Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s essay, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” begins with her version of a story about a seven-year-old girl discovering the sweetness of maple sap by watching a red squirrel. It’s one of her favourite stories “because nothing violent happens in it” (6); instead, the girl, Kwezens, “is met with very basic, core Nishanaabeg values—love, compassion and understanding” (6). The girl’s experience is centred around “her own freedom and joy,” and Simpson imagines herself as Kwezens: “I imagine myself grasping at feelings I haven’t felt before—that maybe life is so good that it is too short; that there really isn’t enough time to love everything” (6). However, as a child she was never in that kind of situation; her experience of education was “one of coping with someone else’s agenda, curriculum, and pedagogy, someone who was neither interested in my well being as a kwezens, nor interested in my connection to my homeland, my language or history, nor my Nishnaabeg intelligence. No one ever asked me what I was interested in nor did they ask for my consent to participate in their system” (6). That was my experience, too; you needn’t be Indigenous to confront educational systems that don’t ask for consent, but no doubt that alienation is increased for Indigenous children. For Simpson, the educational system “required surrender to an assimilative colonial agenda in order to fulfill those principles” (6).
However, in the story Simpson tells, Kwezens “has already spent seven years immersed in a nest of Nishnaabeg intelligence” (6). She has learned to observe and learn from “our animal teachers,” “understands embodiment and conceptual thought,” “relies on her own creativity to invent new technology,” is patient and generous, loved and trusted (6). She trusts “that she will be believed, that her knowledge and discovery will be cherished, and that she will be heard” (7). And she has “learned the sheer joy of discovery” and “how to interact with the spirit of the maple” (7). Kwezens “learned both from the land and with the land” (7). She also “learned what it felt like to be recognized, seen and appreciated by her community. . . . She comes to know maple sugar in the context of love” (7).
For Simpson, “coming into wisdom within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe epistemology” looks like the story of Kwezens and the maple sugar:
it takes place in the context of family, community and relations. It lacks overt coercion and authority, values so normalized within mainstream western pedagogy that they are rarely ever critiqued. The land, aki, is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner-led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom, and when realized collectively it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, inter-dependent and self-regulating community minded individuals. It creates communities of individuals with the capacity to uphold and move forward our political traditions and systems of governance. (7)
Simpson is using the story of Kwezens “in the same way it is used within Nishnaabeg intelligence—as a theoretical anchor whose meaning transforms over time and space within individual and collective Nishnaabeg consciousness” (7). A theory, put simply, “is an explanation of a phenomenon,” and Nishnaabeg stories, like the story of Kwezens, form the basis of Nishnaabeg intelligence (7). However, in the Nishnaabeg context, theory “is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community and generation of people” (7). It’s not an intellectual practice; instead, “it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational,” “intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives” (7).
Most importantly, theory is for everyone: it is “generated from the ground up and its power stems from its living resonance within individuals and collectives” (7). The story of Kwezens and the maple bush has literal and metaphorical meanings, and as the listener grows, those metaphorical meanings come clear. After living a long life, a Nishnaabeg citizen “can communicate their lived wisdom, understood through six or seven decades of lived experience and shifting meaning. This is how our old people teach. They are our geniuses because they know that wisdom is generated from the ground up, that meaning is for everyone, and that we’re all better when we’re able to derive meaning out of our lives and be our best selves” (7-8). Stories like the one about Kwezens “direct, inspire and affirm [an] ancient code of ethics” (8). “If you don’t know what it means to be intelligent within Nishnaabeg realities, then you can’t see the epistemology, the pedagogy, the conceptual meaning, or the metaphor,” Simpson writes. “You can’t see how this story has references to other parts of our oral tradition, or how this story is fundamentally, like all of our stories, communicating different interpretations and realizations of a Nishnaabeg world view” (8).
One can’t assume that the story took place in the past, in pre-colonial times, “because Nishnaabeg conceptualizations of time and space present an on-going intervention in linear thinking,” although the discovery of the sweetness of maple sap and of techniques for boiling the sap to make syrup must have happened a long time ago, I would think. Nonetheless, Simpson contends that “this story happens in various incarnations all over our territory every year in March when the Nishnaabeg return to the sugar bush” (8). Kwezens’s presence on that territory, and within “the kinship relations that she is composed of,” is (now?) “complicated by her fraught relationality to the tenacity of settler colonialism,” and “her very presence simultaneously shatters the disappearance of Indigenous women and girls from settler consciousness” (8). Because she has influence and agency within her family, she “escapes the rigidity of colonial gender binaries”—so in settler colonialism, only boys have influence and agency in their families? is that really true? what about the European stories about girls with influence and agency?—and she also disrupts “settler colonial commodification and ownership of the land through the implicit assumption that she is suppose[d] to be there” (8). However, Kwezens’s “existence as a hub of intelligent Nishnaabeg relationality may be threatened by land theft, environmental contamination, residential schools and state run education, and colonial gender violence,” but she’s there nonetheless, “making maple sugar as she always has done, in a loving compassionate reality, propelling us to recreate the circumstances within which this story and Nishnaabewin takes place” (8). That story propels Nishnaabeg people “to rebel against the permanence of settler colonial reality,” to create alternative realities, “in spite of being occupied” (8).
At this point, Simpson asks questions about the story of Kwezens. What if she “had accepted the permanence of settler colonialism as an unmoveable reality,” or if she “had not access to the sugar bush because of land dispossession, environmental contamination or global climate change,” or “if the trauma and pain of on-going colonial gendered violence” disrupted her family relations and the ability of her family to support her (8-9)? “What if settler-colonial parenting strategies positioned the child as ‘less believable’ than an adult,” or if she was sitting at a desk in a school “that didn’t honour at its core her potential within Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg intelligence,” or if “she had not been running around, exploring, experimenting, and observing the squirrel—completely engaged in a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg [way] of knowing?” (9). What if she lived in a world where girls were not listened to (9)? “What if Kwezens motivation for learning wasn’t her own curiosity and joy, but recognition within the state-run education system?” (9). Of course, the answers to these questions are obvious—Kwezens would not have discovered the sweetness of maple sap.
“For me, this story is a critical intervention into current thinking around Indigenous education, because Indigenous education is not Indigenous or education unless it occurs in an Indigenous context using Indigenous processes,” Simpson writes. “To re-create the world that compelled Kwezens to learn how to make maple sugar, we should be concerned with re-creating the conditions within which this learning occurred, not merely the content of the practice itself” (9). Settlers who produce maple syrup “complete miss the wisdom that underlies the entire process because they deterritorialize the mechanics of maple syrup production from Nishnaabeg intelligence and from aki” by appropriating the process and recasting it “within a hyper-individualism that negates relationality” (9). For Simpson, the “radical thinking and action of this story . . . lies in the reproduction of a loving web of Nishnaabeg networks within which learning takes place” (9).
Simpson notes that before colonization “Nishnaabeg children grew up within the milieu of Nishnaabewin, not within the institutionalized schooling system,” and that many children still do (9). Education “comes from being enveloped by land. An individual’s intimate relationship with the spiritual and physical elements of creation is at the centre of a learning journey that is life-long” (9). In Nishnaabewin, education doesn’t end (9). Practical skills are important, but above all people are “ultimately dependent upon intimate relationships of reciprocity, humility, honesty and respect with all elements of creation, including plants and animals” (9-10). Since Nishnaabeg knowledge “originates in the spiritual realm,” it comes to people “through dreams, visions, ceremony,” and from the spirits (10). “This makes sense because this is the place where our ancestors reside, where spiritual beings exist, and where the spirits of living plants, animals and humans interact,” Simpson continues. “In order to gain access to this knowledge, one has to align themselves within and with the forces of the implicate order through ceremony, ritual and the embodiment of the teachings one already carries” (10). Of course, my rejection of my early religious training makes it very difficult for me to follow Simpson here.
In any case, she says that there’s no standard curriculum within an education that comes from the spirits, and that “it doesn’t make sense for everyone to master the same body of factual information” (10). Within a Nishnaabeg world view, “it is unthinkable to impose an agenda onto another living thing—in essence, the context is the curriculum and land, aki, is the context” (10). I am confused about this point: killing and eating an animal is imposing an agenda onto it, or is that not correct? Has the animal really offered itself to be eaten, in the pain and terror that being killed might generate? I can see how the Nishnaabeg education Simpson is describing doesn’t impose a curriculum agenda onto anyone, but can that point be extended so broadly?
Nishnaabeg knowledge is intimate; it requires “long-term, stable, balanced warm relationships within the family, extended family, the community and all living aspects of creation” (10). What happens when people disagree, though, or when stability is disrupted by death or illness? What happens then? In class, we discussed the romanticism of some accounts of Indigenous ways of thinking and being, and I wonder whether this essay wouldn’t be subject to the same kind of critique—even though it was assigned as reading. Does everyone really end up loving everyone else? Aren’t some people going to rub others the wrong way?
For Simpson, following John Borrows, meaning “is derived not through content or data, or even theory in a western context, which by nature is decontextualized knowledge, but through a compassionate web of interdependent relationships that are different and valuable because of that difference” (11). People are responsible “for generating meaning within their own lives—they carry the responsibility for engaging their minds, bodies and spirits in a practice of generating meaning” (11). Does everyone actually do that, though? I think that in a society where collective survival depends on the engagement of everyone in the work of survival, in the knowledge necessary to survive, that commitment to generating meaning probably would take place. But outside of that specific context, does it? I’m not convinced that it would—not all the time, anyway. What about forms of learning that are relatively abstract and intangible—calculus, say, or grammar? Sometimes—particularly when something is difficult—people will shy away from the work required to learn it. I wasn’t naturally gifted at mathematics, for instance, and it took a lot of hard work and dedicated practice, sitting at a desk, trying to do my homework, to pass math courses. Many of my students in writing classes need to sit down and put in hours of work in order to pass, because they are not gifted writers or because they are not practiced, fluent readers. Perhaps Simpson would dismiss that kind of knowledge as a product of settler colonialism, or perhaps she would suggest that not everyone needs to learn mathematics. The ways that not learning something might limit one’s future options might not be a consideration here, because Simpson seems to be advocating learning that leads to ways of living with and on the land. I don’t know.
Simpson continues:
Within Nishnaabewin, I am responsible for my thoughts and ideas. I am responsible for my own interpretations and that is why you’ll always hear from our Elders what appears to be my own interpretations and that is why you’ll always hear from our Elders what appears to be them “qualifying” their teachings with statements that position them as learners, that position their ideas as their own understandings, and place their teachings within the context of their own lived experience. This is deliberate, ethical and profoundly careful within Nishnaabewin because to do otherwise is considered arrogant and intrusive with the potential to interfere with other beings’ life pathways. (11)
However, once someone has learned something, it’s not their property; they “become responsible for sharing it according to the ethics and protocols of the system” (11).
“Continually generating meaning is often, but not exclusively, done in ceremony and involves ongoing ethical systems of accountability and responsibility, particularly around emotional trauma and healing,” Simpson writes. “Individual generated meaning is an authentic and grounded power. These meanings, in all of their diversity, then become the foundation of generated collective meanings and a plurality of truths” (11). Here Simpson includes dissent within the plurality of collective meanings she is describing (12), which is important, but which I’d like to learn more about, since dissent has the capacity to disrupt the “compassionate web of interdependent relationships” (11) she described earlier.
Simpsons states that “unseen forces or spiritual elements that hold power and influence in the story of maple syrup” need to be understood, even though they are implied rather than stated (12). “There is an implicit assumption in this story that Kwezens offered tobacco to the maple tree before she cut the bark to collect the sap,” she writes. “She does this as a mechanism to set up a relationship with the maple tree that is based on mutual respect, reciprocity, and caring” (12). Offering tobacco is a way to speak directly to the tree’s spirit (12). The tree has agency—it doesn’t have to offer sap to Kwezens—the same way that Kwezens has agency and has chosen to live in a way that promotes “more life and interconnection” (12). Other spiritual interactions in the story include the spirits of the squirrel, Kwezens’s family, and her ancestors (12). “Within a Nishnaabeg epistemology, spiritual knowledge is a tremendous, ubiquitous source of wisdom that is the core of every system in the physical world,” Simpson writes. “The implicate order provides the stories that answer all of our questions. The way we are taught to access that knowledge is by being open to that kind of knowledge and by being engaged in a way of living that generates a close, personal relationship with our ancestors and relations in the spirit world through ceremony, dreams, visions and stories” (12). According to Simpson, “Kwezens already lives in a reality where the spiritual world has tremendous presence in each moment” (12).
Kwezens is also “a vessel of resurgence,” a leader, an embodiment of “the core teachings and philosophies of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg culture” (12-13). She “represents the kind of citizen capable of upholding the tenets of our nation, in spite of settler colonialism”; she is “the goal of community, the re-creation of beings that continually live lives promoting the continuous rebirth of life itself,” and she “represents Nishnaabeg resurgence—the rebuilding of Indigenous nations according to our own political, intellectual and cultural traditions” (13). Creating “a society of Kwezens” who “can think and live inside the multiplicity of our culture and our intelligence” is “a critical task” for Nishnaabeg people: “if we do not create a generation of people attached to the land and committed to living out our culturally inherent ways of coming to know, we risk losing what it means to be Nishnaabeg within our own thought systems” (13). Nishnaabeg resurgence requires being able to “think within the emergent networks of Nishnaabeg intelligence” (13). Decolonization means moving outside of state-sanctioned educational systems by creating “a generation of land based, community based intellectuals and cultural producers who are accountable to our nations and whose life work is concerned with the regeneration of these systems, rather than meeting the overwhelming needs of the western academic industrial complex” or bringing Indigenous knowledges into the academy on the academy’s own terms (13). “Our ancestors’ primary concern is ‘educating’ our young people was to nurture a new generation of Elders—of land based intellectuals, philosophers, theorists, medicine people, and historians who embodied Nishnaabeg intelligence,” Simpson states (13).
However, “Nishnaabeg intelligence has been violently under attack since the beginning days of colonialism through processes that remove Indigenous peoples from our homelands,” Simpson writes (13). Those processes include residential and other state-run schools, dispossession, the destruction of land through resource extraction or pollution, poverty, and violence (13). “Our peoples have always resisted this destruction by engaging in Nishnaabewin, whenever and wherever they could,” she continues (13). She rejects the acquisition of western academic credentials in the provincial and postsecondary educational systems (14). Instead, she calls for the creation of “a nation of Kwezens” by making the land “become the pedagogy” (14).
“Kwezens very clearly embodies the idea of land as pedagogy as she went about her day learning with and from maple trees, among many other beings,” Simpson continues (14). This behaviour had been modelled for her by the adults in the community, but Kwezens teaches us by modelling as well, because “her story aligns with our embodied theory, our Creation stories” (14). Here Simpson turns to Borrows again, in particular his suggestion that Nishnaabeg people learned from the world around them (14-15). She also suggests that the creation stories told in her book, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence, are about “the process by which Nishnaabeg people come to know,” about Nishnaabeg epistemology, which is “concerned with embodied knowledge animated, collectively, and lived out in a way in which our reality, nationhood and existence is continually reborn through time and space” (15). That knowledge is “the unfolding of relationship with the spiritual world” and it “requires complex, committed, consensual engagement” from all the beings involved (15). Settler colonialism doesn’t see Indigenous peoples as “worthy recipients of consent” and “part of being colonized is having to engage in all kinds of processes on a daily basis that, given a choice, we likely wouldn’t consent to,” like the ones she experienced in educational systems where “learning was forced on me using the threat of emotional and physical violence,” which is “unthinkable within Nishnaabeg intelligence” (15). “In fact,” she continues, “if there isn’t a considerable amount of demonstrated interest and commitment on the part of the learner, learning doesn’t occur at all” (15). I think she’s right, but I’m not sure how to generate that “demonstrated interest and commitment,” since many people aren’t all that interested in learning anything, sadly.
The resurgence of Indigenous nations, “an emergent process mitigated by spiritual forces,” requires the generation of new knowledge through “physical and intellectual engagement with the struggle of nation-building” (15). “True engagement requires consent,” Simpson writes. “Being engaged in the physical, real-world work of resurgence, movement-building and nation-building is the only way to generate new knowledge on how to resurge from within Nishnaabeg intellectual systems—deep, consensual engagement with Nishnaabeg processes” (15-16). Is everyone in that community going to engage in those processes, though? “Intellectual knowledge is not enough on its own,” however, nor is spiritual or emotional knowledge: “All kinds of knowledge are important and necessary in a communal and emergent balance” (16). “Nishnaabeg people embody all the necessary knowledge for resurgence,” she continues. “We are enough because if we are living our lives out in a Nishnaabeg way (and there are many of these ways) we can access all the knowledge that went into creating the universe” (16). I’m not sure what this means: is Simpson suggesting that no other forms of education are useful or valuable? No Nishnaabeg lawyers or doctors are necessary? Not so fast: Simpson is interested in “the liberatory politics” of “other communities of struggle who have also been forces to live through oppression,” along with those of Indigenous people, including the work of bell hooks and Frantz Fanon, who speak to her heart and are teachers for her (16). Of course, reading their work means being able to read England and/or French, which would come from the forms of education she dismisses as coercive, wouldn’t it?
“Nanabush is widely regarded within Nishnaabeg thought as Spiritual Being and an important teacher because Nanabush mirrors human behavior and models how (and how not to) to come to know,” Simpson states (16). “Nanabush is fun, entertaining, sexy, and playful,” and not an academic or a credentialed teacher (16). “The brilliance of Nanabush is that Nanabush stories the land with a sharp criticality necessary for moving through the realm of the colonized into the dreamed reality of the decolonized, and for navigating the lived reality of having to engage with both at the same time,” she continues (17). “The academic industrial complex does not and cannot provide the proper context for Nishnaabeg intelligence without the full, valued recognition of the context within which Nishnaabeg intelligence manifests itself—the practice of aki—freedom, sovereignty and self-determination over bodies, minds and land,” Simpson writes. “The academy does not and cannot provide the proper context for Nishnaabeg intelligence without taking a principled stand on the forces that are currently attacking Nishnaabeg intelligence: colonial gendered violence, dispossession, erasure and imposed poverty” (17). The academy would need to recognize and “provide the proper context for Elders and knowledge holders” and fully fund “the re-generation of Indigenous thinkers as a matter of restitution for the on-going damage it has caused and continues to cause Indigenous Knowledge systems through centuries of out right attack” (17).
Simpson notes that Nanabush would wonder why people spend time indoors in classrooms or on computers—how that could be considered Indigenous education in any way (17). Kwezens paid attention to Nanabush, though, because shortly after the world was created Nanabush “took a trip around the world as a way of learning about the world. That’s the first lesson. If you want to learn about something, you need to take your body onto the land and do it” (17-18). That doesn’t mean don’t read books, but it does mean “get involved and get invested” (18). Also, talk to other people: Nanabush did a lot of visiting, “with Nokomis,” “with the West Wind,” “with plants and animals, mountains, and bodies of water” (18). “Visiting within Nishnaabeg intelligence means sharing oneself through story, through principled and respectful consensual reciprocity, with the presence of compassion,” Simpson contends. “Visiting is fun, enjoyable, nurturing of intimate connections and relationship building” (18). It is the core of Nishnaabeg political systems, mobilization, and intelligence (18). “Kwezens knew this,” Simpson writes. “This is why she was visiting the maple tree in the first place” (18). Nanabush also “sought spiritual guidance through dreams, visions and ceremonies” (18). “He shows us land as pedagogy, without yelling ‘LAND AS PEDAGOGY,’ or typing land as pedagogy into a computer 50 times,” she states (18). Nanabush teaches people “how to be full human beings within the context of Nishnaabeg intelligence,” and “Nishnaabeg intelligence is for everyone, not just students, teachers and researchers. It’s not just pedagogy; it’s how to live life” (18). I wonder who is included in the term “everyone” here.
“Being engaged in land as pedagogy as a life practice inevitably means coming face-to-face with settler colonial authority, surveillance and violence because, in practice, it places Indigenous bodies between settlers and their money,” Simpson writes (19). She describes her 15-year relationship with Elder Doug Williams from Curve Lake First Nation, during which they have “hunted, fished, trapped, picked medicines, conducted ceremonies, harvested birch bark, made maple syrup, canoed ancient routes and harvested wild rice” (19). “This represents the most profound educational experience of my life and I hope that it is far from over,” she continues, noting that Williams has taught her the history of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, their political traditions, ceremonies, philosophies, and values, and has taken her to visit sacred sites (19). “It is this relationship, more than any other, that has made me Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg,” she writes. “Doug has invested more time in my spiritual, emotional and intellectual education than anyone else in my life. Yet it is completely unrecognized, unsupported and disregarded by academic institutions” (19). Because that learning has taken place on the land, it has involved running up “against colonial authorities on a regular basis,” including police, game wardens, or individual settlers “providing their own home grown surveillance for the settler colonial authorities” (19). She quotes Williams talking about the 1923 Williams Treaty, which she writes about in her 2017 book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, because of the ways it blocks First Nations people from hunting, fishing, and other forms of being on the land (20). For Simpson, “the largest attack on Indigenous Knowledge systems right now is land dispossession, and the people that are actively protecting Nishnaabewin are not those at academic conferences advocating for its use in research and course work but those that are currently putting their bodies on the land” (21).
Simpson then recalls her time as a PhD student at the University of Manitoba, where efforts were made to bring Indigenous Knowledge into the academy (21). When she had a tenure-track position in the Indigenous Studies department, “there were two Elders on faculty, both women, who had gained tenure on the basis of their experience in Indigenous Knowledge, not on western credentials,” but 15 years later, there are no tenured Elders there, only academics hired on the basis of western credentials (21-22). This approach “reinforces colonial authority over Nishnaabeg intelligence by keeping it reified and fetishized within a settler colonial approach to education designed only to propel settler colonialism” and reinforces “asymmetrical power relationships between Indigenous Knowledge and western knowledge, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples” (22). “Nishnaabeg must stop looking for legitimacy within the colonizer’s education system and return to valuing and recognizing our individual and collective intelligence on its own merits and on our own terms,” she states:
Withdrawing our considerable collective efforts to ‘Indigenize the academy’ in favor of a resurgence of Indigenous intellectual systems and a reclamation of the context within which those systems operate, goes much further to propelling our nationhood and re-establishing Indigenous political systems because it places people back on the land in a context that is conducive to resurgence and mobilization. The academy has continually proven its refusal to recognize and support the validity, legitimacy, rigor and ethical principles of Nishnaabeg intelligence and the system itself, so we must stop begging for recognition and do this work for ourselves. This colonial refusal should be met with Indigenous refusal—refusal to struggle simply for better or more inclusion and recognition within the academic industrial complex. (22)
For Simpson, this refusal is necessary in politics, art, and cultural and intellectual production as well (22). The academy itself needs to “make a conscious decision to become a decolonizing force in the intellectual lives of Indigenous peoples by joining us in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of our knowledge—Indigenous land” (22).
Simpson clarifies her position: “I am not saying that Indigenous peoples should forgo learning western based skills, but we currently have a situation where our greatest minds, our children and youth, are spending 40 hours a week in state run education systems, from age 4 to 22 if they complete an undergraduate degree” (22-23). None of that learning “takes place in a Nishnaabeg context” (23). “In order to foster expertise within Nishnaabeg intelligence, we need people engaged with land as curriculum and engaged in our languages for decades, not weeks,” she argues. “Shouldn’t we, as communities, support and nurture children that choose to only educate themselves within Nishnaabewin? Wouldn’t this create a strong generation of Elders? Don’t we deserve learning spaces where we do not have to address state learning objectives, curriculum, credentialism and careerism, where our only concern for recognition comes from within?” (23). Finally, she asks whether the state-run educational system is “really a house worth inhabiting” (23).
Nishnaabeg education doesn’t and isn’t intended to prepare children for careers in a capitalist system; instead, it is “designed to create self-motivated, self-directed, community-minded, inter-dependent, brilliant, loving citizens, who at their core uphold our ideals around family, community and nationhood by valuing their intelligences, their diversity, their desires and gifts and their lived experiences” (23). Nishnaabeg education “encourages children to find their joy and place it at the centre of their lives. It encourages children to value consent. This was the key to building nations where exploitation was unthinkable” (23). Nishnaabeg education will “create generations of people that are capable of actualizing radical decolonization, diversity, transformation and local economic alternatives to capitalism” (23).
This “culturally inherent resurgence” will challenge “settler colonial dissections of our territories and our bodies into reserve/city or rural/urban dichotomies,” Simpson concludes. “All Canadian cities are on Indigenous lands. Indigenous presence is attacked in all geographies” (23). Indigenous people “have found ways to connect to the land and our stories and to live our intelligences no matter how urban or how destroyed our homelands have become” (23). Thus, urban Indigenous communities are part of a collective resurgence, one that compels Indigenous people to make the shift “from capitalistic consumer to cultural producer” (23). For Simpson, seeing Kwenzens as a fugitive provides the ability to imagine a different future (she cites Martineau and Ritskes here) (23).
I can see the traces of Simpson’s final paragraph in the course on Indigenous Land/Art that just finished—in the insistence that the city, too, is land. That’s important. So too is Simpson’s insistence on having a relationship to the land, although I’m certain that my relationship to the land where I’m writing this would be significantly different from her relationship to the land where she wrote this essay. And the deep knowledge of the land that is characteristic of Indigenous Knowledge—knowing that yellow blackberries, bedstraw, and poplar ash create a red dye that will penetrate porcupine quills, for instance—can only be researched or created or transmitted by the kind of education for which she advocates in this essay. Of course, as a settler, I don’t think I’m really included within that kind of education—that it would be available to me, even if I knew how to find it—but given the realities of ongoing settler colonialism, that exclusion—if it exists—isn’t surprising. At the same time, as I’ve suggested in this summary, I’m not completely convinced that Simpson’s account of Nishnaabewin isn’t a little romantic—that her suggestion that Nishnaabeg societies are based entirely and always on love and respect, that there are no conflicts or broken relationships between people (or between people and the land), isn’t a rather rosy picture. I could be wrong. Perhaps that claim is intended to be aspirational rather than literal? I’m not sure, although it doesn’t feel aspirational, but in some ways this essay is a kind of manifesto, and manifestoes are always aspirational. So I’m left with questions after reading this essay, questions I’m going to have to sit with over the next days and weeks. I do think, though, that I feel less positive or happy than I did when I read Dwayne Donald’s essay a couple of days ago, but why would everything I read leave me feeling upbeat, feeling like I’m on the right track?
Work Cited
Donald, Dwayne. “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination.” Journal fo the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2021, pp. 53-63.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 3, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1-25.
