Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Carter Meland (bio) Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson University of Minnesota Press, 2021 WOULD I BE WRONG to see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies as the written equivalent of the pictographs and petroglyphs painted and etched onto the stone faces of cliffs all across the Great Lakes homelands of Anishinaabe peoples? Would I be wrong to see this book as a regenerative engagement with Nishnaabeg ways of seeing and being as a storied variation on the more critical sorts of work that Simpson carries out in books such as As We Have Always Done? In As We Have Always Done, Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and recording artist, writes about how the elders in her community "pulled me into an [sic] Nishnaabeg world and that this world was a very fertile place for . . . remembering the affirmative Indigenous worlds that continue to exist right alongside the colonial worlds" (16–17). Through their stories and counsel, the elders embody Nishnaabeg "brilliance," in Simpson's word, and by sharing their brilliance with her they "propel" her thinking about "resurgence as a set of practices through which the regeneration and reestablishment of Indigenous nations could be achieved" (16). While her theoretical work presents these affirmative, fertile Indigenous worlds through elder insight, theory, history, personal narrative, and references to the works of other thinkers, Noopiming pulls us into the "Nishnaabeg world existing alongside the colonial reality" (16) through an innovative text that reads as a series of poems, meditations, stories, imagic episodes that flow, urge, grieve, transform, and celebrate Indigenous persistence, resistance, resurgence while knowing that there is likely no real difference between those words. They are a state of being; they are a state of Anishinaabe being in the past-present-future (as if there is any real difference in those words). In Gerald Vizenor's words, I think we can call this a "visionary narrative." Beyond that knowledge of past-present-future persistence-resistance-resurgence, what is Noopiming's vision? How does it get us where we need to be? There is no plot in any traditional sense. Mashkawaji is suspended in ice at the beginning and introduces us to their will, their lungs, their conscience, [End Page 183] their marrow, their nervous system, and their eyes, ears, and brain. They are named Akiwenzii, Ninaatig, Mindimooyenh, Sabe, Adik, and Asin and Lucy. With the exception of Lucy, who will gain an Indian name by the narrative's end, these are all Anishinaabe names for respected elders and ancestral spirits, those presences who are the keepers of the affirmative Nishnaabeg world that exists alongside the colonial one. They buy polyethylene tarps, the blue ones, to share with homeless people in the city; they seek places in natural spaces where they might get more than two hours of sleep at a time so they can access their dreams; they follow the struggle for Palestine liberation on an app on their phone; they build ceremonial lodges out of discarded plastic water bottles; and they do research on neuroplasticity and wonder why it took the zhaganash ("the English") so long to realize "that the brain is a relational organ," an "ecosystem" (105). The "they" I'm speaking of here are all the presences in the story. Reflecting both current trends nurtured in gender studies and the slippery nature of third person pronouns in Anishinaabemowin (which as I understand it are more sort of implied than named), Simpson uses "they" throughout the book, maintaining a fluidity of terminology that resists colonial encapsulation in rigid dichotomies that is surely one of the ultimate messages of the book. Noopiming means "in the bush," and in the book this refers both to forest and urban spaces. It seems to be about bringing "bush" wisdom and worlds into the city, of re-cognizing that Nishnaabeg reality right inside colonial ones—and the city is not necessarily the city but any colonized space. For me, the book is this bush-city Anishinaabe world, a collection of stories that are strikingly imagined and poetically distilled into words that sometimes sit...