Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ([liˈæn 'biːtaːˌsəmʊ'seː ˈsɪmp.sən]) is a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, musician, and academic from Canada. She is also known for her work with Idle No More protests. Simpson is a faculty member at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning. She lives in Peterborough, Ontario. Leanne has taught at many universities across the world. In her books she breaks boundaries between song and story, allowing the aduience to go into a new world.

Early life

Leanne is an off-reserve member of Alderville First Nation, where her grandmother Audrey Williamson (née Franklin), was born in 1925. Simpson's great-grandfather, Hartley Franklin, later relocated to Peterborough to work on canoes when Audrey was three.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was born and raised in Wingham, Ontario by her Nishnaabeg mother, Dianne Simpson, and her father, Barry Simpson, who is of Scottish ancestry.

In the early 1990s, Leanne's grandmother and mother regained their legal Indian status after the legislation of Bill C-31. Leanne and several of her other family members regained their Indian status after Bill C-3 became law in 2011. Their children regained their status after Bill S-3 was passed in 2019. Like Simpson, her family members are all considered off-reserve band members.

Work

Simpson writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and realities, particularly from her own Anishinaabe nation, across various genres, and is known for advocating for Indigenous ontologies. Her work is the result of a journey to reconnect to an ancestral homeland and traditions that she was disconnected from as a child and youth, living off the reserve. As a young person, Simpson immersed herself in her cultural traditions by connecting with Northern Nishnaabeg elders. Simpson's immersion facilitated a linguistic, cultural, and spiritual reconnection. Additionally, Simpson applies Nishnaabeg's methods of meaning-making through Nishnaabeg's storytelling. Storytelling permeates Simpson's respective musical, fiction-writing, and poetic endeavors. She writes from an Indigenous worldview rooted in an embodied relationality to the natural environment. As an Indigenous mother, Simpson wants to raise her children within a tradition steeped in storytelling so they might learn Indigenous frameworks, spiritual belief systems, and Indigenous ethics to draw upon throughout their lives.

Simpson's political consciousness and activist ethic began to develop while working on her undergraduate studies at the University of Guelph. Inspired by actions surrounding the 1990 Oka Crisis and one of the notable women leaders, Ellen Gabriel, of the Mohawk nation, Simpson understood that she needed to actively nurture a reconnection to her Indigenous Anishinaabe roots. Simpson has now taken on the role of the inspirational artist/activist to youth as both a decolonial performance musician and artist, as well as through her academic writings. Simpson's approach to her work derives from an understanding of the limitations imposed by Western epistemologies and centers on Indigenous epistemologies.

Education and academic career

Simpson earned a Bachelor of Science in biology from the University of Guelph and a Master of Science in biology from Mount Allison University. She obtained her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Manitoba. Simpson is faculty at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, and regularly teaches at universities across Canada. She was a visiting scholar in Indigenous Studies at McGill University and the Ranton McIntosh Visiting Scholar, University of Saskatchewan. She was a distinguished visiting professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a past Mellon Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at McGill University. and is currently a Matakyev Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. Simpson's work positions Indigenous ways of being within Canadian music and literature in the 21st century.

Activism and resurgence philosophy

Simpson is active in Indigenous resistance and resurgence, anti-colonialism, gender-based violence awareness and the protection of Indigenous homelands. She was an active participant in the Idle No More protest movement.

Simpson's activism is expressed both academically and artistically. She believes that movements such as Idle No More are most powerful when composed of a collective of community organizers, artists, writers, academics, and speakers that are mobilized through a grassroots, bottom-up approach who approach their activism vigorously and creatively. During the Idle No More protests she became a key figure in the movement after the dispersal of her article, "Aambe! Maajaadaa! (What #IdleNoMore Means to Me)". In this piece, Simpson articulated the importance of defending Indigenous land bases and life ways by emphasizing the interconnected relationality of Indigenous world views and meanings as intimately in connection with the land base.

Simpson articulates that the potential futurity of Idle No More was arrested by tribal infighting regarding allocation of extracted resources. Simpson understood these assertions of monetary rights as connected to the reality of endemic tribal poverty. Even so, she articulates that this caused Idle No More to be sidetracked from the larger critique that questioned the basis of such extractive policies to begin with. She explains that tribal peoples are in a double bind in that addressing the material needs of crushing poverty necessitates participation in the very extractivist system that caused the poverty in the first place.