Video, Past Event, Social Justice, Community, Environmental Justice
Leanne Simpson: Listening in Our Present Moment
Presenting new work, in this talk Leanne uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe consciousness to dismantle the present moment. After three years of pandemic, amplified fascism, freedom convoys, extinct glaciers, police killings, children alone in cages at borders, the resurgence of fascist states, open air prisons for entire peoples, and a dying planet, she is asking herself, what does it mean to, as Rebecca Belmore asks us in her installation Wave Sound, to listen to water? What does it mean, as Dionne Brand writes through her diaspora consciousness and by inventorying the quotidian disasters of our time, in her epic poem Nomenclature, “to believe in water”?
This talk was followed by a Q&A discussion moderated by Am Johal.
About the Speaker
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 over twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is member of Alderville First Nation.
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 short listed 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 new project, a collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living is a National Best Seller and was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Leanne is also a musician. Her latest release Theory of Ice was named to the Polaris Prize short list, and she is the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award.
Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, and SFU’s Office of Aboriginal Peoples.
