Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Works

• 2011Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence

  Draws on Nishnaabeg stories, language and teachings of elders to describe decolonisation as the rebuilding of Indigenous ways of living rather than as a demand addressed to the state.

• 2017As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance

  Argues that settler colonialism is a structure of dispossession and that Indigenous freedom requires “radical resurgence”: land-based ways of life and knowledge, the rejection of extractivism and of heteropatriarchy, and solidarity with Black struggles.

Position

Simpson is on the map as a leading theorist of Indigenous resurgence: the turn away from seeking recognition, rights and reconciliation from the settler state towards rebuilding Indigenous nations on their own terms. “Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back” (2011) develops the idea from Nishnaabeg stories, language and treaty traditions; Glen Coulthard built on it in “Red Skin, White Masks” (2014), and Simpson in turn took up Coulthard’s concept of “grounded normativity”, the ethics generated by land-based practices and knowledge, on which the two wrote jointly in 2016. In “As We Have Always Done” (2017) Simpson describes settler colonialism as a structure of dispossession that targets land and Indigenous bodies, and calls for “radical resurgence”: land-based life and learning, a refusal of extractivism – including the extraction of Indigenous ideas –, the rejection of heteropatriarchy and alliances with Black radical thought. The essay “Land as Pedagogy” (2014) argues that Nishnaabeg intelligence is produced in relationships with the land, so that learning on the land is itself education and theory. “As We Have Always Done” received the Best Subsequent Book award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Life & context

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was born in 1971 and is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario. Simpson studied biology at the University of Guelph and at Mount Allison University and took a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Manitoba. Alongside academic study Simpson learned from Nishnaabeg elders, among them Doug Williams (Gidigaa Migizi). Simpson has taught at several universities, among them as a visiting scholar at McGill University and in 2017 as a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), and is on the faculty of the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in the Northwest Territories, a land-based university programme. With the Kino-nda-niimi Collective Simpson co-edited “The Winter We Danced” (2014) on the Idle No More movement. Simpson is also a writer of fiction and poetry and a musician: the novel “Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies” was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 2020, the album “Theory of Ice” for the Polaris Music Prize in 2021, and “Theory of Water” received the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction in 2025.

Further main works

• Islands of Decolonial Love (stories and poems, 2013)
• Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation (Decolonization 3, 2014)
• Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (novel, 2020)
• Rehearsals for Living (with Robyn Maynard, 2022)