Donate
“The first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is join bonds, actual physical bonds with its neighbours,” writes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “It weaves itself into its environment ... in a way that doesn’t destroy its neighbours. Sintering is bonding; it is building coalitions with your neighbours. And these coalitions mean that the packed sinter snow on the trail has staying power, that it remains long after the spring has melted the snow around it.”
Plenty has been written about the problems we face, but few have offered solutions in a way that coalesces the possibility of transformation the way that this book – and water itself – does. Betasamosake Simpson offers a kaleidoscope of gathered wisdom, shifting your attention in the same way a tawny owl at night might. Your whole being is drawn into where she is trying to have you look, and what she is trying to help you feel.
She brings together collaborators, mentors, wisdom-keepers, writers and artists, alongside the land itself. This offers a fabric of transformation that undulates like the sea, moving in and out of time until the realities of the past feel like a real possibility for the present. She reminds us how to weave ourselves back into the existing fabric of life. The way her ancestors did. The way all humans once did before colonialism and racial capitalism – with its violence, hierarchy and domination – became shared reality.
The future Betasamosake Simpson and her collaborators paint is one in which “we no longer have to envision liberation because we’ll be living it, and it will be all we know”. A world where holding humans in cages at borders is unthinkable, bombing children and their families relentlessly is impossible, and the “laughter and joy of children playing on the beach at Beit Lahia or in Cape Town or on Manhattan Beach or in Pelican Lake is the result of cultures and politics that cherish their joy and their freedom”. To arrive at this future, she offers a cascade of ways to remember we are one small part of a labyrinthine network of species who were once able to communicate in ways far more complex than words.
We need to learn how to know the land and each other and act for the land and each other. To embody this quote from Winona LaDuke, where we live in a state of “continuous rebirth: living life, individually, communally and globally, in a way that brings forth more life, not just human life but all life – that of plants, animals, rivers, lakes, oceans, streams, insects, everything that is alive”. A future where the Indigenous worldviews that decentre human life bring all living beings to a place of liberation and equality.
Betasamosake Simpson shares that to bring forth the world we wish to see we “need to only figure out how to fit into the cascading network of life that [we’re] already part of”. This requires each of us to “dream of, envision and actualise ways of living outside our current imaginings, and to do this as a practice of generating the knowledge we need to reimagine the world”.
A quote from William C. Anderson reminds us that “it benefits the state and our oppressors for us to remain invested in the story of reforming the state rather than abolishing it.” As we’ve seen with the lack of government action on genocide, ecocide and sovereignty, we should “avoid service to ideology and let all that we can gather from different ideas work in service to us”.
Of all the books I’ve read responding to the world we find ourselves in, this one harnessed hope in a way that felt actionable. All we must do is remember who we are and act accordingly. If you, like many, have forgotten, this book will bring back memories nestled deep within your soul.
Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Haymarket Books, 2025. ISBN: 9798888903681
