and the land, and the way our political and economic structures violate those relations by turning everything that exists into objects from which value can be extracted. “Nibi is speaking through action, critiquing by making an alternative,” Simpson writes. “Nibi’s theory, the theory of water, is a scathing indictment of every part of the death machine that has led to this present moment”:

Nibi rains down on capitalist scaffoldings, revealing captured beings who are separated from the network of life, their value in terms of capital extracted, their bodies withering into disposability. Spruce, pine, hemlock and Douglas fir, their woody bodies destroyed into lumber or pulp. Prairies tortured into farmland. Rivers incarcerated into hydroelectric dams. Land confiscated into highways, roads, pipelines, railways, housing, golf courses and parks. Gold-silver, nickel-copper, copper-zinc, lead-zinc, iron, molybdenum, uranium, potash and diamond captured and mined. Shale arrested into oil, gas and bitumen. Salmon, herring and halibut dispossessed from oceans.

All of that destruction, torture, incarceration, confiscation, capture, and dispossession define the world we have built, the world of the Anthropocene. And by “we” I, and Simpson, mean settlers, Europeans, white people, since we’ve been in the driver’s seat for the past couple of centuries. We’ve built the “death machine” she describes. We’re its temporary beneficiaries.

Nibi is an emblem of resistence, of relationship, of giving, of the coming together Simpson calls “sintering,” a central term in her argument. Sintering refers to the way that snowflakes bond to each other on the ground, forming “a snowpack—a denser, more compact, linked formation.” “[T]he first thong a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbours,” she writes. Sintering becomes a metaphor that describes the intricate and powerful web of relationships formed by people in Indigenous societies, and between those people and the world around them, and between the animate and inanimate creatures in that world. Sintering might be essential to anti-colonial resistance; Simpson wonders if it “could play a role in grounding my method of solidarity, in strengthening and renewing connections across communities of struggle towards new constellations of co-resistance. Could sintering be a foundational concept for creating such constellations?” It seems likely, given Simpson’s insistence on the power of relationality.

Another key concept in Theory of Water is the shore, “a space of overlapping or interconnected worlds, of edges and zones and areas of intensive transition.” Shores “are places of diversity and abundance” for more-than-human creatures, and “places of meeting, decision-making, ceremony and diplomacy” for people. They are also “sites of constant transformation.” In the ruderal world we have created—disturbed and hostile to life, as Bettina Stoetzer argues—the shoreline is also a place of resistance: “As cottagers and homeowners use herbicide, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, ducks, geese and fish replant. As landowners rope off, curate and alter, birds, fish, insects and Nishnaabeg violate” (78). Shorelines are therefore “rich sites of mino-bimaadiziwin,” of good living, of regeneration and “synergistic knowledge” that, in contrast to the colonial death machine, “which always ends and diminishes life,” “brings forth more life.” Life was abundant in her nation’s territory before the arrival of settlers, who have built dams and waterways, disturbing the cycles and equilibriums that fostered that abundance, extirpating some creatures (eels, for instance) and causing the populations of others to collapse (wild rice) with cascading effects on the world and her people.

Simpson might be suspicious about my interest in her book. Take my use of the Anishinaabewin word “mino-bimaadiziwin,” or the fact that much of my book Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, thinks about the Plains Cree or nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which means “kinship relationality” according to the online dictionary I rely on, but that actually means, according to the poet Louise Halfe–Skydancer, something more like “walking bent over towards the ground greeting our relations.” “Extracting a single concept or phrase out of our complex knowledge systems, taking it out of embodied practice and placing it in text, translating it, often literally, into English, and then repeating it in all kinds of different contexts results necessarily in dilution,” she contends, leading to “complex ways of world building” being“reduced to paragraphs in studies, or to phrases, or even hashtags.” In addition, when Knowledge Holders share their teachings with settlers, their “understandings of the world are processed, depoliticized, sanitized and colonized into a form that is nearly unrecognizable.” It’s just another extractive process, one that delivers a phoney collaboration that serves to disrupt Indigenous resistance.

That argument reminds me of Stó:lō musicologist and art historian Dylan Robinson’s argument that all settler attempts at learning—about the world or about Indigenous Peoples—are extractive attempts “to understand and make accessible Indigenous ‘issues’ through settler logics.” Our bottomless appetites, our unbounded desire to consume absolutely everything, disqualify us from the kind of respectful, loving relationships Robinson and Simpson see as the primary ethical tenets of their nations’ philosophies. It’s as if, as I wrote in Walking the Bypass, we are like the cannibal monsters in Cree sacred stories, utterly devoid of relationships and defined by our hunger. For Simpson, “settlers under colonialism have never, ever been able to hear the expansive web of living things that we refer to as land, just as they have never heard Indigenous peoples.” Because of our ecocidal and genocidal behaviour, we appear to be, in Simpson’s view, people with whom relationship appears to be impossible. “Just because Nishnaabeg worlds are deeply relational does not mean we should be in relationship with everyone, and it especially doesn’t mean we should be in relationship with all the forces that attack mino-bimaadiziwin,” she states. “Quite the opposite.”

You might protest that description, but Simpson makes a good case for its accuracy, and the processes of extraction on Indigenous lands (and what part of this country isn’t on Indigenous lands?) seems to be accelerating. As I read, I was reminded of something the professor in a postcolonial literature course I took once, Jack Healy, said about what colonialism looks like from the perspective of the colonized. It is, he said, “a massive pile of black and brown bodies.” Simpson would agree with that description, but she would add the bodies of other creatures to it. That’s the reason this book is angry, legitimately so, and while sometimes that makes it hard to read, it’s necessary, too.

20. Chelsea Coupal, U Alive

I was supposed to read something else today: a thick academic book, important for my research and an interlibrary loan that must be returned next week, a book that will be impossible to finish unless I gather my wits and get to it. Instead, I read Chelsea Coupal’s new book of poetry, U Alive, because I went to her launch this afternoon and was so excited by her reading that I couldn’t wait.

These poems are lovely, sometimes funny, more often suffused with a sense of mortality even though the birth of Coupal’s daughter is one of the book’s recurring themes. Grandparents die, a friend dies, an owl and a cat are poisoned by eating mice killed by rodenticide, an eagle poses with the blood of a rabbit staining its face. Many of these poems are about the passage of time, leaving adolescence behind and becoming an adult. Parenthood is the final marker of that process.

I noticed fixed forms here, racking my brain to remember the definition of a pantoum. The calendar poems—12 of them, another indication of time’s flight—seem to be Coupal’s own invention, and I predict we’ll see more of them in work by other poets. When I saw them, flipping through my copy (a preorder, it arrived last week), I asked my colleague, an expert on fixed forms of poetry who happened to be sitting next to me, what they were. “I think they’re supposed to imitate the form of a calendar,” she said, kindly not shaming me for my inattention. Of course: each one bears the name of a month as its title. The book covers a year, but a year of memories, not a fixed chronology. There are other forms of counting here, too; the body count poem “What’s Your Number,” for example. And I thought only old people were so attentive to how little time is left. “We are all walking past / the rust of the past, walking / into dust,” Coupal writes in “Bone Patterns.” Indeed.

What I love about books like this is learning about experiences I’ve never had and never will have: being a woman, growing up in rural Saskatchewan, navigating a world where I’m judged by my looks by sometimes predatory men (see “On My Appearance”) or my sexual availability, giving birth. Isn’t that the point of literature? I want to hear about the lives of people who aren’t like me. U Alive gives that to me, in lines that make me laugh and gasp out loud. Now I want to reread Coupal’s first book, Sedley.

It’s almost the end of poetry month. If you haven’t read any poetry yet, please consider looking for one you might like. Poetry has a reputation for being hard to understand (my students usually think that’s the case), but it doesn’t have to be. Try this one, for instance, which is included in U Alive. Where it gets strange, at the end, just listen to the music of the words without demanding it make immediate sense. But be careful—you might want to read more.

19. Barbara Lounder, Becoming Corona Walker

I met Barbara Lounder at the Walking’s New Movements conference in Plymouth, UK, in the fall of 2019. She and her husband, Robert Bean, were very kind; they even invited me for dinner with Hamish Fulton, the renowned walking artist. Barbara and I have kept in touch since then, and when she let me know she had published a chapbook as part of her Corona Walker exhibition at Hermes Gallery in Halifax, I immediately sent an e-transfer. The chapbook arrived two weeks ago, and since it’s so short (someday I want to publish a chapbook!), I moved it to the top of my TBR pile, which is actually multiple piles, heaps really: okay, a hoarding situation that requires outside help.

Anyhow, this chapbook is beautiful, which isn’t a surprise, since Barbara is a sculptor and installation artist, who also does walking performances and social practice work. She and Robert both taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for many years. My point is that books by artists tend to be beautiful, and I’m a sucker for beautiful objects. This is a work of art, and like a limited edition print, my copy is numbered: 7/100.

One of the exciting things about this chapbook is the inclusion of two tintypes! One is a photograph of a young girl in the nineteenth century; she represents Corona Walker, the subject of the exhibition for which this chapbook was produced. The other is an image of Barbara and Robert. Here they are:

My photograph is terrible–I freely admit it!–but at least I managed to keep my fingers, which were holding the book open, out of the frame.

The Corona Walker project has been in the works for nearly 35 years. In 1992, Barbara noticed a broken headstone in a cemetery in Dartmouth, where she and Robert live, that bore the name “Corona Walker,” who was born in 1870, just after Confederation, and died in 1889. She has left few historical records, aside from her headstone, which looks rather substantial in the photograph included in the chapbook, a death announcement in the Halifax Morning Herald, and a brief mention of her funeral in a contemporary’s journal. The marble headstone has been repaired, but the inscription underneath the young woman’s dates of birth and death has been obscured by time and weather and lichen.

During the Covid-19 novel coronavirus pandemic, when Nova Scotia was locked down and walking paths closed, Barbara and Robert took to walking in that cemetery. The juxtaposition of the words “corona” and “walker” caught Barbara’s attention. She began researching this unknown young woman, thinking imaginatively about what her life might’ve been like. Because, for instance, she might’ve been named after the sun’s corona during a lunar eclipse, there’s a photograph of a 2024 eclipse (by Robert) included in the book. According to the Hermes Gallery, along with this chapbook, the exhibition that came out of this project, Diadem, included found objects, photographs, and a poem. The show has come down now, and I didn’t see it, but the chapbook gives me a sense of what it might’ve been like.

There are two essays in this chapbook, one by Barbara and one by Robert. Hers shows how what we know about Corona Walker’s life, which is very little, enabled her to think in many different directions, exploring nineteenth-century Nova Scotia, the ways the colonialism and industrialism and environmental devastation shaped the city where she lives, the connections between Dartmouth and the Triangle Trade I remember learning about in elementary school (enslaved Africans sent to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations, the sugar shipped north and exchanged for dried cod, the dried cod sent south to feed those enslaved workers), the diseases that might’ve carried off an 18-year-old woman. “This is my intangible heritage,” she writes, the absent, invisible, silent existence of people I cannot know.” I found the multiple directions this one brief life carried Barbara to be fascinating. I wonder if one could pick any worn headstone in any cemetery and, through a combination of diligence, luck, and imagination, show how other lives and locations are woven together.

Robert’s essay is a brief, theoretical exegesis on the Corona Walker project: its connections to walking, deep time, and the absence of its central subject. The work constructs “a speculative history,” “an exploratory biography where no chronicle exists. The writing approaches the presence of an absence.” Why does Corona Walker–or the other souls resting in that cemetery–matter? “The past haunts the present and defines the future.” Yes, it does. I’m reminded of the Regina Indian Industrial School cemetery on Pinkie Road, a place I wrote about in Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, and the way that place, and the 38 First Nations children buried there, have shaped the present in this city, this province. For decades, those graves were unmarked; the cemetery was located far from where the school was, now the site of a youth-detention facility. So many forgettings, and yet the haunting continues. It would continue, I think, even without any tangible sign of the past. It would just be harder to see. But if we look carefully, we’ll begin to notice, to understand.

Becoming Corona Walker is the result of that kind of careful looking. If you would like a copy, you can find the artist’s email address online. Perhaps some unsold copies are left.

18. Ann de Forest, editor, Ways of Walking

I was on a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago, learning more about a walking workshop I’ll be part of in early May. I recognized the name of one of the other participants: Ann de Forest. Don’t I have a book by her? I asked myself. When the call ended, I went looking. Yes, there it was: Ways of Walking. It’s been a while since I read something about walking. Why not give Ways of Walking a try?

What’s a good metaphor to describe the collection of personal essays? A buffet, a smorgasbord, a feast? (It’s getting close to supper time–can you tell?) The 26 authors included show how moving through the world on foot is connected to so many other aspects of experience, individual and collective and both together: grief, curiosity, memory, connection, anger, caretaking, assault. Ever asked yourself what it might be like to walk through Philadelphia–many but not all of the essays here describe walking in that city, the home of its editor–if you’re African American? Wonder what it’s like to walk in places that have been colonized? Want to know about walking and disability, or walking and illness, or walking and injury? As a woman, if that’s not how you identify? Thinking about walking and pilgrimage? All of that, and more, is included here. The writers aren’t shy about giving credit to their literary forebears, either. Thoreau makes multiple appearances, as does Virginia Woolf; the Little Prince shows up, as does Hart Crane, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gertrude Stein, and Aphra Behn. Ways of Walking is a rich collection of perspectives and references.

Some of the thinking here caught me unawares. For instance, Justin Coffin, in the final essay suggests that there are “two kinds of great journeys: we are either Theseus escaping the labyrinth or Odysseus trying to get home.” I want to steal that idea. David Hallock Saunders remembers walking games his father played with him in Los Angeles when he was a boy, games that recall the playful way that the Situationists and, more recently, psychogeographers like Phil Smith navigate the city. Ann de Forest’s essay about walking in Los Angeles encourages me to rethink what I imagine that city to be like. Ruth Knafo Setton, remembering walking with her late father, suggests that “[w]alking is an act of gratitude for our ability to perceive, to move with our bodies, and to see and absorb with our senses.” Walking gives Lena Popkin “two conflicting, almost clashing, emotions”: as a woman and a survivor of sexual assault (more and more it seems those two groups of people are one and the same, a Venn Diagram that overlaps completely), she feels “both apprehensive and calm, often in the same walk and sometimes at the same time.” Once again, I was reminded of how limited the notion of a text being “relatable” is. We ought to read to understand difference, not similarity–to learn something new, even if that’s difficult.

My favourite essay in this collection, I think, is Sharon White’s “Walking (Variations on Thoreau).” It’s a beautifully written braided essay, and I’m a sucker for beautifully written braided essays. Half of the time I wasn’t sure what was going on in White’s essay, and it didn’t matter:

In the pine forests it’s not a handicap to be alone. A group of fishermen give me a map. A ranger says I should have had an ice ax, but I don’t. I take a day or so to reach the ridge and then it’s splendor wherever I look. The chime of the wind crashing against my ears. In the morning I can’t see, my eyes pinned shut by bees. My first-aid kit is useless. But I can make it down to the series of clear sandy streams emptying into pools where I strip off my clothes and soak my bites in the water.

Had I not been on that Zoom call, had I not recognized de Forest’s name, this book would’ve stayed on its shelf, and I would’ve missed reading that paragraph. You just can’t predict what wonderful surprises are waiting for you.

By the way, this blog, like everything I write, doesn’t involve the use of any generative AI tools

Just that. I’m not using a technology that’s based in theft, has an outrageous environmental footprint, makes us stupid, causes mental illness, and serves to enrich fascist techbro billionaires.

Ever.

For more information, check out Andrea Bartz’s Substack. That’s one place where we can learn more about this technology. It’s not the only place, but it’s a starting point.