Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas)

Indigenous Americas

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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Indigenous Americas

University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London

The publication of this book was assisted by a bequest from Josiah H. Chase to honor his parents, Ellen Rankin Chase and Josiah Hook Chase, Minnesota territorial pioneers.

Title page art copyright Lianne Marie Leda Charlie

Our Treaty with the Hoof Nation and Binoojiinh Makes a Lovely Discovery were previously published in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, The Gift Is in the Making, from the Debwe Series published by HighWater Press, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

The interview by Naomi Klein was previously published as Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No Mores Leanne Simpson, Yes! Magazine, March 5, 2013. http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.

Billy-Ray Bellcourt, sacred, was previously published at https://nakinisowin.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/sacred/. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, author.

Title: As we have always done : indigenous freedom through radical resistance / Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Series: Indigenous Americas | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017037620 (e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4529-5601-5 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Ojibwa IndiansPolitics and government. | Ojibwa IndiansCanadaGovernment relations. | Nishnawbe-Aski Nation.

Classification: LCC E99.C6 (e-book) | DDC 323.1197/333dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022270

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

I AM WRITING THIS CHAPTER on a gray, wet winter day, in the caf in the sports complex at Trent University as my two kids attend swimming lessons. My kids pass the symbol with a casual they should change that and dont have a fit, Mom. They have grown up in their territory, learning with a community of artists, makers, and elders, a luxury that not all of us, including myself, have had. Because of that, I see a strength in them that I dont see in myself. I see an ability to point out and name colonialism, resist and even mobilize to change it. They know more about what it means to be Nishnaabeg in their first decades than I did in my third. This intimate resurgence in my family makes me happy.

Over a decade ago, I was listening to Doug speak to a group of Canadians in a coffee shop in downtown Peterborough, a city in central Ontario between Toronto and Ottawa. Peterborough is known to be a conservative hockey town (really, a small city) on the edge of cottage country. Doug wanted his audience to know where they were, and he began by telling them what the land used to look like. The non-Native audience was nearly silent, transfixed by each sentence he spoke. So was I, because as he was speaking, I was recognizing that the land I know as my home has been devastated by settlement, industrial development, the construction of highways and roads, the Trent-Severn Waterway, and four centuries of dispossession. I understood that the landscape I knew as home would be almost unrecognizable to my Ancestors, and I hadnt known previously that I could barely even imagine the worlds that had already been lost. In the weeks after that talk, I spoke with Doug about what he had shared. As we drove around our territory in the months that followed, he pointed out where the Wendat (Huron) villages used to be, where hunting grounds were located, the former locations of black oak savannas and tallgrass prairies. I began to start my own talks with a narrative of what our land used to look like as a quick glimpse, albeit a generalized one, of what was lostnot as a mourning of loss but as a way of living in an Nishnaabeg present that collapses both the past and the future and as a way of positioning myself in relation to my Ancestors and my relations. I want to do the same here in this book.

Nogojiwanong (the place at the end of the rapids, or Peterborough) is in the heart of the Michi Saagiig part of the Nishnaabeg nation, and we call our nation Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamigthe place where we all live and work together. between the Kanienkeh:ka (Mohawk) and the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg. Diplomatically, we have always had close ties to the Wendat. They asked to live in our territory at different points in history, and we made agreements with them so they could. There are wampum belts made, and the oral tradition has a lot of evidence that we lived together quite well: they lived in longhouses and farmed, and we were hunting and fishing, ricing and sugaring, traveling by the waterways.

Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg are salmon people. Doug tells me ChiNiibish had its own resident population of salmon that migrated all the way to Stoney Lake to spawn. We drank directly from the lakes, and that was a good, healthy thing to do. There was a large population of eels that also migrated to Stoney Lake each year from the Atlantic Ocean. There was an ancient old-growth forest of white pine that stretched from Curve Lake down to the shore of Lake Ontario, which had virtually no understory except for a bed of pine needles. There were tallgrass prairies and black oak savannas where Peterborough stands today. The lakes were teeming with minomiin, or wild rice. The land was dotted with sugar bushes, the lakes were full of fish.