Why We Should Read Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

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Why We Should Read Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

You know that sense of the challenging excitement of trying to wrap your brain in directions it hasn’t yet gone and didn’t know it could?! Weaving together history, climate change, trauma, Palestine, and the brilliance of racoons, among many other issues, Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, musician and academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s amazing, thought provoking, challenging, disorienting, and uplifting book rewards commitment from the reader in spades.

The shape of the book, with characters representing a being’s nervous system, conscience, will, and body, for example, is intriguing if not confusing to those of us schooled in mainstream settler ‘logical’ structures. It offers insight into Indigenous thinking, poking fun at whites and at Indigenous from an Indigenous perspective. One of its gifts is to get us to stop trying to figure it all out, as that is unnecessary!

Among the many gems Simpson offers us:

‘Ceremony strengthens the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for emotional regulation and empathy.’ ‘Trees are good because they are simultaneously networked into the sky, the dirt and the breath. They feel everything and they record it in their tree bones.’

Hope ‘sounds like green leaves, attached to branches, moving in the wind.’

Simpson offers beautiful allegories of the experiences of animals – namely the formations of geese and the positive subversion of racoons – dealing with encroaching settlers.

This book confronts all our assumptions, making us face that we are not able to see what we can’t see! Colonizers/settlers couldn’t, and still can’t, see what the Indigenous systems were because it was/is so outside their way of viewing life. The whole book – spirit, animal, human – is about Indigenous resistance. It captures the Indigenous experience – how Indigenous people have resisted (and figured out how to be in) the settlercolonial world.

The Warmland Book and Film Collective – a response to the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada – explores, celebrates, and learns from Indigenous authors and filmmakers. We are welcoming new members – if you enjoy friendly, spirited, and interesting conversation, email us at WarmlandBFC@gmail.com for the zoom link. We next meet online January 12th to discuss Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips & Suggestions to Make Reconciliation a Reality by Bob Joseph.