Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best Subsequent Book 2017.

Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. Subjects & Keywords: Social Sciences, Literary Criticism, Indigenous Studies Indigenous resistance, blockades, beaver dams, Nishnaabeg storytelling, regeneration, generative resistance, Canadian Indigenous literature, land defenders, water defenders, practice of wisdom, Indigenous stories, Indigenous authors.Īcross North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. A Short History of the Blockade reveals how the practice of telling stories is also a culture of listening, “a thinking through together,” and ultimately, like the dam or the blockade, an affirmation of life. Widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation, Simpson’s work breaks open the intersections between politics, story, and song, bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Moving through genres, shifting through time, amikwag stories become a lens for the life-giving possibilities of dams and the world-building possibilities of blockades, deepening our understanding of Indigenous resistance, as both a negation and an affirmation. In A Short History of the Blockade, award-winning writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg stories, storytelling aesthetics, and practices to explore the generative nature of Indigenous blockades through our relative, the beaver-or in Nishnaabemowin, Amik.

As we have always done simpson