Indigenous artist fuses her politics, frustrations and joys
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson marks the release of a collection of poetry, short stories and lyrics
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson looked perfectly at home on stage under the gauzy pink and purple lights as she performed dreamy, ethereal songs from her 2016 album f( l)ight to a standing-roomonly crowd.
Anyone walking unaware into Toronto’s Henderson Brewery — a trendy locale in the rising Junction Triangle neighbourhood — on that stormy, umbrella-destroying April night might have been surprised that this was actually a literary party thrown by her publisher, House of Anansi Press.
The annual bash was turned up for Anansi’s 50th anniversary and the spring 2017 season of its poetry collections, including a new book by Simpson, who closed out the night following readings by CanLit icons Dennis Lee, Lynn Crosbie and Kevin Connolly.
The award-winning Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg author, musician, academic and activist was celebrating the release of This Accident of Being Lost, a hybrid collection of poetry, stories and lyrics from f( l)ight that fuses the political concerns, frustrations and joys of her life as a contemporary Indigenous woman with BuzzFeed-era touchstones such as gentrification, body image and online obsessions (even Kate Middleton makes a brief appearance).
Simpson is critically fearless in her observations of settler behaviour — she unapologetically crafts her stories primarily for Indigenous readers. “Indigenous stories are often coded and layered as part of their process and esthetic qualities,” Simpson says. “Every book has references and experiences that might not be familiar to all audiences; the difference in my work is that I don’t centre whiteness.”
Take the story “Plight,” which pokes at earnest white lefties for whom reconciliation is ultimately nothing more than a dinner-party conversation. The story follows three friends who have distributed flyers informing residents of a gentrified neighbourhood — located on traditional Mississauga territory — that they’ll be tapping their maple trees for syrup. Simpson’s narrator-protagonist wryly comments, “I debated framing this as performance art because white people love that and if it were the fall and this was Nuit Blanche, we’d be NDN art heroes.”
Yet, similar to other artists such as the DJ crew A Tribe Called Red and visual artist Christi Belcourt, Simpson’s commitment to producing work for and inspired by her communities has also attracted a broad, non-Indigenous following. Humour, much of it dark, flows throughout Simpson’s writing, which she says is a very important part of Anishinaabeg life and within her family circle. “I try and reflect this back to my community,” she says. “Humour is such an interesting force and process of release, reveal and transformation. I really like using it in my work.”
Like humour, musicality runs in the Simpson family. Her sister, Ansley, just released her first album, Breakwall, and the siblings have already shared stages. Simpson began working with music around 2010, and in 2013, released Islands of Decolonial Love, a nine-track companion album (featuring a collaboration with A Tribe Called Red) to her debut story collection of the same name. She shifts effortlessly between mediums without worries about being pegged as one or another. “I work from within Nishnaabeg intelligence — that doesn’t fit very well with colonial labels and boxes,” she says. “The spine of my practice is my relationship to my land and my people and that drives this work. I’m less concerned about fitting in and more concerned with connection.”
Simpson’s political awareness really emerged in the early 1990s while she was an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph. She recalls seeing Mohawk activist Ellen Gabriel leading the resistance at Kanesatake during the 1990 Oka Crisis, and thinking, “I needed to better understand who I was as a Nishnaabe.” Her scholarly work as a faculty member for the land-based Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh, NWT, and as a newly appointed distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University, sees her putting in miles across the country, inspiring a younger generation of Indigenous students with her performances and writing outside the traditional colonial-based structures of academia.
“In many ways, my presence as an Anishinaabekwe disrupts colonial presence, power and the narratives that regenerate colonial relationships,” she says. “In that way, everything I do is an intervention. My writing is just me being me. Me responding to the realities of my life. Me reflecting my community back onto itself.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill & Quire.