Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, musician, and member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario. Her work develops Nishnaabeg intellectual and political traditions as a contemporary practice — refusing the settler-colonial frame’s positioning of Indigenous traditions as past-oriented or culturally-protected residues. She is a faculty member at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning and has published across academic, literary, and musical registers.

¶Core ideas

• Indigenous resurgence. The constructive political-ethical practice of revitalizing Indigenous traditions as living, contemporary practices — not as preservation of cultural heritage but as ongoing political-intellectual production. Distinguished sharply from the politics of recognition (which would seek settler-state acknowledgment of Indigenous identity).
• Grounded normativity. Indigenous ethical-political life rooted in land-based practices — the obligations and orientations that arise from relations to specific territories and the nonhuman beings who inhabit them. Distinguished from abstract normativity that floats free of place.
• Nishnaabeg internationalism. The contemporary international relations of Indigenous nations as nations — across borders, with each other, and with non-Indigenous polities — operating in a different register than settler-state-mediated international relations.
• Refusal of recognition-based politics. Following Coulthard’s analysis: recognition by the settler state operates as a technology of governance, requiring the Indigenous subject to make themselves intelligible in the colonizer’s categories. Resurgence turns away from recognition and toward the practices, languages, and land-based relations that constitute Indigenous political life on its own terms.
• Story, ceremony, kinship as theoretical form. Simpson’s writing refuses the settler-academic separation between scholarly argument and Indigenous narrative-ceremonial form. The story is the theory; the ceremony is the politics; the kin-network is the polity.

¶Key works

• Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (ed., 2008)
• Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (2011)
• Islands of Decolonial Love (2013)
• This Accident of Being Lost (2017)
• As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017)
• A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin (2021)
• Multiple albums (Theory of Ice, F(l)ight) integrating Nishnaabeg storytelling with contemporary musical forms

¶Where her work figures in this library

Simpson is foundational for temporal-middle, settlerism-and-the-cybernetic-subject, and the industrial-intellectualism critique. Her grounded-normativity concept is one of the alternatives the cybernetic-postliberal account holds open against the closure claim.