A genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force–water–through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers
For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water?
So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.
Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.
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“Leanne Simpson’s Theory of Water offers quiet meditations on what it means to believe in water, Nibi. Water has its own time, ontology, and theory and practice of change. If we listen carefully, as Simpson does, it can teach us to be patient. The transformations of water from solid, liquid to gas are sometimes quick, like snow melting in the Spring, and other times, unfold over countless generations like a glacier carving its way across the land. The answers water provides are healing, regenerative, and flowing in ways that breach and dissolve the rigid social hierarchies of colonialism and capitalism. Simpson asks herself and thus the reader, do you believe in water?”
—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
“Theory of Water builds a case for deep relationality. Rather than a law—like form of kinship, or model and theory of interdependance or an account of transactions apportioning material and social worlds, this is a leaky, boundary defying and rich account of how we come into being through water and sinter; attach to, stay alive with this crucial, transitional and shifting fractal form. Grounded in Anishnabe thought and history Simpson scales up from the fractal to offer us a theory and model also of internationalism, of social and political intercommunalism and permeability occasioned also by water, as mode of transport, as a connector of worlds, regions, life forms. This is a model of Indigenous political thought that refuses all enclosures. Theory of Water enacts an intellectual and political history and diplomacy of the present that calls for shared journeys and shared futures.”
—Audra Simpson, author, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
"'Love is the necessary precursor to world building,' Leanne Betasamosake Simpson teaches us, before she proceeds to enact that very idea with a fierce generosity in this very book. Theory of Water offers us new ways of relating to that animating spirit that keeps us alive, that binds us together in shared fate. Water is teacher, water is ancestor, water is power, and water is song. Through tender moments of mourning an Elder and unapologetic assertions of rage at colonial injustice, Simpson offers a tremendous gift for those seeking a shared map for reciprocity, accountability, and resilience."
—Eve L. Ewing, author of Original Sins
"Karl Marx wrote, 'To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter'; for him it is man. Leanne Betamosake Simpson tells us that to be radical is to grasp the source of the matter: water. She is right, and shows us why in this poignant and poetic meditation on the power of water as Life. The first victim of colonial/capitalist exploitation, water is also the first line of defense, and our most important site of (re)creation. If we are serious about decolonization, we need a theory of water."
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"In Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson moves much like her subject and inspiration—with fluidity as much as force, without fixity yet with steadiness and direction. Asking us to learn from the water that is inside us and between us, Simpson recovers indigenous knowledges that connect past and future but circumvent colonial histories. To make the world again, we are invited to decenter ourselves and join the flow. A powerful contribution to organizing and to being."
—Gina Dent, co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
"Theory of Water is a meditation on water, scale, and relation. Placing her body on the shore, on ice and snow, in water, with cattails, bark, bullfrogs, and more, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s attentive and scalar thinking demonstrates that 'what we do on a small scale is how we exist at the large scale.' Simpson gives us the word sintering —which is what snowflakes do to bond in space and place; it is joining and deformation; it is transformation, it is an ethic of how to live. Sintering should be a new word in all of our vocabularies for how to see and imagine ours and each other’s linked presences and work in the world."
—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
"A beautiful, meditative, and clear-eyed reflection on our shared life on a fragile planet hurtling towards a precipice—one brought about by rapacious colonialism and its attendant systems of exploitation. Leanne Simpson’s Theory of Water is an origin story, a prayer, and a call to action for an interconnected, sintered way of life. The ‘sound of rushing water’ transported me to my homeland in Kashmir where ‘water on land, land on water’ as an age-old mode of living is now under threat from extractive development. Everybody should read this profound book."
—Mirza Waheed, author of The Collaborator"No writer in recent memory has more thoroughly rearranged my moral compass than Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and no book brought me more solace than Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Amidst the cascading calamities of colonial and capitalistic violence, in which the prevailing power structures depend so fiercely on our diminished capacities for care and attention, Simpson has written an essential work on love as methodology, on what it means to stand in solidarity with one another and with the earth that sustains us. This is more than just an imagining of something better, but a reminder that better has always been here, has always been possible. A book of immense regenerative power, written by one of the few truly incendiary, indispensable writers working today."
—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise