Theory of Water: World-Making with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

What can we learn from water?

In this live conversation from Tidelands in Seattle, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, musician, and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson joins All My Relations to discuss her new book Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, our second selection for the All My Relations Book Club.

Leanne invites us to listen to water as both teacher and theorist, “Water changes forms from a solid to a liquid to a gas. It expands our understanding of time. It always escapes the container, and it connects us all.” Instead of centering land as the primary orientation point, she turns to water to imagine how we might build beyond the limits of the present.

Together we explore grief, creation stories, Indigenous resurgence, and the difficult work of world-making in a time shaped by colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological crisis. As Leanne reminds us, “Listening to water and thinking through world making means that we have to collaborate with each other… building against this present moment. That’s a struggle, but it’s a relational struggle to give birth to something different.”

At its heart, this conversation asks what it means to create futures rooted in Indigenous intelligence, care, and responsibility—and what water might already be teaching us about how to begin.

A/V Production by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez

Music by Mato Wayuhi

Produced by Matika Wilbur

Episode Artwork by Kitana Marie

Video Edit/Social Media by Mandy Yeahpau

Transcript:

“Water changes forms from a solid to a liquid to a gas. It expands our understanding

of time. It always escapes the container, and it connects us all.

What is the message of the theory of water? Listening to water and thinking through

world making means that we have to collaborate with each other, and we have to

share our different perspectives and different knowledges in terms of building against

this present moment. And that's a struggle, but it's a relational struggle to give

birth to something different. Water's something that's been here since the beginning

of time. The same amount of water has been cycling over the planet.”

Water changes forms and every single living being on the planet has a relationship

to water. So rather than using land as an orienting sort of force, I wanted to listen to water and see what kind of worlds we could generate, what kind of alternatives we could generate.

Sorry.

Welcome back to All My Relations. I'm Matika Wilburne. Matika Sitsa, Stah Hobbschat,

dweltra up, d 'altra Sunamish, Tiguitzayas, Nostalajad Siaz.

Hello, relatives,  Manichalachia, Temras Lane, Senesnet. My name is Temeris Lane. I come from the Golden Eagle clan of Lumme Nation just up north here. Today we're recording live from Tidlands with a guest who has shaped my own creative process, my own creative path in such profound ways.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is here with us.

Welcome, Leanne. If you would take a moment to just introduce yourself as you would

to a large group of people before we jump into theory of water. 

I, Keniwaya, Kiddikavishu, and thenoamahama, that we know that we're going to be the

Donjabaw. In the the Gojovani Megawadododha, Bidas, Musake, Netizhnikas.

My name is Leanne Simpson. I'm a Michi Sagik, Nishinabeck, writer, scholar, and

musician, and I'm so happy to be here with you all today. 

Leanne is a writer, a musician, and academic, someone whose words have carved out space for so many of us to imagine and otherwise. I first fell in love with your work through Islands of

decolonial love, which cracked something open in me. It was, I think, the first time that I saw our messiness, our beauty, our humor, our longing for freedom, all rendered with such tenderness and precision, and I've carried it with me ever since. 

I feel just like so lucky and thrilled to have you here. Thank you so much for being here. We just launched the All My Relations Book Club. You get to be our second author, and we're so honored to be here in person with you. 

In theory of water, you talk about how water cannot be contained. I love that. And it moves to where it needs to go. I wanted to listen to water. I wanted to think through world making, pushing back against colonialism and genocide and racial capitalism and this moment that we're sharing. It's very clear to a lot of us that we need to be building another world, a different world,

a world where practices of care and consent and accountability are at the core.

And so I wanted to listen to water. I wanted to think through world making, pushing back against colonialism and genocide and racial capitalism and this moment that we're sharing.

I love how you talked about water as a they. You know, a lot of times people will

talk about water as a she -her. And I wondered if that was quite deliberate,

I'm sure it was. 

It was deliberate, and it comes from, I think, a lot of different places. I wanted all genders to be able to see themselves inside the book and inside water. In Inichna, by culture, things get divided up sometimes by gender, and so, but in this book, I wanted to sort of expand that a little bit because we all, everybody who is living, all of the different forms of life on earth right

now, have a relationship to water. And I think that as sort of a network, there's more than just a he, him, she, her. So I think that that was very, very deliberate in the book.

When you talk about world making, you talk about this incredible need for renewal,

and you talk so much about the creation story. Maybe you could touch on that for

the audience. 

So in Anishnaabe, people have lots of different creation stories. Some of our elders say there's four. Some say that there's seven different regions and different families have different stories. But the one that I retell in this story was one that I learned from an elder, Doug Williams and Curve Lake. And he tells this story of a moment in our past where things went all wrong,

where everyone was fighting, where there was lots of death, where there was lots of

famine, where Anishnaabe people were really, really struggling. And that's a lot of our

stories. 

I think speak to this present moment when mistakes have been made, when power is imbalanced, where we're not taking care of our kin and our relationships and how to sort of rebuild. 

So in this story, Joie Manadoe, who that word gets translated as creator or like a Christian god, but in our language it means the one that lives us unconditionally. And so they get an idea to

make this world, the one that we're living in with the oceans and the trees and

the mountains and the desert. And they try and it doesn't work out. There's

struggle. 

So this is sort of a story of struggling, of using what you have to make

something better. And there's a point in the story where another spirit comes to

help Shueh Manitou, and that's Gishika Koir, Sky Woman. She lands in this place

that's all water on the back of a turtle. It's very, very different from her

experience and from the place that she comes from, but she notices a design or a

map on the back of a turtle, which has 28 sections on it, and then 13 bigger sections in the middle. 

So it's the moon cycle is on the back of the turtle, and so she knows that what's missing in Jeweymanadeau's plan is that cycling and renewal. And once she is able to figure that out, they're able to make the world that we live in that's able to renew itself and where life is continuous renewal for not just human life, but all life. 

And so that moment in the story and in the book is one of my favorite moments. Because I think Gigi Gagai learns to trust herself and her experience and her body. It's a collaborative moment where the turtle is there. There's other animals there. And together, they make our reality out

of the materials that were available to them, all sort of under the guise of caring

for each other.

I wrote this book in mourning for the loss of Doug Williams, the elder that I had worked with for two decades, who was a really close friend and an amazing teacher. He was a former chief. He worked at Trent University as the director of Indigenous knowledge and in the PhD program in Indigenous Studies.

He was one of the first indigenous people to get a degree from Trent University. He was a ceremonial leader. He was a pipe carrier, and he had a tremendous knowledge of Michisa Geek history, culture. He was a fluent language speaker.

He spent a lot of time when he was growing up with his two uncles, and his two uncles were really, really good at escaping the truant officer at school. So they spent a lot of time learning from their uncles in the bush.

And so he had this body of knowledge that didn't, that got stamped out of a lot of people, but that was passed down to him. And so he taught a lot of people,

a lot of Anishinaabe knowledge over his lifetime. And I spent probably about two

decades learning from him. We were really good friends. 

We were really similar. We had similar politics. I learned a tremendous amount from him in the sugar bush, rising, hunting, trapping, and he passed away right before I, he was beginning, he knew I was working on this book, but it was in the very, very early stages. 

So part of this book is me kind of getting up in the morning in the fog of grief and wanting to missing him and wanting to remember everything that he taught me. Because I think when indigenous people, when we lose an elder, we're not just losing a friend or a parent or a grandparent. We're losing this body of knowledge. We're losing this access to this huge body of knowledge. 

And we always think that we didn't spend enough time you know absorbing everything right right so it also feels like oh that knowledge is gone now and I just have what I've retained why didn't I pay attention more why didn't I write down more why didn't I like record more record more learn more memorize more whatever why didn't I spend more time doing doing whatever I should have been doing and I so I think part of my my grief was like trying to write him back into life and try to thinking this was the first time I had to think through something without you know driving around in his truck drinking coffee asking him questions like I was sort of it was sort

of the sink or swim moment when you know how elders will like teach you and then

all of a sudden they just don't show up and you have to do it on your own. I think that was part of this book.

 What a beautiful relationship and you can feel the grief flowing through the pages and also the joy humor and the deep care grief is is sometimes a chance to remake yourself and remake the world which I think is what Sky Woman was doing because she was also grieving the loss of children when she was on the back of that turtle. It reminds me that life is struggle, that indigenous resistance is struggle, that our ancestors had to struggle really hard to get us here, and that world -making and sort of coming together to meet the needs of your community is not something that, you know, you always do when you're happy and you have lots of resources and lots of time and emotional capacity. It's the kind of work that you have to do anyway.

What experiences help you feel safe enough to stand behind your words,

your theories, your ideas? 

I've been thinking a lot about this question since you emailed me and I don't think that I ever have felt safe enough to stand behind them but I think that you do it anyway and you do it over and over again and eventually for me I think that I kind of generated the confidence that I'm supposed to be here I'm supposed to be at this mic I might look different than the stereotypes that the audience has in their brain for what I'm supposed to say and look like and do. But I'm going to take my space and step up to this mic and find my voice, and I'm going to push out those fraud complex. You're not good enough to be here. You shouldn't be here out of my brain. 

But I don't know that it's ever felt safe. It would be wonderful if that was the case

for indigenous women and writers and artists. But I think that the thing is that

we do it anyway. 

Maybe it's never felt safe, but you have this spirit, you have this name that you carry that means something, not just to you, but to the land, to the people, to the moon.

You know, we always like to ask everybody that comes onto the podcast to talk a

little bit about relationality, because really that's at the heart of this podcast, and I can feel it pulsing through your work. What does writing in relationship look like for you, in relationship with land, with language, with kin? I think that writing in relationship means is listening. It means listening a lot to the voices and to the living beings around me. 

It can be a struggle.

Relationality is not easy. Relationality is very, very complex. It takes a lot of

work to have healthy relationships in a colonial context in the context that we're

living in. A lot of that work is gendered, it's labor, its systems of care and

caring that are so devalued by colonial society. 

The people in my life that I learn a lot about relationality are often the ones who are overwhelmed doing care work in the family and communities. And I think a lot of our indigenous laws and a lot of our indigenous governance and politics is around care because those relationships are so important. And so a lot of times I think when I'm writing like, oh, I don't

want to over kind of romanticize this because it is the core of who we are. It is the core of how we move through life and we move through the world. But it's also not easy. It's not easy to get along with people who have different views or who have uncomfortability, there's lots of conflict, there's lots of working through conflicts, there's lots of listening and figuring out how to work with consent and accountability and all of those kinds of things. 

So I think relationality is a struggle and it's very difficult, but I think it's the core and the key to living a good life. 

You're a musician, a poet, a storyteller, writer, an author, an academic. This book is genre shape -shifting, right? It doesn't fit into one box, one genre. How do you decide when something is a song versus a poem versus an essay? 

Anishinabe creative practice does not fit into genres, and it does not fit into disciplines. Our artists, there's always intellectual stuff in their work. There's always political stuff. there's poetic stuff, it's a site of knowledge generation, and I don't think we police what kind of knowledge or where that knowledge comes from. So I feel there's tension in the academy around knowledge

production and what activities generate knowledge and what do not.

And for me, I think anytime you've got indigenous people coming together, doing

something, making something, that can be a side of knowledge generation. And so I

didn't set out to sort of detonate genres and disciplines, but I also didn't set out to try to fit in because I think sometimes it can be very powerful when you're trying to think through an academic or intellectual idea and then poetry kind of falls out. 

I also think it's a very indigenous thing to do. When you listen to elders talking, our languages are very poetic. They're very beautiful. They're designed to take you on kind of an emotional journey as well. And I think that that's great. That's part of the tools and part of the practice because ultimately we're creating in this nest of relationships and you want to connect with your audience and you want people, you want to connect with multiple audiences and you want people to be able to find meaning in your work. And so that necessitates, I think,

different forms.

Let's jump into something that might spark a little more fire. What do you think

white liberalism gets completely wrong about indigenous resurgence? 

Like so many folks like to say the right things, but this book pulls no punches. 

One of the things that I've seen in a Canadian context a lot is the separating of political resurgence from cultural resurgence. So white liberals love our art, they love our literature, they love our trauma, they love our books, they want to learn our languages, they want to celebrate us and be inspired by us, but they do not want us to have the ability to protect our homelands. 

They do not want us to have self -determination over our lives. They do not want to do the work of redistributing resources so that we can take care of our kin. As soon as you start

to go on the land and you start to see resources and think about forestry or

mining, this is a big deal in Canada right now with the relationship with the U .S.

in terms of tariffs and economies. And so there's a lot of pressure on indigenous

homelands in terms of development and extractivism. And that's where you lose the

white liberals as soon as you start to stand up for your land and for your waters.

And I think that's a place where it's really important to not have this separation

between culture and politics. 

Being indigenous is inherently political?

It is. It is. And we have a lot to lose at every moment.

And part of our lives, part of the lives of our ancestors was resistance and was

protecting those homelands and was standing up even though they felt afraid, even

though it wasn't safe, and advocating for those that didn't have a voice and they

don't have a voice and that's something that indigenous women have to do daily right

now you talk about that so poetically in theory of water i love how you you talk

about like we come from these teacher these resistors right that might not have

known what was going to be the outcome but did it anyways.

Yeah i like feeling like I'm sort of another wave on the beach that I'm continuing on the fight and the resistance of my ancestors, that this is a continuation, that we're also preparing

this next generation to take on those responsibilities, to be the next wave on the

beach, so that this work isn't over. 

This work is on a longer time frame than just my life. One thing I underlined and carried around for days was your language around racial capitalism. 

For our listeners who've never questioned capitalism before, which I doubt is any of our listeners, can you break down what that term means in your work? And what does it look like, really, to push back against that system through art and writing and the work that you do? 

So It's funny in the academy when you start to read about this body of literature around racial capitalism, there's a lot of big words and there's a lot of concepts. But if you go back to the reserve or the reservation, I work in the north a lot, so I'm working with hunters and

trappers, and they very much have an astute analysis of racial capitalism from their

own lives. 

They understand how the land gets changed from being a relative, from something that we belong to, and that we practice these activities that pull us in, whether that's fishing or hunting or hide tanning, our practices of belonging and caretaking, and those practices become commodified. Those relationships become no longer relationships, but they become natural resources or they become commodities. And so I think that I've tried in this book and in my other work to sort of pay attention to how indigenous people experience capitalism, how indigenous peoples experience that racialization of capitalism. 

So we have homelands, our homelands, our bodies, our minds are seen as something that can be extracted and consumed by settler colonialism, by white people. We are a resource, and we all have different experiences of that. Some of that is quite gendered, but we know that that's how this system works. Where commodities, where property, there are boundaries around that

that are guarded with violence and that under this system we're resources that are to be used to fuel settler colonialism and that economy. 

Our people have always been very smart about pointing that out right from the time that they were trying to negotiate treaties. Right from the time the settlers first got here they saw that there was going to be a problem they saw that over harvesting not sharing everything you have not using everything you take not taking only what you need was going to lead to a tremendous imbalance and they said something right from the beginning and they've been saying you know this is going to cause the world great harms this is going to change the climate this is going to lead to wildfires.

All of these kinds of things are not shocking to indigenous people because we have heard

our elders say these things forever. And so I really try in my work to center that

kind of analysis around racial capitalism because I think our people know that and

we know it from experience, we know it from our stories, we know it from our

families and from being out on the land. 

Even just language. Even just the language.

The word resource, resource, like, meant for extraction. Yes. The word resource means

that it is there to be taken, right, as opposed to relative.

Yeah.

And care take, you know, there's just a complete 180 in worldviews.

Our teachings are so applicable to our own personal lives and our own personal

relationships and our own families, but they also scale up. I liked thinking through

that in the book about how our practices of consent and accountability and self

-determination, scale up to community, scale up to nation, scale up to how we

interact with people when we're visitors on their territory. 

It snows where I live and paying attention and being curious and asking questions about how snowflakes form when they're in the sky world, how they behave when they become landed or grounded, knowing that I have experience with that because, You know, there's the first day of

the snow when the snow falls, it's fluffy, and if you don't go out and shovel it when it's fluffy, you're going to have a harder time the next day after it centers and becomes heavier. It's one of those things that I think water is teaching, water is illuminating things all around us all the time,

but I'm often not paying attention to that. and I'm not looking to the embodied practice of water as a source of intellectual knowledge, as something that can be a theory of how to organize ourselves and how to weave ourselves into the environment in a way that doesn't destroy ourselves or our neighbors. 

So it fits into this Sinichnavea concept of Minoamazawan, this idea that you live your life individually and collectively in a way that brings forth more life, not in a way that that is

a never -ending death -making machine.

Yeah.

Not to mention anyone. Just to keep it light, right?

What is it that you're ingesting right now that's nurturing your creative process. 

I think today what I was ingesting was ocean and mountains and and big trees and wind

and so today walking around Seattle and walking around this territory I was trying

to pay attention to all of the different forms of life that I was sharing my

mourning with and I think that the land and the waters for me is something that is

even when I'm in an urban setting is something that really feeds the part of me

that can write and make music and I think contribute to community in a positive way

what is your rhythm or your ritual the morning is a really important time for for

me. And when I was younger, I would get up and write in the morning when my kids

were still asleep. So it was that quiet time watching the sun come up when the

house was quiet. I could think clearly with that first cup of coffee.

And now I've sort of maintained that process when I'm writing. I get up very early

in the morning. I try not to look at my phone or turn on the computer or kind of

engaged with that part of my life and the world. And then sort of spending the

rest of the day running or moving, being outside, doing some of the other kind of housekeeping parts of writing, like the references or editorial work. But that morning is really, I think, an important time for me think of of new ideas. 

And I also don't think of new ideas sort of in an office trapped to my computer. Like I often think of ideas when I'm running or when I'm biking or when I'm skiing. Yeah, I loved hearing you talk about that because I feel very similarly. Like, I do not feel like I am a whole real person until I have exerted myself physically to exhaustion.

Have you always maintained that balance? As an athlete myself I feel like when I

was writing in academia at that, it was really hard for me to find that balance.

It was really hard to find balance, sort of period. As parents, as people who are

concerned with what's going on in our communities, people who are wearing lots of

different hats who are very, very busy lives, who have a lot of people depending on

us. I think that idea of balance is just like this kind of white lady idea that's

just not an option. It's just not going to happen. And so I strive for it and

there's periods where I feel like my life is balanced, but there's lots of periods

of where it feels very chaotic and overwhelming. 

The story that comes to mind in this moment for me is I was breastfeeding one of my kids and I think it was Minoway so it was the younger one I was feeling very overwhelmed because I would have had like a a one -year -old and a four -year -old and constant stress no sleep

like and I was also feeling like I was like my colleagues were progressing, writing the papers and writing the books, and I was just nursing and playing in the sandbox. And so I asked an elder Edna Manitwavi, and I was breastfeeding at the time, and I was like, I really got to get back to this, like, governance work and this self -determination, and I'm really interested in the Anishnaabe perspectives on treaties and like what do you think I can do to like try to understand this and she's like you just focused on what you're doing right now like you've got some

pretty important stuff happening and um also like the way that you would learn about

treaties is through breastfeeding like you're missing it right now because you want

to get back to the at me in your books like you're sharing there's two separate

beings here you're like negotiating and I was like oh maybe I should just be really

present in parenting and what's what's going on in my house right now and maybe not

try to intellectualize my way out of it.

 Yeah. 

There you go the pressure though the it's so real thank you for saying that because i think we've all had those moments of like as much as we love our babies and i loved the experience of breastfeeding it is another more than full -time job you're doing it 24 hours a day for for me

for two years i did it i know you did it with alma be longer yeah for each baby so four years total and um and like the pressure to get back to being a producing member of society is part of this colonial idea that we're refuting, I suppose, or refusing. Can you imagine writing a proposal in the academy and say, I'm going to breastfeed this child for two years as my research methodology? 

But that's essentially what the Zelda was saying. This practice that you're doing, this

care practice, this deep relationality, like you're doing the work right now, self -determination, right now.

That makes me feel better.

Good. My work here is done.

When you imagine an indigenous future, what does it feel like? What does it look

like?

I'm going to start with the feel like because I think when you're sitting at the

shore and I'm feeling calm. And I think that that's what an indigenous future looks

like. I'm in my body, there's an absence of trauma. There's an, I don't have to

heal from anything because I haven't been harmed. 

I just have to breathe.

I don't have to breathe to fight off and a panic attack, I just have to breathe.

So I think that thinking about the times in our lives and the places and the people and the relationships that make us feel grounded, that make us feel like we belong, that make us feel calm. That's the starting point. And thinking about how we can come together and make those places grow, I think that that's what an indigenous future looks like.

Before we close, we'd love to hear what you would offer young indigenous writers who

are just beginning, those who are full of stories, but not sure about that safety

that is elusive or what's possible for them. 

How would you, what would you offer them? 

Doing it. 

So getting up or finding when you're getting your ideas to write it and to give yourself permission to write whatever you need to write in that moment. So shut down that critical mind, shut down the voices in your head that are telling you you can't do it or that you're not good enough or

that your ideas aren't good enough. And just give yourself permission to create, find, do that, work hard and do that, rehearse that on a kind of daily basis, and then find people to build a community around you that are going to give you lots of encouragement and lots of positive feedback. 

You probably don't need someone when you're starting out to, like, rip apart your work. 

What you need is a lot of encouragement and a lot of feedback that's positive and that's nurturing. So try and gravitate towards people like that in your community. And then just don't give up.

Keep doing it. 

Thank you both. 

How can we support you? Are there any calls to action. 

There are so many calls for action right now. I feel like there's overwhelming calls for action. So I think doing what we can do to speak out against the genocide in Gaza is really important. I think protecting the most vulnerable people in our communities and working to meet the material needs of the people in our communities and our families is the most important work that we can be doing right now. 

Okay, relatives, Tigwit. Thank you so much for listening. That's all the

time we have for today. 

Thank you to you, our loyal listeners, for making this show possible. Thank you to our team at Tidlands here. Pancho for all the things. Mandy for editing and Kitana for episode artwork and Mato for scoring. It takes a whole family to make this podcast possible and I'm grateful to all of you. Until next time. All my relations.