Theory of Water

“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

“Theory of Water builds a case for deep relationality. Rather than a law—like form of kinship, or model and theory of interdependance or an account of transactions apportioning material and social worlds, this is a leaky, boundary defying and rich account of how we come into being through water and sinter; attach to, stay alive with this crucial, transitional and shifting fractal form. Grounded in Anishnabe thought and history Simpson scales up from the fractal to offer us a theory and model also of internationalism, of social and political intercommunalism and permeability occasioned also by water, as mode of transport, as a connector of worlds, regions, life forms. This is a model of Indigenous political thought that refuses all enclosures. Theory of Water enacts an intellectual and political history and diplomacy of the present that calls for shared journeys and shared futures.”
—Audra Simpson, author, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

Praise for Rehearsals for Living:

“What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book."
—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough

“Rehearsals for Living is a profound and sublime work of memory, witnessing, refusal, dreaming. In the trenchant tradition of Black and Indigenous feminisms, this brilliant book moves us away from the language of crisis or victimhood to the precise and intimate encounters of kinship and liberation. The letters between Maynard and Simpson magnificently shapeshift and engage on multiple levels, and in doing so, rigorously demand an accounting for horrific violences while illuminating lives and worlds anew. A masterclass in literary form, ethical orientations, and collective futures.”
—Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

“The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.”
—Dionne Brand, poet, novelist, and essayist

“Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again.”
—Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem