Happy book birthday to NOOPIMING: The Cure For White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, which is out today from House of Anansi Press!
Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush,” and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making. It is a lived experience. It is a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits, who are all busy with the daily labours of healing — healing not only themselves, but their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them all together. Enter and be changed.
“Noopiming is far ahead of us in so many registers of story, language, and worldview; its cumulative effect is a new cosmology.”
— Dionne Brand, award-winning author of Theory
How is it that Simpson’s fiction can feel both familiar and warm like old teachings and absolutely fresh and brand new: . . . As always, I am in awe of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.”
— Katherena Vermette, best-selling author of The Break
“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson dares to explore not only the humanity of a characters, but the humanity of the parts that make us whole, in a world running on empty.”
— Catherine Hernandez, best-selling author of Crosshairs
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician, and a member of Alderville First Nation. She is the author of five previous books, including This Accident of Being Lost, which won the MacEwan Book of the Year and the Peterborough Arts Award for Outstanding Achievement by an Indigenous Author; was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award; was longlisted for CBC Canada Reads; and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, National Post, and Quill & Quire. She has released two albums, including f(l)ight, which is a companion piece to This Accident of Being Lost. Leanne is represented by Marilyn Biderman.