Theory of Water
Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead
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Theory of Water
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Narrated by:
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Tiffany Ayalik
About this listen
Acclaimed Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson takes a revolutionary look at that most elemental force, water, and suggests a powerful path for the future.
For years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather across all forms of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home.
Recently, as she skied this path and meditated on our world’s uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek, the ice beneath her feet, and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water?
So began her quest to discover, understand and trace the historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. Soon she began to see how a "Theory of Water" might lead to a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today.
In this inventive work, Simpson artfully weaves Nishnaabeg story and tradition with her own deep thinking and lived experience—and offers a vision of water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2025 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (P)2025 Knopf CanadaCritic reviews
One of CBC's Canadian nonfiction books to read in spring 2025
One of Ms. Magazine's April 2025 Reads
“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 . . . [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, by one of the few truly incendiary, indispensable writers working today.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This
“Urgent and necessary . . . Profoundly moving and unflinching, it is a deeply personal and generously expansive meditation on what it means to live in communion with the earth and its inhabitants, living, gone, and still to come. This beautiful book is a gesture of hope to a future that might still be possible, if we heed its lessons.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
“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, Betasamosake Simpson . . . demonstrates that ‘what we do on a small scale is how we exist at the large scale.’ She gives us the word sintering—which is what snowflakes do to bond in place. It is joining and deformation; it is transformation; it is an ethic of how to live. Sintering should be in all our vocabularies for how to see and imagine each other’s linked presences in the world.”—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes