Leanne Simpson
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. Her work centers Nishnaabeg intellectual traditions as living systems of knowledge, governance, and education — not as historical artifacts to be preserved but as ongoing practices of freedom.
Core ideas
- land-based education: education rooted in relationship with land, water, and the more-than-human world. Land is not a backdrop for learning but a co-teacher and source of theory [@simpson_AsWeHaveAlwaysDone_2017].
- Resurgence: Indigenous freedom comes through the regeneration of Indigenous practices, governance, and relationships — not through recognition by colonial institutions.
- Intelligence as relational: knowledge arises from and is accountable to networks of relationships — with land, with community, with ancestors, with other-than-human beings.
- Refusal of extraction: settler colonialism extracts resources, labor, and knowledge. Indigenous resurgence involves refusing extractive logics, including in scholarship and education.
Notable works
- As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017)
- Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence (2011)
- Islands of Decolonial Love (2013, short stories)
Related
- Linda Tuhiwai Smith — also works on decolonizing knowledge systems
- land-based education — the pedagogical practice she theorizes
- Indigenous resurgence — the political framework she develops
- Glen Coulthard — fellow theorist of resurgence and grounded normativity
- Refusal — the practice of declining extractive logics