Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead

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 many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has found refuge in skiing—in all kinds of weather across different forms of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skimmed along this path and meditated on our world's uncertainty—including environmental devastation, the rise of authoritarianism, and the effects of ongoing social injustice—her mind turned to the ice beside her, and the snow beneath her feet. And she asked herself: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know not only the land on which we live, but the water that surrounds and inhabits us? To coexist with and alongside water? 
    So begins this renowned writer's quest to discover, understand, and trace the historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. On her journey, she reflects on the teachings, traditions, stories, and creative work of others in her community—particularly those of her longtime friend Doug Williams, an Elder whose presence suffuses these pages; reads deeply the words of thinkers from other communities whose writing expands her own; and begins to shape a "Theory of Water" that reimagines relationships among all beings and life-forces. 
    In this essential and inventive work, Simpson artfully weaves Nishnaabeg stories with her own thought and lived experience—and offers a vision of water as a catalyst for transformation, today and into our shared future.

LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story, and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the United States and has twenty years experience with Indigenous land-based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh. 
Leanne is the author of eight books, including A Short History of the Blockade and the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize. This Accident of Being Lost was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her latest project, a collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, is a national bestseller and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

ISBN: 9781039010246
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: April 22, 2025

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