NOOPIMING

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies is a bold reimagination of the novel, one that combines narrative and poetic fragments through a careful and fierce reclamation of Anishinaabe aesthetics.

Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush,” and the title is a response to English settler and author Susanna Moodie's 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. It was commissioned as a guidebook for British immigrants coming to North America and has since become a part of our literary canon. Set in the same place as Moodie's colonial memoir, this genre-fluid novel is offered as a cure for Moodie's racist treatment of Mississauga Nishnaabeg in her writing.

She creates for us 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. These stories gather up tiny pieces, one at a time, as they slowly circle through the perspectives of different characters, in a breathtaking act of world-building that rewards patience and deep listening. This is the real world, the one where meaning accumulates through close observation and relationship. Enter and be changed.