emmarie_ 's review for:

A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

5.0

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Everything I've ever read by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has been deeply insightful and impactful; she's a prolific and hugely influential Indigenous (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) scholar, artist, and activist. In A Short History of the Blockade, Simpson writes of the parallels between Indigenous blockades and beaver dams. "Indigenous blockades are indeed a refusal of the dominant political and economic systems of Canada. They are a refusal to accept erasure, banishment, disappearance, and death from our homelands. They are indeed an amplification and centring of Indigenous political economies—Indigenous forms of governance, economy, production, and exchange. They are indeed a resurgence of social and political practices, ethics and knowledge systems, and in this way they are a generative refusal" (9). After framing Indigenous blockades, she shares four stories of beavers and their blockades (we often call them dams). "Amik [the beaver] is the one that works continuously with water and land and animal and plant nations and consent and diplomacy to create worlds, to create shared worlds" (14). Simpson focuses on the idea of beaver dams as "both a negation and an affirmation" (19). That is, beaver dams alter waterways, create and destroy lakes and ponds, even change fluvial geomorphology. Beaver dams negate the waterway that existed before the dam. At the same time, beavers aren't really destroyers of rivers; on the contrary, their dams create new aquatic and terrestrial habitats for all kinds of plants, fish, insects, and mammals. They are ecosystem engineers who affirm other species and ways of life by "creat[ing] shared worlds" (14). Simpson's stories about beavers are rooted in Indigenous oral tradition, but modernized (in absolutely hilarious ways) to reflect how Indigenous cultures have been affected by things like the internet and gummy worms but remain rooted in centuries of tradition and particular ways of understanding and interacting with the world. Simpson's point is that Indigenous blockades (we often call them illegal blockages of pipelines, mines, hydro-dams, forest clearcuts, and more) are just like beaver dams: rooted in multi-species lifegiving practices, imbued with deep knowledge and wisdom, and sites of embodied collective practice that engender "political, intellectual, and spiritual engagement" (10). Both a negation and an affirmation. I love how Simpson frames and reframes the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the rest of the natural world, between beavers and humans, between negation and affirmation. I love how she illustrates the relationships between stories, theory, and collective embodiment. What a gift.