Category: Reading

27. Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

I brought Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma with me on this trip because a) it’s been on my desk for ages, and b) I live in a flat place (or so I thought, but not according to Masud’s use of that term), and c) I heard that it’s a book about walking. I’m happy I did. A Flat Place is a beautifully written, thoughtful articulation of living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). That’s not all this book is about, but it’s the beginning of a description of the territory it explores.

For Masud, literal flat places—she lives in UK, and the flat places she visits are the fens of Cambridgeshire, Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney—evoke both her interior emotional landscape and a place she regularly saw but never visited in Lahore, Pakistan, where she grew up. That flat place, a large field near her childhood home, occupies a huge place in her memory. It is, she explains, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, the base that her life stands upon, mostly because it was open and apparently unrestricted, two qualities that were absent from her life. Her father, a doctor, kept the family isolated from outsiders. He was perhaps paranoid, perhaps narcissistic—language Masud doesn’t use—and definitely angry, emotionally distant, threatening, and potentially violent. A raging man with firearms is frightening. Masud describes him as “a megalomaniac and a fantasist.” Her mother had experienced childhood trauma and may have been raped by her husband before their marriage; she could not protect her daughters from him. The rest of the household—it wasn’t a nuclear family; her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins lived in the tiny house—were just as emotionally disturbed. Her grandmother, for instance, was emotionally scarred by the years of turmoil caused by the Partition of British India into Hindu and Muslim states in 1948 and “married off at sixteen to a man who hardly spoke.” She once told Masud that hugging a baby will turn it into a weakling. Masud describes her Pakistani grandfather as “half mad.” Her other grandfather, who was Scots, took his own life. The trauma on both sides of her family goes back generations, and for her Pakistani relatives, it’s part of the legacy of colonialism. Masud is infuriated by the blithe acceptance by white Britons of the trauma colonized and racialized people are simply supposed to accept. Nobody in her family is evil, just damaged, and even her father has his good points, but the result of the chaos and coldness, for Masud, is cPTSD.

Unlike regular PTSD, which typically results from some clearly marked horror, cPTSD is the result of many, even daily, small traumatic events, like the ones Masud experienced with her father. The trauma, following psychiatrist Judith Herman, is prolonged and repeated. But, because those events seem so minor, people with cPTSD often don’t understand how they could have had such an effect. But Masud was shaped by those daily events, the chronic lovelessness, the ongoing fear and rejection. When she was sixteen, her father told his wife and children to leave. Her older sister had committed some offence at university in Europe—a photograph was sent, and although we don’t get the details, it may have been sexually compromising in some way—and for whatever reason, he blamed them. I wonder if the sister was with another woman in the photo; Masud herself is queer, or seems to be. She saw him once more, eight years later. When he died, she felt little.

But she usually feels little. She has friends but finds intimate connections difficult. Her flat emotional life, her suicidal thoughts, suggests depression, but she has other symptoms: physical pain; stomach problems; derealization, a dissociative disorder; chronic freezing and fawning responses to stressful situations—which, for Masud and her strained nervous system, can be just about anything.

How does all of this relate to flat places? They have “always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me,” she explains. “Flat places have always given me a way to love myself.” They “quieter the thing in me that’s always crying,” she continues. The contradiction she sees in them—between everything being visible and there being nothing to see—sends a message that’s impossible to decode. “Flat landscapes ask us to tolerate not knowing things,” Masud tells us. “Not knowing what is beneath the surface, whether anything is. A flat landscape’s combination of complete exposure and complete withholding asks us to accept that there are things we’ll never understand.” By presenting us with this uncertainty, flat places “help us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘matter’”—and, for her, “they provide solace for someone who doesn’t experience conventionally heightened feeling.” They give her permission “to be numb, to be without feeling or desire.”

That’s a hard way to live, and in part Masud’s walks through flat places help her become less numb. And, in part Masud’s, they just provide her with the reassurance she describes. Even if she doesn’t feel emotions strongly, her writing is beautiful, absolutely stunning. I opened the book at random and found this paragraph about the Newcastle Moor, which I find lovely:

The cows were sometimes on one side of South Nuns Moor, sometimes on the other. People say that cows lie down when rain is coming. But the moor cows lay down, and stood up, and I found out that neither meant anything, in terms of the weather. Once I found three of them arranged in a kind of triskelion shape, tail to tail and gazing implacably out across the moor. “Hello, gorgeous!” I catcalled as I passed, and they said nothing.

The phrase “in terms of the weather” leaves open the possibility that the cows’ actions might have some other meaning, perhaps one known only to them—the “not knowing” she finds reassuring. And who hasn’t spoken to an animal or bird as they passed? I do that all the time, and while that might be unusual, I doubt that it is. Plus the word “triskelion”! The whole book is full of such writing. Masud is an award-winning scholar of twentieth-century literature, and her prose suggests that she might win other kinds of prizes, too.

A Flat Place is an original book that brings place and psychology and walking together. If you’re interested in any of those things, check it out.

26. Louise Bernice Halfe—Sky Dancer, wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration

Louise Halfe is an important poet; the former Saskatchewan poet laureate and parliamentary poet laureate’s work reveals the truth of residential schools and colonialism more generally, and the difficult work of recovery and restoring balance to individuals and communities, in ways that would cause the scales to drop from the eyes of the most entrenched denialist. And wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, her new collection of short essays and poems, is also (not surprisingly) essential.

The subtitle, especially the word “inspiration,” is the key. Inspiration is related to respiration, and for Halfe, inspiration flows like breath, in and out, a cyclical rhythm that’s linked to other cycles (the round of the seasons, for instance) and the wind. The book’s first poem refers to the wind’s “plaintive breath,” and the last one concludes, “I will be one / with their breath.” Those lines are about “the Night Sky Dancers,” the “Great Mystery” that nourishes Halfe constantly.

So much has happened to interfere with those relationships, to block both breath and inspiration: residential schools, lateral violence, colonialism, cultural genocide. wîhtamawik traces possibilities of recovery from those ongoing harms, through language and ceremony and creative expression. It presents us with layered connections, between the cycles of our bodies and our lives, and the greater cycles of the world that sustain us. It shares ethical truths from Plains Cree or nêhiyaw culture, ideals we would all do well to try to follow. It emphasizes a holistic approach to life, one that brings together our minds, bodies, spirits, and the earth. There’s a lot to think about here, and that thinking can only open up new possibilities, perhaps ones that lead towards the decolonization Halfe urges.

I will be in conversation with Halfe and poet and scholar Jesse Archibald-Barber at Artesian in Regina on the evening of Tuesday, May 19, as part of the Cathedral Village Arts Festival. It promises to be a productive discussion; if you’re in or close to Regina, please join us.

Dani Karavan, “Passatjes,” Portbou, Spain

Dani Karavan’s memorial to the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Passatjes, has been here in Portbou since 1994. Benjamin died here in 1940. Although he had a safe conduct pass that should’ve allowed him to cross Spain and enter Portugal, the police refused him entry. Because he was in poor health, he was allowed to remain in Portbou overnight. In the Hotel Francia, he took his life. His despair is understandable. As a Marxist and a Jew, the Nazis would certainly have murdered him—his brother was killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942—and he had already spent time in a French prison after the Nazis had revoked his citizenship, leaving him stateless. His plan was to join other emigré philosophers in the United States. One can imagine how he felt about discovering that his safe conduct (imagine what that had cost) was worthless, that he was being sent back to France to die. He’s as much a victim of the Holocaust as anyone else who the Nazis murdered.

Passatjes (the title refers to the German title of Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project) is situated on a hill above the bay, next to the cemetery where Benjamin’s remains rested for five years before the local man who was covering the rent on the crypt stopped paying, and Benjamin was removed and reinterred in a common grave.

Passatjes works on many levels, literally and metaphorically. I first approached it, accidentally, from below (I missed the signs that point tourists in the right direction), where it looks like a chute, part of a mine or a smelter, poised to dump rock or molten metal onto the road (and onto me). The rusty steel of which it’s constructed (Core-10, I think, although it’s not quite rusty enough for that) adds to the impression. I turned toward the bay and looked across at the buildings and the green and rocky hills on the opposite side. My perspective was open, unchanneled, I could look wherever I liked.

Then I walked back through the village, climbed the stairs, and followed the road to the memorial. There it was: a line of rusted steel plates across the parking lot; a darker patch of stone in the wall on the other side, facing the monument; and the steel tunnel and stairs that lead down the cliff, the bottom closed off by a sheet of plate glass. The description on the official website says there’s an olive tree, too, but I didn’t notice it, or at least I wasn’t sure which tree it is meant.

The form imitates the neighbouring cemetery, which is also built around stairs on the hillside, but where it is colourful and light and open, Passatjes is dark, somber, and enclosed. As visitors descend, their feet create deep, echoing hollow thuds; when the roof of the tunnel opens to the sky, turning the work into a steel trench, I heard the ghostly echoes of the voices of people above in the parking lot, which were somehow caught between the rusty walls. It’s chilly. The glass reflects the people on the stairs, dimly, while allowing us to see the relative and unreachable freedom of the bay below. The stairs continue past the glass; if it weren’t there, we could continue to descend until we fell to our deaths.

The text etched into the glass is ghostly, too, its words hard to make out against the light streaming through from outside, even on this cloudy day. The text etched into the glass at the bottom of the memorial’s stairs alludes to Benjamin’s second burial. It’s a quotation from Thesis 7 of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an essay published not long after his death. (He was carrying a heavy manuscript in his suitcase, one he said was more valuable than his own life, but it went missing after his death and has never been found. The quotation is in four languages: Spanish, Catalan, French, and English. Notably, deliberately, not German, the language Benjamin spoke, the language of the country of his birth. In English, it reads,

It is more difficult to honour the memory of the anonymous than the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have minded being placed among those who couldn’t afford a more noteworthy burial: the poor, refugees. Perhaps that’s a silly romantic notion.

I sat down at the bottom and thought about all the anonymous dead over the millennia, and the way that in a few years or short decades all of us will join Benjamin among them. It was all deeply moving.

Portbou is a cute little tourist village. Maybe Passatjes encourages more visitors; it’s hard to say. I did find a short pilgrimage of sorts, from the train station to the site of the Hotel Francia and the police station, and then the memorial. If I ever return to Barcelona, I’ll come to see Passatjes again.

25. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

Tim Ingold’s Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description has been on my bookshelf for several years, one of those books I’ve bought with every intention of reading and hadn’t opened. In fact, I think I bought it because someone recalled the copy I had borrowed from the library, which was also sitting on a shelf, unread. It’s not like I’m ignorant of his work: I quote one of his books on lines, and one of his essay on walking, in Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. However, I don’t know his work that well. Before I left for Spain and The Walking Assembly 2026, I put Being Alive into my daypack. Ingold was giving the keynote, which turned out to be a talk on rivers and the valleys through which they flow. That talk, and this book, have encouraged me to learn more.

Being Alive deserves more attention than a sleep-deprived traveller on trains and aircraft can give it, but its main point is that Ingold wants to bring anthropology back to life—to a study of movement, becoming, flow, process, habitation, rather than one of pausing, being, stasis, product, occupation. He’s big on such binaries, but that’s fine; they’re the stuff of academic argument. I wonder, though, if those binaries aren’t points on a spectrum.

Take Ingold’s distinction between the network and the meshwork. A network, he argues, is static. What matters there are the nodal points, the places where the lines of the network cross. The more lines that converge on a specific point, the more important that point must be. The lines connecting those points become less important. The meshwork, in contrast, is all about the lines of which it’s constituted, their flow, their energies. It’s a polemical position, an argument in favour of attending to fluidity (which is difficult; it’s so much easier to grasp phenomena that are understood as static, even if that understanding is flawed, rather than open-ended movement, the way it might be easier to comprehend a still photograph of a creature than the living, breathing creature as it moves around and avoids its observer, or that a published poem is easier to write about than an improvisation at a slam), and that’s fine, but the points where the lines cross have meaning, too. Perhaps it’s a shift in perspective or emphasis, and perhaps his argument is a necessary corrective.

Among other things I’m taking away from this book is a need to read Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gauttari, especially A Thousand Plateaus, another book which has been on one of my shelves for ages. Their ideas about lines are a big influence on Ingold. And, in a way I find charmingly honest, he notes how that book’s difficulty defeated him at first. Eventually, when he was ready for their thinking, he was able to understand it. Perhaps I’m finally ready. I would just need to find the time.

But I found the time to read this book, however imperfect my reading of it is, even if I finished it on a jolting local train from Barcelona to Portbou to see the Walter Benjamin memorial. And, I hope, have another café con leché.

Also, a bonus: Ingold was kind enough to sign my book. It’s now a little travel worn, but the creases and stains, along with the signature, might be considered signs of the journey I’ve been making.

La Sagrada Familia and 24. Gillian Jerome, Nevertheless: Walking Poems

Here’s something new: a walk paired with a book. I’ve never done this before.

La Familia Sagrada: does that count as a walk? Does it matter? I walked there; I walked around while I was there, listening to the audio guide; I’ll be walking back. Good enough for me.

What an incredible cathedral; what a testament to faith and human creativity and the sublime and the beautiful.

Here’s an odd coincidence: while in line for the Passion Tower, a woman behind me looked familiar. Where are you from? we asked each other. Susan lives in Saskatoon; we met at my book launch there in January.

I would’ve stayed longer, but I slept in (jet lag, I guess) and had trouble getting organized, and so I missed breakfast. By two in the afternoon, my stomach was making those noises and I had a headache. Time to find lunch.

Then, lunch: inexpensive and delicious—grilled vegetables, local garlic sausage, Greek yogurt with honey. And Gillian Jerome’s book, Nevertheless: Walking Poems.

I’ve been looking for things I might be able to teach in a course about walking and writing next winter, and before I left for Spain, I threw this book into my bag. I enjoyed it, particularly the way Jerome talks back to solitary, male walkers (Rilke, Rousseau) and instead sees walking as a way to connect with others. Not just the people she’s walking with: also passersby, people sitting or lying down whom she sees, people she remembers. She also realizes her links to the places where she’s walking—particularly their histories, but also their futures as the Anthropocene thunders onward. Jerome is a gardener, too; I included the photo I took of the lavender outside Sagrada Família because that’s one of the flowers she grows in her Vancouver yard. Caring for plants is another way to recognize our connections to the places where we live. So too, I just realized, is writing about them.

I don’t think Jerome would mind if I shared this lovely sonnet, “Poem for Autumn,” which I’m too lazy to type out, and since AI bots visit this blog daily, scraping text to feed themselves, it’s probably better to present it this way:

Lunch is finished. Time to pay up and return to my wandering.

23. Sadiqa de Meijer, Qaf’s People

Sadiqa de Meijer’s new book of poetry, Qaf’s People, deserves more attention than a man tired after a long day of travelling eating tapas and drinking beer at a restaurant in a square just off la Rambla in Barcelona can provide. I tried not to get grease on the pages; I think I succeeded. But the great thing about books is that they can be reread when one has more time and attention to give them. As I will be rereading this one.

These poems are beautiful and surprising. They are deeply personal; Qaf, a place in Iranian and Arab mythology, here comes to represent the home of people who are mixed, who have complicated cultural backgrounds, who might not resemble their parents, who receive racist abuse from people who look like their caregivers. That’s de Meijer’s experience, and her family, her personal history, is explored in this book. The poems are brave, too, but not because they’re personal. I can’t imagine writing poems with the syntax and line breaks displayed here. The boldness and inventiveness are remarkable. The women at the next table must’ve wondered why that North American kept saying “wow” throughout his dinner.

I’m a huge fan of de Meijer’s writing. This book increases my admiration for her work.

22. George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

I started reading George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo a few months back, but during the semester I find it almost impossible to read for pleasure. If I read all day, I don’t want to open a book when I get home. But the semester is over, and I’m flying to Spain for a workshop on walking art, and when I travel, I spend the dead time in airports and aircraft with a book. My bags end up heavier than I’d like, because they’re full of books. Yes, I could load them all onto my phone, and I do have quite a few on this device, but it’s not the same. When I get to Barcelona, I’ll probably mail home the ones I’ve finished. Including this one, which I started this morning and could not put down.

What an astonishing novel. Lincoln in the Bardo is like nothing I’ve ever read. The impossible imagination required to come up with the premise, never mind the ability to realize it and the astonishing research it required—I am flabbergasted.

It’s hard to describe the story without spoiling it, but I’ll try. Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over one night in 1862: the night after the funeral of Lincoln’s son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever. Lincoln is one of the characters, but we only see him indirectly, through quotations from histories and biographies (some actual, and some, I think, invented, but I could be wrong about that), and through the words of the ghosts trapped in the cemetery, unwilling to accept they’re dead and refusing to make their journeys to the spirit world. Willie is one of them. He wants to remain close to his father, to continue to experience his love. And Lincoln’s love for his children knows no limits.

It’s the lowest point of Lincoln’s life—Willie is dead, the Civil War is going badly, he’s facing tremendous criticism for the intensifying combat and the resulting casualties—but the resident spirits are having their own crises, too. Saunders is a Buddhist—I first heard of him when he appeared on Dan Harris’s meditation podcast, 10% Happier—and the book takes the ideas of non-attachment and the inevitability of suffering seriously. By clinging to life—their own, for the spirits, and Willie’s, for Lincoln—all the characters are increasing their pain. Only by accepting the impermanence of everything can suffering become manageable. “At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end,” one of the ghosts realizes, noting that it’s our nature to be “suffering, limited beings.” That seems accurate, even if it’s kind of a downer.

But Lincoln in the Bardo isn’t a Buddhist tract. By the end of, I cared deeply for all these odd characters, and found myself moved by what happens to them. It’s astonishing, given the number of characters (a note at the back says that the audiobook required 166 actors) and the strangeness of its structure. You might think that the filters between us and the characters—the fragments of history and (maybe) firsthand accounts, many of which disagree with each other; the oddness of the ghosts; the way Lincoln is presented through both halves of the narrative; the rendering of mid-nineteenth century English, in its formality and sometimes tortured orthography—might limit the novel’s emotional intensity, but they don’t.

No wonder this book won the Man Booker Prize. I can’t wait to read more from George Saunders.

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road wins a Saskatchewan Book Award!

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, took home the best nonfiction book award at last night’s Saskatchewan Book Awards. I was happy enough to be nominated; winning is incredible.

Links to an online retailer in the UK and the US and Canadian distributors are on my other site, if you’re interested in getting a copy. It’s also available in stores.

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.