Theory of Water - by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Paperback

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE 2025 WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION - A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2025 - The Hill Times' Top 100 Best Books in 2025

Acclaimed Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson takes a revolutionary look at that most elemental force, water, and suggests a powerful path for the future.

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has found refuge in skiing--in all kinds of weather across different forms of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skimmed along this path and meditated on our world's uncertainty--including environmental devastation, the rise of authoritarianism, and the effects of ongoing social injustice--her mind turned to the ice beside her, and the snow beneath her feet. And she asked herself: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know not only the land on which we live, but the water that surrounds and inhabits us? To coexist with and alongside water?
So begins this renowned writer's quest to discover, understand, and trace the historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. On her journey, she reflects on the teachings, traditions, stories, and creative work of others in her community--particularly those of her longtime friend Doug Williams, an Elder whose presence suffuses these pages; reads deeply the words of thinkers from other communities whose writing expands her own; and begins to shape a "Theory of Water" that reimagines relationships among all beings and life-forces.
In this essential and inventive work, Simpson artfully weaves Nishnaabeg stories with her own thought and lived experience--and offers a vision of water as a catalyst for transformation, today and into our shared future.

Review Quotes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE 2025 WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION - A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2025 - The Hill Times' Top 100 Best Books in 2025

"[Theory of Water is] a genre-defying blend of storytelling, theory and land-based knowledge. Through vivid imagery and grounded insight, Simpson explores the interconnections between water, people and place. . . . The conversation flows through themes of Indigenous ethics, communal learning, and the possibilities of a more hopeful, interconnected future--all anchored in Simpson's singular voice as both academic and artist." --Canadian Geographic

"Lyrical, intimate and expansive." --The Tyee

"No writer in recent memory has more thoroughly rearranged my moral compass than Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and no book brought me more solace than Theory of Water. . . . [An] essential work on love as methodology, on what it means to stand in solidarity with one another and with the earth that sustains us. This is more than just an imagining of something better, but a reminder that better has always been here, has always been possible. A book of immense regenerative power, by one of the few truly incendiary, indispensable writers working today." --Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This

"Urgent and necessary. . . . Profoundly moving and unflinching, it is a deeply personal and generously expansive meditation on what it means to live in communion with the earth and its inhabitants, living, gone, and still to come. This beautiful book is a gesture of hope to a future that might still be possible, if we heed its lessons." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

"A meditation on water, scale, and relation. Placing her body on the shore, on ice and snow, in water with cattails, bark, bullfrogs and more, Betasamosake Simpson . . . demonstrates that 'what we do on a small scale is how we exist at the large scale.' She gives us the word sintering--which is what snowflakes do to bond in place. It is joining and deformation; it is transformation; it is an ethic of how to live. Sintering should be in all our vocabularies for how to see and imagine each other's linked presences in the world." --Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

"Theory of Water is a profound, beautifully made work of liberation by a writer deeply attuned to what matters in this world, how to listen to it, how to preserve it, and how to reframe our relationships to reflect it. This is not a book; it is a gift: we are lucky to have it." --Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

"Karl Marx wrote, 'To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter'; for him, that matter is man. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells us that to be radical is to grasp the source of the matter: water. She is right, and she shows us why in this poignant and poetic meditation on the power of water as Life. The first victim of colonial/capitalist exploitation, water is also the first line of defense, and our most important site of (re)creation. If we are serious about decolonization, we need a theory of water." --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"In Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson moves much like her subject and inspiration--with fluidity as much as force, without fixity yet with steadiness and direction. Asking us to learn from the water that is inside us and between us, Simpson recovers indigenous knowledges that connect past and future but circumvent colonial histories. To make the world again, we are invited to decenter ourselves and join the flow. A powerful contribution to organizing and to being." --Gina Dent, co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.

"Theory of Water builds a case for deep relationality. Rather than a law like form of kinship, or model and theory of interdependence, or an account of transactions apportioning material and social worlds, this is a leaky, boundary defying, and rich account of how we come into being through water and sinter; how we attach to, and stay alive with this crucial, transitional, and shifting fractal form. Grounded in Anishinaabe thought and history Simpson scales up from the fractal to offer us a theory and model also of internationalism, of social and political intercommunalism and permeability occasioned also by water, as mode of transport, as a connector of worlds, regions, life forms. This is a model of Indigenous political thought that refuses all enclosures. Theory of Water enacts an intellectual and political history and diplomacy of the present that calls for shared journeys and shared futures." --Audra Simpson, author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

"Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Theory of Water offers quiet meditations on what it means to believe in water, Nibi. Water has its own time, ontology, and theory and practice of change. If we listen carefully, as Simpson does, it can teach us to be patient. The transformations of water from solid to liquid to gas are sometimes quick, like snow melting in the Spring, and at other times unfold over countless generations, like a glacier carving its way across the land. The answers water provides are healing, regenerative, and flowing in ways that breach and dissolve the rigid social hierarchies of colonialism and capitalism. Simpson asks herself and the reader, Do you believe in water?" --Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

"In Theory of Water, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers up a vital, indispensable text about the work of fusing thought with embodied practice in the face of colonial capitalism, which continues to derange our planet. Simpson shows through an analysis of snow and water that already codified in Nishnaabeg philosophy is the blueprint to another world, one where solidarity in revolutionary struggle is always possible. A beautifully written ode to our capacity to resist state violence and imagine otherwise." --Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound Is a World

About the Author

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 twenty years experience with Indigenous land-based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh.
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 shortlisted 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 latest project, a collaboration with Robyn Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, is a national bestseller and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.