What We Can Learn from Water, a Great Force of LifeTransformative and resilient, it helps us meet our future. An excerpt from ‘Theory of Water.’Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
25 Apr 2025 The Tyee
[Editor’s note: Lyrical, intimate and expansive, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s ‘Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead’ is a new essay collection that invites readers to draw lessons from water, the world’s most elemental force. Simpson’s writing considers how Indigenous peoples across history have interacted with water in all forms. It puts forward a vision for how to meet our shared future with lessons from water, a life force and a basis for transformation. In the following excerpt, Simpson considers Nibi, or water, as a ‘form of Indigenous internationalism’ that helps us meet the moment in geopolitics.]It was in the final chapter of my book Rehearsals for Living, as I was writing the last letter to my co-author Robyn Maynard, that I began to think about water, Nibi, as a theory, or a mapping of life and affiliation and global connection — in other words, as a form of Indigenous internationalism.
I became interested in thinking alongside water as it travelled the globe over and over, moving inside and outside bodies across all kinds of borders, and as it changed form from solid to liquid to gas. And I remain interested in its continual movement and cycling, its immense relationship with all forms of life on the planet.
Colonialism has forced Indigenous peoples to talk, think and organize around land in our resistance to ongoing dispossession. But within Nishnaabeg culture there are also responsibilities for the caretaking of water, and often these reside in the realm of women or people who give birth.
Often in our ceremonies, these people will sing and pray to water, focusing on expressing our communal love, dependency and gratitude for Nibi’s life-giving qualities. And some have become activists.
From 2003 to 2017, Elder Josephine Mandamin led a movement of water walkers — people who walked around the Great Lakes, drawing attention to the health and well-being of the water.
The activist Autumn Peltier from Wikwemikong has been fighting for access to clean drinking water for a decade, since she was 12 years old. Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook teaches us that water in our mothers is our first environment, and the health of the amniotic fluid that surrounds us there is directly related to the health of the aquifers and lakes that surround us in the larger world. Meanwhile, Nishnaabeg fasting ceremonies, which include spending time on the land in the spring and going for four days and four nights without water, reinforce the idea that we cannot exist very long without this element.
All genders and all forms of life have a relationship with water. Water droplets in our breath connect us intimately, as we learned during the pandemic. Nishnaabeg think of water as the lifeblood of the earth. We think of the Great Lakes as internal organs that filter and clean water before sending it along the Gchi-Ziibing, or the St. Lawrence River, to the Atlantic Ocean.
In this sense, the health of the Great Lakes is akin to the health of our own kidneys and liver. We rely upon coastal peoples to take care of the water in the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. We rely on northern peoples to take care of the permafrost, snow and sea ice. We rely on Indigenous peoples in deserts and arid regions around the globe to advise us of the great power that even a little bit of water holds. We rely on mountain peoples to take care of headwaters and glaciers.
In my own practice, I rely on writers and thinkers like Christina Sharpe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs to teach me what Black feminists theorize about the Atlantic and the middle passage.
An invitation to learn
In the face of ongoing dispossession, Indigenous peoples have written much about the importance of land to our continued existence. Land and land-based practices are the nest within which we learn our philosophies, laws, ethics and politics.
And while water is, in this context, considered to be an integral part of the land, I am interested in the theories that water, in and of itself, holds for living, organizing and making worlds beyond the ones we’ve inherited from colonialism and racial capitalism.
The present moment — one of climate catastrophe, of ongoing genocide and Nakba in Gaza, Palestine, of genocides in Sudan and Congo — demands that we direct our dreams and actions towards making worlds that refuse capitalism and dispossession and the spectacular violences required to maintain them.
The present moment demands that we figure out how to create and maintain robust constellations of co-resistance and provide material support for anti-colonial movements locally and globally.
As the axis of capital, and the states protecting that capital, descend into fascism, the present moment demands that we come together and face our linked crises in a manner that ensures the sanctity of the planet for all species and generations yet to come.
The theory of Nibi asks us to think on a scale that is outside the present moment and our own immediate needs. I’m thinking about Nibi as theory here because Nibi offers us an invitation to learn from its embodied practice, a practice of cycling that is global, is permeable and brings about a continuous rebirth on our planet.
Nibi asks us to ground ourselves intimately in land and place, and relate that grounding to other movements, geographies, cultures and lands.
The shorelines of our lands, shaped by water, teach us about fractals — patterns repeated across scales — and show Nishnaabeg that the same practices we engage in within our family are the practices we engage in as nations and in the larger universe.
Nibi teaches us that our thinking is most powerful when it can connect the intimate to the global and move between scales effortlessly.
Nibi, water, is iterative, resilient and transformative as it carves out spaces from rock over thousands of years. And water, Nibi, is interdependent and decentralized, a vessel for multitudes of land- and water-based species and communities.
And finally, water and Nibi always create more possibilities. Water and Nibi are working within mino-bimaadiziwin to propel a continuous, global rebirth of life.
Nibi, like all Nishnaabeg theories, is an emergent theory of internationalism. Nibi’s practices on a small scale are replicated on a larger scale.
Nibi works with, and asks us to embrace, uncertainty, multiplicity, adaptation, iteration and decentralization, as forces that create the conditions for life to emerge and continue.
Nibi is inside us, and it connects us to all forms of life on the planet. Nibi matters.
Excerpted from ‘Theory of Water’ by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Copyright © 2025 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Alchemy, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Iron Dog Books will host a book launch for ‘Theory of Water’ on April 28 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at St. James Community Square, 3214 West 10th Avenue, Vancouver. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson will be in conversation with Billy-Ray Belcourt. Tickets and books are available for purchase onsite. [Tyee]
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