Review: Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

I’ve read a few other books by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and loved them. This Accident of Being Lost and Islands of Decolonial Love are collections of short stories and poems that explore different aspects of connection, love and belonging from an indigenous perspective. These works showcase a writing style that is deeply personal, beautiful in its emotional intensity and particularity.

In The Theory of Water, Simpson leaves the realm of fiction and poetry to speak more overtly politically. While I found this premise interesting, I felt flat-footed: despite the title, this book is not a work of political or philosophical theory but a personal memoir. Simpson looks back on the process of grieving the loss of Doug Williams, an Elder and friend who guided her in reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. When writing figuratively — such as in her metaphor of sintering, that joining and mutual transformation of snowflakes that could form a basis for radical communal movement — Simpson’s prose is evocative and compelling, even in this non-fictional form.

However, her engagement with political theory left me disappointed. Works seemed haphazardly referenced, and were summarized subjectively: I recently read X and it made me think of Y. Her approving references to Gramsci and Aimé Césaire appeared carefully worded to give the impression they were opponents of communism, rather than committed communists with specific disagreements with specific communist parties. Her epistemology was also too irrationalist for my tastes (“Cyclical time comes from land. Linear time is a European construct that overlays cyclical time — a mechanism to organize the world in a homogeneous way to facilitate, of course, capitalism.”) Still, I found it interesting to see how she incorporated radical Black authors like Cedric Robinson into her vision for the radical indigenous movement.

Perhaps if I had gone into the book expecting a memoir, I would have appreciated it more for what it was than been disappointed for it not being what I wished for.

Review: This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The author seems to have put a lot of herself in this book. Or, at least, there are some intensely intimate passages that feel so neurotically and emotionally particular, and so I imagine the author has to have drawn a lot of these lines from the contours of her soul. Maybe she embellished a bit here, amplified a bit there, and twisted in strands from people she's known over these threads. Is it strange to move through the world when so many people know these pieces of your heart? Or, rather, imagine that they know these pieces of your heart?

The unifying themes of these short stories are love in the digital age and being indigenous while settler capitalism destroys the planet. In the first theme, Leanne explores modern experiences like the strange intimacy of online friendships, the overthinking that comes with 15-minute gaps between messages, the way interactions can be quantified and analyzed, the way the real world and the digital world bleed into each other. In the latter theme, Simpson shows rich examples of indigenous connection to the earth, not the sappy stereotyped "Mother Earth is so powerful. The water is so sacred" kind of platitudes settlers want to uplift (to quote a sarcastic line from the final short story), but what it means to feel connection to a place and to your ancestors, the struggles of weaving in modern living and tradition, and sharing these experiences with people.

Not every story or song was to my tastes, but the highlights were meaningful to me.

Review: Canada in the World by Tyler Shipley

Canada crafts a narrative about itself as peace-keeping nation, beloved around the world as a friendly force for good. Sure, Canada will reluctantly acknowledge a few stains on its reputation — activism around the residential school system and genocide of the First Nations has grown too loud to ignore. But these historical beats are seen as blemishes, unconnected to Canada’s broader national identity.

In Canada In The World, Tyler Shipley corrects this narrative, starting first with early settler relationships with First Nations to show the through-line between Canada’s settler colonial origins and its continued colonial exploitation domestically and abroad. Shipley emphasizes large structural forces like capitalism, industrialization, and material geopolitical interests, over individual personalities and cultural clashes. With this method, he builds a cohesive narrative that covers several centuries of history in just 500-odd pages. Shipley often takes explicit aim at Canada’s nation-building mainstays like Canada Heritage Minutes and grade 10 history texts, and weaves in familiar media and contemporary history and the occasional personal anecdote. He draws from a vast set of secondary and tertiary texts, summarizing their theses and contextualizing them into his overarching narrative. The result is a compelling, approachable text that should be, for now, the definitive introductory leftist text on Canadian international political history, with a bibliography that lends itself well to further study.

The book is strongest in its first half, which covers Canada’s settler colonial origins up through its tepid opposition to fascism in the mid-twentieth century. The latter half drags somewhat: Canada has been very active in the world during the so-called Cold War and the periods that followed it, supporting oppressive dictators (e.g. Chile) and overthrowing democratic socialist governments (e.g. Ecuador) with the goal of furthering its mining interests and aiding US imperialism. Shipley does an admirable job at trying to summarize the requisite history of dozens of nations to understand Canada’s role in these conflicts and connect them to the unifying theme of his book, but the goal of a comprehensive survey of such activities inevitably results in episodic vignettes packed with names and dates. Still the book compares favorably with Yves Engler’s Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (one wonders why Engler bothered at all; he draws from Shipley’s book as a source to create a fully inferior and redundant work), and would pair well with books like Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets and Vincent Bevins’ Jakarta Method, which provide more structure into the mechanisms of western foreign intervention.

It is too early to say how well the book will hold up since it was published in 2020. However, the relationship between Israel and Palestine has sharpened in the intervening years and Shipley staked out a position that would have been quite bold just five years ago, but has increasingly been adopted since. His analysis of China will likely age more poorly: he has nothing positive to say about modern day China, despite its lifting of a billion people from poverty and its emphasis on mass education, while praising similar poverty alleviation efforts when they occur in Latin America. Still, it is a fantastic corrective to the mythology of Canada.

Review: Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec

The Canadian and American states were founded on centuries of genocide. Now what? This is the question Krawec explores in Becoming Kin. Reconciliation requires understanding the harm done and proactive righting of wrongs. Appropriately, this essay collection starts with telling the story of the wrongs of settler colonialism (Chapters 1-5). To do so, Krawec weaves together personal stories, linguistics, history and myth — Anishnaabe and Christian peoples both come to understand themselves and their values through their myths. With these stories imparted, Krawec shifts towards the future, towards becoming kin — a relationship that comes with reciprocal responsibilities to each other. She explores kinship with the land (Chapter 6), the interrelatedness of people (Chapter 7), and practical considerations for rebuilding kinship (Chapter 8).

Krawec’s essays come with homework: each finishes in an aambe, an Anishnaabe term meaning “let’s go!” These sections ask the reader to participate by learning about the treaties that govern the relationships with the Indigenous peoples they share a home with, observing the absence of Indigenous stories in the media they consume, or finding a way to insist on Indigenous representation in your community in whatever form that might be. As the book progresses, her homework problems increasingly involve community building and outreach. 

At the outset, Krawec insists the reader read her book with a friend. Learning and doing are best done in community: “Reading books in solitude may alter our individual relationship with the world around us. But like our histories, our lives do not unfold in isolation. We exist collectively: as neighbours and community groups, as workplaces and sports teams, as book groups and families.” It is from this community that your ability to change the world grows: “Organizing is a scary word. We hear it, and we think about large-scale events and mass mobilizations, but it begins with finding one person you can disrupt with.”

It is this emphasis on practical steps via community and education that makes this book special. Indigenous history is told more completely elsewhere (see, for example, works by Dunbar-Ortiz or Nick Estes). Indigenous philosophy is told more compellingly for a popular audience in Braiding Sweetgrass. Krawec’s writing meanders, and sometimes takes on a lecturing tone. Her perspective is more spiritual than what resonates with me. But her book, particularly Chapter 8, is forward-looking and community-oriented. It urges you to act and also makes you realize those first few steps aren’t so hard after all. That’s rarely found in a book.

Review: Our History Is The Future by Nick Estes

In Our History Is The Future, Nick Estes documents the #NoDAPL resistance movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and connects it to the centuries of struggle for indigenous liberation that preceded it. Although Estes is an academic, he is also an activist, and this book reads as if it were written for training up the next generation of activists. This sets this work apart from others that might otherwise be competing in the same niche of US indigenous history. For example, Estes connects the struggle of indigenous nations in the US with the anti-imperialist writings of Lenin and Amilcar Cabral, figures too controversial for more mainstream audiences. Estes also does not seem to feel the need to sternly disapprove of militant protests while uplifting only lawfare. Because the book assumes little prior knowledge, it’s a reasonable entrypoint into indigenous liberation.

However, the book fell a bit flat for me. The historical sections are often dry, and while each chapter is centered on a broad theme, they tend to jump between topics without clear structure or chronology, making it hard to follow the argument or use the book as a reference. I would also have appreciated a more philosophical lens at times. For a book about national sovereignty, I was surprised how little development there was of what self-determination and nationhood mean. At several points, Estes emphasizes the difference between radical Indigenous internationalism and mere striving for status as a nation state, however how these goals differ in practice was more implied than defined. For example, in the passage below, Estes enticingly hints towards the difference between becoming a nation-state and ending imperialism, but it’s unclear how the nationhood sought by the Treaty Council varies from “the freedom associated with nation-states”:

Indigenous nationhood is often misunderstood as an exclusive project—the sole aspiration of just Indigenous peoples—or as confined within narrow definitions of the nation-state. This is similar to the way the “Indian problem” is treated as solely an Indian problem. According to the International Indian Treaty Council that first met at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 1974 and drafted the “Declaration of Continuing Independence,” the problem was not Indigenous peoples; the problem was, and always has been, imperialism. The aspiration for nationhood set the Treaty Council apart from other Red Power movements that sought the freedom associated with nation-states.

There are many indigenous nations, and it's possible Estes avoided precise definitions of nationhood and related terms out of fear of collapsing many diverse ideals into one. Still, the history of a struggle is also the history of a class coming to understand the struggle from a theoretical perspective, and this part of the history was lacking.

These shortcomings aside, the book is valuable in telling the stories of many of the key figures in indigenous liberation movements, and demonstrating both its connection with other movements and its internal diversity of thought. As Estes documents, #NoDAPL found support from #BlackLivesMatter and socialist parties. The indigenous struggles before it were closely connected to the USSR , to countries that overthrew their colonizers, and to Palestine, which still wages its war against its colonizer. The fall of the USSR and the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement slowed indigenous liberation movements, and allowed Western aggression to run rampant. 

One interesting example of internal struggle was the Treaty Council’s decision to file for non-governmental organization (NGO) status within the UN. As Estes describes, “To some, the channeling of energy into an NGO—arguably a non-revolutionary and non-sovereign entity—seemed in contradiction to their larger project.” The Treaty Council’s response remains an important reminder for our current movements too: “Decolonization, or a better term, liberation is a slow, painstaking process. What the colonialists accomplished over the past four centuries cannot be overcome easily.” The Council used their position as an NGO to push forward recognition of indigenous issues through events such as the 1977 Conference of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas (which the US boycotted) and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (which the US voted against).

Our History is the Future focuses on history, but there’s a few glimpses of what Estes believes the future might be. He points to the mutually supportive, non-hierarchical and non-commodified structure of resistance camps, and he ends his book on the note “For the earth to live, capitalism must die.” There’s a very, very long path between protesting pipelines and the abolition of commodity exchange, and I am left with many, many questions about what that road looks like.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

This history of the United States is familiar history, in the way that Wicked is familiar to The Wizard of Oz fans: the formation and development of the United States told from the perspective of those indigenous to the continent. Rather than extolling the inventions of liberties and freedoms, this history is a tragic devastation of a rich network of communities, and their struggle for survival, recognition and restitution.

One of the key themes of this work is how genocidal ideology doesn’t spring out of nowhere. The dehumanization of peoples in Europe preceded the dehumanization of peoples of the Americas, if to a less radical degree. England used bounties to capture priests (who they would then kill) as part of its conquest of Ireland; to conquer the vast distances of the Americas, this practice turned into scalping (Chapter 2). A religion whose God called upon them to wander the wilderness, defeat the heathens, and to occupy a promised land, went on to do just that in the New World (and then later, in Palestine), calling it Manifest Destiny (Chapter 3). The dispossession of peasants across England during the birth of capitalism reverberated in the dispossession of indigenous people of the Americas, using many of the technologies of capitalism — debts, cheap commodities (Chapter 3) — and benefitting from a self-interested volunteer army of settlers (or squatters) instead of the compelled labour of feudalism (Chapter 7). 

Another key theme is that this ideology is not a thing of the past. As the conclusion argues beautifully, the same techniques of quelling insurgencies, the same dehumanization of the barbarous enemy are present in United States imperialist wars of the 20th and 21st century (Vietnam, Iraq, Yemen, the Philippines, Kora, and others). Manifest Destiny developed into a belief that is the United States’ right to have military bases across the world, to bend the world to its will through legal tools and economic tools and, of course, violence. 

I think everyone should read this book.