Tag: wâhkôhtowin

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.

50. Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step

I’ve been practicing mindfulness in a small way since the beginning of January, mostly by practicing guided walking meditation, and I realize I’m at the very beginning of understanding it. I’ve learned from those guided meditations, and from podcasts, but I haven’t read much about it, and since reading is the primary way I take in information, that’s a significant problem. For that reason, on the train to Ottawa yesterday I opened the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. I thought it would help me understand more about mindfulness, and it did.

Born in Vietnam in 1926, Hanh became a monk at the age of 16. He came to the United States in the 1960s as an anti-war activist. The Vietnamese government wouldn’t let him return home, and he established the Plum Village centre in France. Peace Is Every Step is a collection of published and unpublished writings, lectures, and informal talks, edited by Arnold Kotler and others. It probably shouldn’t be read in one go, as I did; instead, it should probably be read one chapter at a time, like a daily devotional text. The advantage of reading it the way I did, though, is that it might be easier to take in what makes sense and leave the rest out. At least, that’s my claim.

Peace Is Every Step is organized in three sections. The first, “Breathe! You Are Alive” is like a mindfulness primer, with short chapters on breathing mindfully, walking meditation (I’ve been doing it wrong by walking too quickly, although I’ve found it helpful anyway), and approaching other daily activities, like driving, cooking, washing dishes, and eating, in a spirit of mindfulness. The second section, “Transformation and Healing,” considers personal development, with a particular focus on dealing with anger and other difficult emotions by accepting them with love and compassion, and then looking to find their root causes. It’s good advice, and it echoes the way some psychologists, like Tara Brach, suggest that we recognize, acknowledge, investigate, and nurture ourselves and our emotions when we are in the grip of powerful feelings, instead of taking them out on ourselves and those around us.

The final section, “Peace Is Every Step,” applies mindfulness to larger social or political issues, such as the environment, war, and various forms of inequality. There, Hanh advises readers to carry themselves according to their political goals, so that people advocating for peace ought to avoid anger or hatred, and people advocating for sustainability ought to focus on the interconnectedness of all things. “Our body is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin,” he argues; it includes the air we breathe and the sun that allows everything on this planet to live. “There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us,” he writes, “from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean, to the movement of a galaxy millions of light-years away.” That emphasis on relationship reminds me of the Plains Cree or nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which means something like “kinship relationality,” although that dry phrase misses all of its nuances, including the way it suggests a physical attitude of walking while bending over towards the earth’s living creatures. I’m not claiming any stronger connection than what my mind creates, and I’m aware that my interest in both wâhkôtowin and mindfulness could be written off as a form of appropriation, even though I think both might help us avoid destroying the world around us and, thereby, ourselves. I saw parallels between Hanh’s discussions of dying rivers and Robert Macfarlane’s recent book Is a River Alive? If a river can die, then it must also have the capability of being alive, too. It only stands to reason.

I’ve picked up other books by Thich Nhat Hanh, mostly (like this one) with titles that suggest (literally or figuratively) walking, and now I’ll make a point of reading them. I also want to thank my friend Roberta Laurie, whose Facebook posts about Hanh introduced me to his thinking. Imagine, social media as a force for good! Don’t tell the techbros, or they’ll block the word “mindfulness” the way they’ve blocked links to Canadian news media.