Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, musician, and academic from Canada. She is also known for her work with Idle No More protests. Simpson is a faculty member at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning. She lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
Early life
Leanne is an off-reserve member of Alderville First Nation, where her grandmother Audrey Williamson, was born in 1925. Simpson's great-grandfather, Hartley Franklin later relocated to Peterborough to work on canoes when Audrey was three.Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was born and raised in Wingham, Ontario by her Nishnaabeg mother, Dianne Simpson, and her father, Barry Simpson, who is of Scottish ancestry.
In the early 1990s, Leanne's grandmother and mother regained their legal Indian status after the legislation of Bill C-31. Leanne and several of her other family members regained their Indian status after Bill C-3 became law in 2011. Their children regained their status after Bill S-3 was passed in 2019. Like Simpson, her family members are all considered off-reserve band members.
Work
Simpson writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and realities, particularly from her own Anishinaabe nation, across various genres, and is known for advocating for Indigenous ontologies. Her work is the result of a journey to reconnect to an ancestral homeland and traditions that she was disconnected from as a child and youth, living off the reserve. As a young person, Simpson immersed herself in her cultural traditions by connecting with Northern Nishnaabeg elders. Simpson's immersion facilitated a linguistic, cultural, and spiritual reconnection. Additionally, Simpson applies Nishnaabeg's methods of meaning-making through Nishnaabeg's storytelling. Storytelling permeates Simpson's respective musical, fiction-writing, and poetic endeavors. She writes from an Indigenous worldview rooted in an embodied relationality to the natural environment. As an Indigenous mother, Simpson wants to raise her children within a tradition steeped in storytelling so they might learn Indigenous frameworks, spiritual belief systems, and Indigenous ethics to draw upon throughout their lives.Simpson's political consciousness and activist ethic began to develop while working on her undergraduate studies at the University of Guelph. Inspired by actions surrounding the 1990 Oka Crisis and one of the notable women leaders, Ellen Gabriel, of the Mohawk nation, Simpson understood that she needed to actively nurture a reconnection to her Indigenous Anishinaabe roots. Simpson has now taken on the role of the inspirational artist/activist to youth as both a decolonial performance musician and artist, as well as through her academic writings. Simpson's approach to her work derives from an understanding of the limitations imposed by Western epistemologies and centers on Indigenous epistemologies.
Education and academic career
Simpson earned a Bachelor of Science in biology from the University of Guelph and a Master of Science in biology from Mount Allison University. She obtained her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Manitoba. Simpson is faculty at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, and regularly teaches at universities across Canada. She was a visiting scholar in Indigenous Studies at McGill University and the Ranton McIntosh Visiting Scholar, University of Saskatchewan. She was a distinguished visiting professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a past Mellon Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at McGill University. and is currently a Matakyev Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. Simpson's work positions Indigenous ways of being within Canadian music and literature in the 21st century.Activism and resurgence philosophy
Simpson is active in Indigenous resistance and resurgence, anti-colonialism, gender-based violence awareness and the protection of Indigenous homelands. She was an active participant in the Idle No More protest movement.Simpson's activism is expressed both academically and artistically. She believes that movements such as Idle No More are most powerful when composed of a collective of community organizers, artists, writers, academics, and speakers that are mobilized through a grassroots, bottom-up approach who approach their activism vigorously and creatively. During the Idle No More protests she became a key figure in the movement after the dispersal of her article, "Aambe! Maajaadaa! ". In this piece, Simpson articulated the importance of defending Indigenous land bases and life ways by emphasizing the interconnected relationality of Indigenous world views and meanings as intimately in connection with the land base.
Simpson articulates that the potential futurity of Idle No More was arrested by tribal infighting regarding allocation of extracted resources. Simpson understood these assertions of monetary rights as connected to the reality of endemic tribal poverty. Even so, she articulates that this caused Idle No More to be sidetracked from the larger critique that questioned the basis of such extractive policies to begin with. She explains that tribal peoples are in a double bind in that addressing the material needs of crushing poverty necessitates participation in the very extractivist system that caused the poverty in the first place.
Simpson's activism is rooted in a resistance to extractivism, which refers to both the material extraction of natural resources from the Earth as well as the cognitive extraction of Indigenous ideas, i.e., cultural appropriation. Simpson critiques environmental reforms that operate from extractivist philosophies and explains that the solutions to impending environmental collapse cannot be based in extractivist methodologies. She specifically critiques the ways in which government and corporate environmental reforms extract pieces of Indigenous knowledge in the search for sustainable solutions while lacking a related cultural context and that their efforts only serve to reinforce extractivist methodologies. Ultimately, Simpson situates her critique of extractive capitalism within the larger framework of colonialism.
A strong proponent of Indigenous resurgence, Simpson suggests an alternative ideology focused on rebuilding Indigenous nationhood using Indigenous intelligence and local engagement with land and community. Simpson's philosophy is grounded in an Indigenous perspective and is focused not on a return to the past, but on bringing traditional ways of living into a collective future. She articulates the potentiality of a collective future as one necessarily built without the exploitation of the earth and absent the ongoing acts of aggression against Black and Indigenous peoples. She derives inspiration from Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL, and the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
Simpson's academic writing on decolonial theory has been drawn upon by many Indigenous scholars, decolonial theorists, and Indigenous rhetoricians. Glen Coulthard draws upon Simpson's philosophies in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition to explain that the solution to settler-colonialism cannot be found in Western epistemologies. He notes Simpson's imperative that Indigenous activists must begin to focus a greater part of their energies on building alternative modalities of living based in Indigenous worldviews. Further, Simpson's approach is one based in rejecting assimilationist tendencies and state sanctioned recognition politics. Simpson specifically calls for decolonial action articulated via Indigenous decolonial theory rather than Western epistemologies and absent the approval of state sanction. Simpson critiques Canada's use of recognition and reconciliation politics as a way in which to neutralize Indigenous concerns by relegating anti-Indigenous and colonialist policy to a distant past which alleviates the state of any motivation to address systemic oppressions that stem from the settler-colonialist state. Additionally, Simpson understands Canada's Indian Act system as a political imposition from the Canadian government for the purposes of maintaining power over tribal lands not based in Indigenous ontologies or relationality to the land base. Indian Act chiefs then are unable to act in the best interests of the tribal collective as they are ultimately beholden to the Canadian government. Simpson's activism is one that understands these systems of extraction and control must be dismantled.
Simpson's philosophy of Indigenous resurgence remains focused in reviving Indigenous ontologies through collective epistemic, pedagogic, and creative decolonization. Simpson articulates that such resurgence must remain focused on bringing traditional lifeways into the present but enriched with an understanding that Indigenous ways of being are rooted in a fluidity that lends themselves to future application.
As an Indigenous feminist, Simpson believes that the decolonial work of resurgence necessitates decolonizing heteropatriarchy from Indigenous movements. In particular, Simpson understands the centering of cis-gendered men as a holdover from colonial movements and Western frameworks of heteropatriarchal dominance. Dismantling heteronormative frameworks is key to Simpson's project and thus centers an Indigenous feminist/queer-centered approach. In her article "Queering Resurgence," she approaches mothering and guiding her children through a decolonial perspective that challenges heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, and the exclusion of queer Indigenous peoples. As part of reconfiguring Indigenous peoples' sovereignty, resurgence means ensuring queer Indigenous people are part of rebuilding the Indigenous community.