Red Emma’s

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.

"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

“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

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and artist who is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh. For the past two decades, as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured extensively at universities across Canada and the United States. She is also the author of eight books, including the nonfiction A Short History of the Blockade; the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize; and the novel This Accident of Being Lost, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, was a national bestseller and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Marisela B. Gomez, MD, True Manifestation of Reverence, is a co-founder of Village of Love and Resistance in Baltimore Maryland, organizing for power, healing and the reclamation of land. She is a meditation and Buddhist teacher, physician scientist, and holistic health practitioner. She lives in the lands previously stewarded by the Piscataway, Lumbee and other tribes, colonized as Baltimore Maryland in the USA. She is the author of Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore along with other scholarly, political, and spiritual writings.