Ideas - Following the wisdom of water to remake an unravelling world

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Water has been "a powerful teacher" for Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a member of Alderville First Nation north of Lake Ontario. With so much uncertainty about the kind of world that’s taking shape, her award-winning book Theory of Water draws on Anishinaabe creation story, Indigenous ethics of relationality and reciprocity, and the wisdom of water to chart a course for remaking a better, more sustainable and just world. Simpson's Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction in 2025.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface.

Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.caver to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this ideas podcast, could you

follow us on the app you're using, it's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop. The podcast is available every weekday, so our feed has lots to choose from. If you already follow us, thank you so much. Maybe you could give us a review or a rating. And if there is an episode you can't stop thinking about, please recommend it to a friend. Every little bit you do helps other listeners find ideas. Now on to today's podcast. What Does it mean to listen to water or to believe in water? That is the question that I was asking myself continually through this book. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

My name is Leanne Bidas Moussaid Simpson. The author of Theory of Water, Nishnabe Maps, to the times ahead. I was listening very carefully. to water. I was thinking alongside water to, I think, see beyond the present moment and to see beyond my own perspectives in this present moment, a being that was teaching me through their embodied practice of what it means to live inside of the ecological processes that make up our share world. And water became a very powerful teacher for me in that sense. The times ahead seemed to be here now, unfolding in real time with the unraveling of the world order of the past.

In a sense, it's something indigenous peoples around the world have experienced in a violent, traumatic fashion many times, the unmaking and undoing of their worlds. The loss of their land, way of life, language, culture, livelihood, systems of governance. In theory of water, Leanne Simpson recounts the horrors inflicted on indigenous peoples in Canada by colonialism. But she draws on Anishinaabe traditional knowledge, ethics, and creation stories, to reveal the wisdom and power of Nebe, the Anishnabi word for water. Nebe embodies a fierce critique of colonialism and capitalism as irreconcilable with indigenous life. And Nebe is an unconquerable life force that provides a map for world-making based on the sustaining

relationship her ancestors lived with each other and the natural world in the times before. Leanne Simpson is a renowned Nishna Begg scholar and a member of the Alderville First Nation North of Lake Ontario. She's an award-winning musician and the acclaimed author of nine books. Her latest Theory of Water won the Hillary Weston Rite. Trust Prize for nonfiction in 2025. Throughout tonight's episode, you'll hear excerpts of the lecture she delivered in January 2006 as the Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.

But we begin with her visit to the Ideas Studio. She told me how an academic posting in Yellowknife led her to think deeply about water. I had the opportunity through my work at the Dichinta Center for Research and Learning to spend about a month on the side of a lake that was transforming from a frozen winter world into a summer watery, wet gathering place for fish and ducks and birds and people. Canadians are around lakes and rivers that are freezing and melting all the time, but it's rare that we get to sit on the shore in that overlapping space of land and water and sky

and witness that transformation on a day-to-day basis. The sounds were incredible. The changes were incredible. It felt like a miracle. And so in my work as a musician, I wrote the record theory of ice about that experience. And that is when I really started very literal. truly listening to the sounds that water was making.

Over watery edges. It's the ice edge to collect camp. You shoot ducks while it's still easy. I think the process of making music, collaborating with other artists, rehearsing, touring, playing the record, deepened my understanding of water and was sort of the precursor to this.

And every living thing on the planet, it, every culture, every group of people, plants, animals all have a relationship with water through this global cycling of water. As someone who is from and considers the Great Lakes, my family, it's something that I have a very long kind of ancestral relationship to as well. So it made sense then to spend a lot more time in a focused way, thinking about what the theory of water could teach me about being alive in this present moment. Bonjour, Ani Kinawaya, Gidigabhizu, Nedawema, Kina Ghi and Ashnavek Ogunming, the Donjibah,

and gojewanee, Megawada, Bidasmasa, Kednajana-Kas. This family of lakes, Nayano, nibimong, Gichikiming, in Canuck Kong, the place of the turtle, holds 21% of the earth's fresh water and 84% of the continent's freshwater. These great lakes, Nayano Nibimong Gichikiming in Canuck Kong,

the place of the turtle, are the internal organs of my world, filtering and cleaning water from the sky, the rivers, and the snow, through four lakes, and then finally to Chinebich, which sends the water down, Kichibing, or the St. Lawrence River, connecting me to every ocean and every drop of water on the planet since the beginning of time. My family is 14,000 years old.

The parents are sun and ice, a spectacular sheet of ice that covered most of so Canada and a large portion of the northern so-called United States. As Neyano Nibemong Gichikimine's parents melted into them, they carved five basins into the land filled with the ice's miraculous transformation into water. This family is made up of 3,500 different species of life, plus an additional 200 species of bird, that migrate through the region in the fall and again in the spring. If you live here, you belong to this family of lakes. If you visit here, you belong to this family of lakes.

If you're listening to this, you belong to this family of lakes. You say in your book that your collaborators in writing the actual book were snow and ice, slush and water. How were they your collaborators? I think that we're visiting right now where much of Canada is experiencing very cold, very wintry weather. I've thought a lot about snow and ice in my own experience because, of course, with climate change, it's becoming more precious.

It's becoming not something that we can always count on in the winters where I live. I wanted to pay a particular attention to water in this frozen stee. state, this precious state, this state that is shrinking has shrunk over my lifetime to see what I could learn. And I think this is where in the book, the idea of centering comes from by looking at snowflakes about thinking about what happens to our cities and our communities when we get a gigantic blizzard and things quiet. Things slow down. We get a snowed down. We get a snow day. We're home in bed. Things are not functioning. We can't move about modern life. Snow is one of those few things that shuts everything down until this day. I started spending a lot of time

thinking with snow paying attention to how it behaves in the sky, how it's formed from a single nucleated speck of dust, how it attracts water, becomes ashore, falls through the sky, it creating these crystal arms into that formation of a snowflake. And then when it lands in this new environment, the first thing it does is it begins to center. Snowflakes are apt at communication, naming their feelings and using eye statements and arguments. They practice consent and accountability as if it were the food of life, and they know how to apologize and repair. And the first thing snowflakes do when they land is the same thing they do in the sky, and that is to transform, to fit into the network they have landed in. Their fragile arms

bend and round, they metamorphosize from an individual to a commune, bonding at temperatures below zero to other edges of other snowflakes neighboring them. They round their edges to form a stronger, denser, packed, present. They soften in refuge. They cintering. Centering is a form of bonding, attaching and building coalitions with your neighbors, a transformative communal process that takes tiny fragile flakes and bonds them together into packed-centered snow,

snow that has staying power. Snow flakes weave themselves into their environment in a way that doesn't destroy their neighbors, in a way that doesn't destroy themselves. When they arrive on land, the first thing they do is center. The first thing they do is to find a way to belong. And because it transforms, and Canadians know this really well, if you are out, you know, one hour after the snow finishes falling, shoveling, it's light and fluffy.

But if you don't go out for 24 hours, you have a more difficult job. The snow is heavy, it's saggy, it's centered. So the idea that I could learn something really important about being alive on this planet from a snowflake because of what it does is something that, became very special to me. Yeah. I have to say, having grown up in this country, that I've never heard a more beautiful description of a snowflake and what it does and how it exists in the world.

I understand, of course, that you learned about centering while you were cross-country skiing. Yeah. Yeah. How did learning about sintering teach you how to be in the world? I think, first of all, I owe a huge debt to Inishina Bay elders, and I owe a huge debt to Doug Williams, who was an elder from Curve Lake, because they taught me to look to the land and to look to things like ice and snow and water

as a map for inspiration and as beings that were embodying sort of intellectual thought and theory about how to live in the world. They point to the ecological processes that renew and replenish the earth as being a sort of, of knowledge. These are where the instructions were coming from. I think that through that gift, I knew that paying attention to the world around me and to the natural world could be something that could be quite generative. And so I was taking that with me on the ski trail. And the practice of doing these activities sort of over and over again, I think, is also related to to generating that knowledge and being able to listen, slow and listen to what's going on

around us. And so I think from those teachings, I knew to look to snow. So the word that for water in Inesha Bay language that you use in the book is Nibbe. But it's a word that holds far more meaning than the word we use in English. And I wonder if you could explain a bit about what Nibbe means and just how much more it encompasses and holds on to than the word water. I think that culturally I understand water as being something that life is incredibly dependent upon. Culturally, we have certain ceremonies at certain times of a year where people might fast or go without water to learn very succinctly about how important it is for life. We have songs that talk about how water is a healer, water is a medicine,

and water is a connector. When I look back at the way that my ancestors lived, Michi Sa Gik people, Michi Saq means at the mouths of the rivers. So we were living at the mouths of the rivers that drained into Lake Ontario. We would have been dependent on fishing as a staple. We would have been dependent on monoman or wilder ice that grows on the lakes.

We would have spent the month of March in sugar bushes, working with water again, the sap from trees and boiling that down into sugar. So water was where a lot of our sustenance would have come from. It was also an incredibly important mode of transportation. So we would have traveled in canoe across the lake, through the rivers from Lake Ontario into Georgian Bay. It was the highways as well. It was important in terms of our origin stories in the womb before we're born.

So I think my ancestors saw it as an incredible life force, something that they had a continual relationship with on a day-to-day sort of moment-to-moment basis. I think that that's a pretty beautiful way of living. Yeah. You could almost say water is everything. Yeah. Water is life. Yeah. How does the idea of Nibbe connect to world-making as you understand it?

So I think in this book I wanted to think about the kinds of worlds that we could imagine and that we could build outside of the one that we're currently in. I wanted the book to be an invitation for other groups of people, other individuals to think alongside me. So I didn't want it to be instructive, but I wanted people to engage with sort of what I was sharing and think about. meaning in their own cultures and in their own lives. And I think in that way, water became a connector. It became something that if you grew up in the prairies or the desert, you had a relationship to. If you grew up in the far north, you had a relationship to. If you're living in some place like Gaza right now, you understand what it means to have water be used as a weapon. In a lot of Anishna by origin stories, water plays a role. And so I think culturally we see water as a world-making

force. And because it is so crucial for life, it's pretty foundational. Yeah. You mentioned Doug Williams. He's a very strong and abiding presence throughout the book and you're thinking, who was Doug Williams? And what did he mean to you? Doug Williams was an elder from Curve Lake First Nation. He was a great sort of bushman. He loved hunting and he loved fishing. He loved the land. He loved Michi Sagik, Nishabakh people. He was a fluent speaker. He has been a past chief of Curve Lake First Nation. He was an amazing storyteller. He was a really important, I think, historian. He worked for years. supporting the Indigenous Studies program at Trent University. He ran a sugar bush. And he taught me over two decades a tremendous amount of knowledge and practice. He was a great friend.

He was a mentor. And then Doug has taught hundreds of people like me throughout the years. He has a really big presence, I think, in our part of the nation. And definitely has a big presence in your writing. It sure does. He thought about things very, very deep. deeply. He wrestled with sort of how to live in the contemporary world, and he engaged very deeply with our teachings, and he was always sort of in the midst of discussing sort of in

Ashnavea politics or philosophies or stories with groups of people. He gave a lot back to the community as a ceremonial leader, as a teacher. There was always, you know, people at his house and on his land trying to learn from him. But I think one of the most important things that I remember about him as a teacher was just how gentle he was. I want to be like that in the world as well. I'm very sorry you lost him. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry that we all lost him as well. Yeah. And your grief over him really is palpable through the book. And there's, if I may, there also seems to be grief from a whole host of sources. throughout the book. Where else is that grief coming from? Doug was alive at the beginning of the book,

and he died during the writing. And so there's part of me that knows I'm grieving. I'm trying to remember every piece of knowledge that he passed on to me, which I think is very common for indigenous people my age when we lose an elder. Must be terrifying, because you don't want to forget anything. It feels like that, yeah. And then I think I'm also missing him. It feels like he's right beside me writing and I'm having these conversations in my head with him. So I think that's the process. When I went out, the book is done, the book's been edited. It's now time to engage with audiences. People are really identifying with that threat of grief because I think collectively we're experiencing grief, whether that's from climate change or the way that the world is changing

the genocide in Gaza and in Palestine, building up from the pandemic. It feels like in a lot of ways each year just gets worse in a way that we couldn't have imagined. It does. So I think I was probably, that was in the background when I was writing the book, but there was this acute sort of grief from the loss of Doug. So I think that has been a connector to audiences. as we just kind of gather in a room for a reading, pause, and think about this shared moment where there is a lot of grief and a lot of hopelessness.

Yeah. You mentioned in the book that you were reminded that your ancestors are with you. I'm supporting and sharing and caring for you from another realm is what you say. Just given the moment we're in, how important that is. Yeah, and I think about them a lot because they went through some pretty horrific moments in history, as well, some pretty horrific world endings, some genocides. And so I think that this idea that our ancestors are right here with us supporting us is something that gives me a lot of strength and gives me a lot of hope because I know that our people are strong. I know that we've been in similar

situations before and that we've been able to still get this next generation through. We've still been able to care for each other. We've still hung on to the things that are important. I take, I think, inspiration and strength from that. Part of the, a large maybe part of the grief that comes through in the book does center on water and its inhabitants. And you live in a north of Lake Ontario, traditional Nishnabic territory. How have you seen the waterways in that region, you know, where Nishnabic people paddled and portaged and camped and fished? How have you seen that being contained, carved up, and controlled? So I come from Treaty 20, also the Williams Treaty areas,

and one of the big impacts on water was the construction of the Trent Severn Waterway, that system of lift blocks. That caused a lot of flooding. That caused a lot of the reversal of flow for some of those bodies of water. It caused the destruction of wild rice, which was a huge staple in our diet. it, you know, chumming around with Doug, he used to call it, he would talk about, you know, things that he remembered from his childhood, salmon in Stony Lake that were migrating up from Lake

Ontario that were extirpated. He used to talk about eels from the Sargasso Sea that used to come into our territory. So I think there's this generational knowledge where if you don't have those relationships between the generations, you forget what the baseline looks like. Doug's teachings were really useful in orienting and teaching me that I don't even know that my ancestors would recognize the North Shore of Lake Ontario right now. He can remember drinking right out of the lake, but we can't do that anymore in my territory. The abundance of fish that my people were used to that was normal has changed a lot. So Doug would get quite emotionally saying,

you know, we would be out paddling, maybe trying to find wild rice, and he would point out an old camping spot that his family might have camped at and there would be a monster cottage or home on there. There's been lots of conflict in our territory from some cottagers and harvesters of wild rice because some cottagers want to have like a kind of a

pristine beach and not a swampy wild rice patch in front of their cottage. I think the thing that I've most emotionally attached to that I'm losing within my lifetime is snow and is winter and is the cold. I was just visiting my parents who live in the snow belt region of Lake Huron and this winter, they've had this tremendous amount of snow, the kind of winters that I haven't seen for, you know, 30 or 40 years. part of, I think, the focus for me on ice and snow and slush in this book is because it's becoming more precious, because it's dying under climate change. I think when you get a little bit old and you start to be able to see these changes in the course of your lifetime, that hits hard. It hits hard as an individual. It must also really hit hard for indigenous people collectively. given their traditional and sacred role as caretakers of land and water and lakes and snow and ice and permafrost and all that stuff, just what it must be like to watch when things are melting when they're not supposed to that natural cycles are being disrupted.

I think my ancestors really early on in the colonial period saw that there was going to be a problem when sort of capitalism landed on our shores and people started to violate what. John Burroughs would call an Ishnabai law. This idea that you take only what you need, you use everything you take, you share everything you have was just being constantly violated first around white pine trees for the mass of the sales, then the fur trade, then this sort of insatiable greed that was fueling economies in Europe and causing a lot of destruction in our homeland. And I think indigenous peoples in Canada have been extraordinarily good at articulating this about organizing and mobilizing to protect our homelands. They've been on the front lines of climate change and of advocating for us to switch to molds of being that are less destructive on the land.

And I worry in terms of indigenous knowledge, though, that so many of our our cherished land-based practices like making maple sugar or maple syrup is something that's really immediately being threatened by climate change. So I start to wonder that some of the things that I've taught my children that are very precious in my family and precious in my community, they might not be able to practice. They might not be able to pass down to their children. and that feels really devastating. Yeah.

Indigenous people have also been on the front lines of the critique of colonialism and capitalism. And there are many critiques in Canada, let's say, or in the Western world of capitalism and colonialism. But I'm wondering how indigenous critiques of capitalism and colonialism different. I think one of the ways that they're different is that rather than writing them down, our people embodied them. We have bodies of knowledge and practice about how to live in families and communities and in nations that are anti-capitalist that are about practicing how to weave ourselves into the cacophony of life in a way that brings forth more life. So I think it's been an embodied practice that has been the critique.

And I think that's oftentimes what you see in indigenous resistance through things like the blockade. we are going to protect the land from, you know, set development by blocking this road and refusing settler colonialism or refusing capitalism. And behind those barricades, we are going to feed people. We're going to sing songs. We're going to do ceremonies. We're going to take care of the children. We're going to take care of the elders. We're going to embody the alternative.

Theory and practice. Leanne Badesemose Simpson is the author of the award-winning book, Theory of Water. Nishnabe Maps to the Times Ahead. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Every day, your eyes are working overtime. From squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important.

important. Comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrists detect early signs of eye and health conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at specksavers.cavers.cai exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.caver's to learn more. It's been said that being neighbors with America is like sleeping with an elephant.

One gets affected by every twitch and grunt. Well, these days, there's a lot more than twitches and grunts in dealing with the U.S. I'm Paul Hunter. And I'm Katie Simpson. We're reporters here in Washington, and every Wednesday, We'll bring you a smart conversation to help you make sense of how American politics are affecting Canada. Our new podcast is called Two Blocks from the White House. Find and follow now wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube.

Leanne Bidasse-Mose-Simpson writes that this is a time of world endings and world beginnings. And the news and the air is full of anxiety about both. So much uncertainty about the future and the kind of world that's taking shape. But Simpson's theory of water points to a better kind of world that Nebe, water, helps make possible as the blood of the earth and the one that cleans the earth, an agent of world making and an antidote for hopelessness. Nebe plays a central role in the version of the Anishnabe creation story Simpson recounts in theory of water and in her lecture.

The story begins with Shuehmanado. And Joie Manitou is a benevolent energy that loves things, loves living things unconditionally. Joie Manitou is at the same time all the genders and none at all. In this story, before there is life, before there is a world or even world making, there is love. Jouet is an unconditional love, an organizing force. that infuses our reciprocal relationality with deep practices of care. Jouet is bound up in the communal. It's an ethic that is animated in our relations,

propelling practices of kindness, and generating empathy for all the forms of life that make up this world. Joie Manitou had a dream of the world, the one we know today with the oceans and rivers, the forests and mountains, the deserts and glaciers. And with dreams and visions come responsibility. So Joie Manadoe knew they had to make it happen. This first time creation happened spontaneously and life was created instantly and everything was beautiful. This went on for a long time.

Everyone was getting along and in Inishina Bemoan we call it Kina Bamazoin. Everyone was participating in a big kindness. But Doug taught that this piece didn't last and that one day things started to go very wrong. Everything died off and no one knew why. He used to say

it could be that life is not that easy to keep. It could be that life is fragile. It could be that in making life, we don't always get it right. It could be that in isolation, no individual or community has the knowledge we need to build worlds. It could be that world making and struggle. All the earthbound life died and was gone. Only the sun and the great waters were saved. This bothered Joie Manadoe, and they were upset. This resonates with me sitting on the edge of climate collapse, apartheid, genocides, and overwhelming world endings. I'm imagining indiguaire, Jaue Manadoe, in the sky world, scrolling on their phone, watching Netflix in bed under a weighted blanket,

feeling bothered because the place they created got into trouble. but Joé Manadeau doesn't stay in this place for very long. The spirits that lived in the sky went to Joie Manadoe and asked if they could help. So the first time Joie Manadoe created the world, they did it alone, and it didn't work. So when help was offered, they agreed. They asked another spirit who was different in character and work than themselves to try. They asked Giziggo Kui, Sky Woman. They asked her to go down to the earth and to see if creation could be repaired.

Gizigokai's work was not easy. The first time she tried, her two children died, and she was consumed by grief. Something wasn't working right for Jolwe Manitou's dream. Gijigou Kui went back to the sky world to visit with Jueh Manadou, try and figure out what had happened. I imagine the two felt a deep despair, having both tried and failed. They were now both grieving, perhaps stuck in the fog of bereavement. In the meantime, back on earth, a great flood happened, covering the earth with water, washing over and nurturing the land and changing the physical structure of the earth.

Water, or Nebe, saw the problem and did the work that only they can do in hopes that it would help to move things along. Nibi didn't have to act. Nibi, though, was thinking beyond themselves and their responsibilities. Nivey was living in kindness, witnessing, and empathizing the struggle of both Jueh Manitou and Gizuco Kui. Within a Nishnaabe world making water is always crucial. Our humans, we first exist in a water world, and it's a world that meets all our needs and where we learn what it feels like to be safe. Water that I breathe in becomes a constituent that makes up most of my body.

Water that I breathe out becomes part of someone else's body. Water travels the world over, moving easily through land, air, soil, rock, and bodies. Nibbe continually violates the home spaces of everything on the planet, and it might take a very long time, but Nibi always escapes the container. Nivei reminds us that we can build all the enclosures we want, including our own bodies, but there are world-making forces, world-building, and maintaining the planet,

that are planetary, that are beyond us. In fact, if Nibi is enclosed, they work away, seemingly gently, incredibly persistent, and unsuspecting until the enclosure is eroded away, and there's an undercut or an arch or a hole, and it appears as chasm and rupture. They keep at it in the beginning when it seems absolutely impossible, through the years of seeing no progress to the point where they think they might be imagining or wishing a transformation,

through the hopelessness of incremental change until finally, after everyone but nibi has given up across an incomprehensible time frame for living things, there is a miraculous rupture. Perhaps world-making is the practice of communal struggle. Joie Manitou and Gizegokwee continue their visit in the sky world. They comforted each other. Joie Manadoe encouraged Gizegu Kui and told her not to give up. Gizegu Kui eventually makes the decision to go back to the earth and to keep trying. She encounters Nibi's flood, the catastrophic upheaval that has left the world in a completely different place than when she was last there.

Here is the world. It's only water. There's no land. There are no humans. In time, Gizigal Kui found animals in the water that had survived the flood because they could fly or swim, the loons, the beavers, the muskrats. Chick-Kinak, the snapping turtle, came to the surface and offered Gizier-Gi-Zer. Gizigogu Kui a place to land and rest. The animals Giziggo Kui found needed help.

They also needed a place to rest because they had been swimming or flying endlessly for days. Maybe they weren't even thinking of making a world at this point. Maybe they were only thinking of caring for the ones that were near exhaustion. Giziggo Kui rested on the back of the turtle with the beavers and the muskof. and the other animals, a communal place of refuge. Giziggo Kui noticed the design on the turtle's back. She ran her finger around the rim of the shell and felt its meaning. 13 parts in the middle, 28 parts around the edge.

She felt its meaning because her body cycled each moon and her body's practice of cycles enabled her to see the moon's cycles on the turtle's back. The turtle shell was a map. 13 moons or months, 28 days each. Turtles still carry that map today,

as does the moon, as do people who menstruate. The turtle was showing her that what was missing in Juei Manadeau's previous design was cycling and renewal. Not even Joie Manadeau is perfect because the job of Joie Manadoe isn't perfection. The job of Joie Manadoe is unconditional love. After a while, the loon, a bird that can swim and float, offered to dive to the bottom. The loon was gone for a long time and finally floated to the surface drowned. The loon tried so hard it had died trying. Same with the otter, same with the beaver.

Next came muskrat. The same thing tried too hard and floated to the surface. But when muskrat floated to the surface, Gizhiko Kui noticed they had a handful of earth. She put that handful of dirt onto the turtles back, and it grew into mountains and streams and lakes, and then into clouds and winds and rains and trees and beautiful animals, and this world was created. Gizigokwe went back to the sky world and became the moon. She became the one to watch over and regulate all of the cycles needed to bring forth more life on earth. Her form cycles, and she visually reflects through her phases, the cyclical nature of the universe. When you talk about world making, how do you want people to understand it?

I think for Inishnave people, I've been taught that we need to get up in the morning, kind of survey the resources that we have at hand and who's involved and we need to make life. And so I think of my ancestors living on this land in the times prior to, colonization and they were makers. They made their clothes. They made their transportation. They made their education and healthcare and political systems and governance and spirituality. They were constantly collectively and individually engaged in a creative process. And I think that that's a very powerful way to live because it aligns us with those so sacred big theoretical origin stories, I think sometimes in this present moment, it feels like world making is happening without us. It's

happening to us, that there are forces in the world, whether that's coming from colonialism or capitalism or fascism, that are making decisions for us, and that we don't have very much power to influence that. And us, you mean all of us. And I mean all of us. And so I think also in this moment, it's easy for our dreams and our visions to shrink. It's easy for us to think, oh, well, what might have been possible in the 1990s or even in 2000s or no longer possible because this is where we are. And I think we always need people that are continually visioning and dreaming something different so that we're not just settling for what we're inheriting, but we're remembering that we have agency and power, especially when we come together to meet the

material needs of our immediate community, we can build those little worlds. And I think we're seeing some amazing world building happening in places like Minneapolis right now as people support their neighbors in the face of ice. We were given the responsibility of Mino Bamazuan, of living in a way that contributes to a continuous rebirth. of all of the living things on the planet, we were given the responsibility not to remake the world, but to fit into the complex networks of interconnection and interdependence of the ecosystems that make up the planet.

Together, my ancestors were skilled at weaving others into the web because we knew we belonged to a family of lakes, and when everyone knew they belonged to a family of life, of lakes and we're working together and knitting themselves into each other. Life could be quite stunning. There are a number of words that recur repeatedly and in the book Theory of Water. Care, love is a big one, but also sharing, consent, relationality, reciprocity. I'm wondering collectively what you think, the importance is of these words to an indigenous way of being. Different cultures have different origin stories.

And what I love about mine is that it doesn't start with nothing or with emptiness. It starts with an unconditional love. And that's beautiful to me that the first ingredient in making our world was caring for each other and caring for the living things that we're sharing time and space with. That is something that in Inishinaabe culture, caring about the plants that were harvibing, for medicine, caring about the animals that are our sustenance, caring about our children, about our elders, about our neighbors. Those are practices that are embedded in our teachings. They're embedded in our spirituality and they're embedded in our culture in a very deep way. Relationships are very, very important in an ishape thought. The idea that relationships are

reciprocal or that there is a cyclical nature to it. So you're not always, always giving, but sometimes the community also shows up to support you. I'm just listening to you and imagining a world kind of being undergirded by love. And I can understand how incongruous this world seems at the moment the lack of love and the lack of consent and relationality must be jarring in that worldview. I think that it's always been jarring for indigenous people who are practicing this way of life. And sort of the construction of Canada is based on a very different set of values and a very different set of practices that were very violent and we're very much designed to dispossess indigenous peoples of our land and our minds and our bodies. And so I think in the face of that, part of our resistance, part of rebuilding. and taking care of our children and our homelands is leaning into those care practices,

leaning into figuring out how to center and support other movements and other people that are facing genocides. There's a lot of talk by governments and industry about creating economic opportunities for First Nations and making them partners in resource development. and that kind of talk. But from your perspective, is this viable? Like, are the worldviews of indigenous people and capitalism fundamentally at odds? When I'm asked this question, I like to sort of take a step back and ask,

why is that the only option that's being presented to First Nations by government? So the only option is poverty or sign on to this mine, this big divestation. and get, you know, a portion of the profits in order to be able to sustain yourselves. So we don't have the right to say no to this development. We're not negotiating on even footing. And I think that we're not being given any kind of alternatives outside of this model. So when I'm teaching indigenous students, I like to think about how do we want to live in this world? How do we want to live in our homeland?

How do we make sure that these land-based practices that are so precious to us are viable in practice and passed down? How do we build communities that are healthy and well? That might mean some partnerships. That might mean saying no and having that no be respected. But it's about consent and it's about accountability. And it's about having the ability for communities to, decide what's best for them, not being pressured into this. You have to be poor or you have to be part of this multinational project. You also write, and I'm going to quote the book here directly,

today Water is teaching me that any meaningful Anishna Be world making requires not only the radical transformation of the Anashnebe out from under the domination of colonialism, but the radical transformation of the state and the planetary abolition of racial capitalism. You go on to say such world making requires the profound reorganization of everything. That seems like a transformation that like on a nearly incomprehensible scale. How would you even begin? I think the work has already begun. I think that we saw in 2020 a global uprising for black life. We saw abolitionists, black abolitionists, articulating their ideas for worldmaking. Right now, we're seeing community folks mobilized in places like Minneapolis to protect their

neighbors by doing their laundry, by bringing them food, by physically getting in the way of ice. So I think that there's lots of examples from anti-colonial movements, from feminist movements of people refusing the world that we have and going great lengths to, take care and to dream something different. I think that while it seems to be incomprehensible, what I learned from writing theory of water is that the map already exists. We don't have to remake the world. We just have to fit into the ecological processes that reproduce the planet in a way that brings forth more life. And different movements and different cultures are figuring that out. So if we can sort of knit that together, maybe we will be able to create the knowledge and skills that we need in order to make

the alternative. But do you think that kind of communing is scalable? I think that I have to believe that it's scalable. I think that that's what I learn from my ancestors. It might seem to be on a scale that's incomprehensible, but that doesn't mean you stop working towards it. And I think once you get a group of different people and that diversity coming together, building coalitions, I think that it can be unstoppable. So I think that that work is important because it keeps our imaginations alive. It keeps possibilities being built and it builds a body of knowledge and a body of practice that we can then build upon more. It becomes cascading. Is that where the answer lies in the younger generation, do you think? As an older person, I'm hesitant to be like, we kind of screwed all this up. Like,

good luck. I have hope for the future. I don't know that that's fair. No. I think that everybody of all generations needs to be engaged and needs to be thinking through these issues and needs to be acting right now. And I don't think it's fair to put it, to put it all on the youth, because we've got them into some pretty serious trouble. The youth are doing lots of inspiring things. I think that we all have a responsibility to be doing inspiring things. You write that Nibé is an emergent theory of internationalism and that it opens up a possibility for a form of indigenous internationalism. Can you explain what would be an indigenous internationalism?

What would it look like? I think that when Canadians think of indigenous people, they often think of us as being hyperlocal and of knowing our homelands in great depth. And I think that that's true. But when I am in the forest, I am surrounded by different kinds of trees. I'm surrounded by different kinds of trees.

by different kinds of plants and insects and butterflies and birds and the sky and the land and the water and the air. I'm surrounded by a diversity of beings and other humans. So my job is to sort of build attachments and relationships across difference. It's to weave myself into that network of life. And when I do that, I start to connect myself past great distances. So as Mityisagik in Ishnabek, when I am doing that work on the shore of Lake Ontario, I'm connecting myself to the Sargasso Sea. I'm connecting myself to every body of water on the planet, to every drop of water on the planet. And so indigenous people have international relationships in the forest, in the berry patch, in the sugar bush, in the rice beds. because we're thinking about all of the different living beings that we're sharing time and space with. We're thinking about them as autonomous beings, as self-determining beings,

and we're figuring out a way of living with them. Yeah. And you end your book by writing that an indigenous internationalism encompasses all life on the planet. And quote, it connects all living things. It cycles and reproduces the planet. It is a theory of water and it lives inside all of us. end quote. So in a way, kind of despite the darkness, the violence, the danger, the loss, the uncertainty that seems to be clouding everything these days, the theory of water means maybe there's some kind of hope? I think the theory of water means that, as Miriam Kaba says, we have to make hope a discipline. We have to practice hope. So hope is a feeling. And when you feel hopeful, that's wonderful. And it can propel movements. And it's,

can propel your life, but even in the absence of hope, we have a responsibility to the coming generations to live in a different way and to figure out how to live inside this cycle of water, this theory of water, in a way that leaves something for those coming generations. I have learned so much from your book, from your lecture, and from our conversation today. Thanks for coming in. Miigwech for inviting me, for visiting with me and for this deep engagement of my work. Leanne Beda-Sem-Mose-Simpson is an acclaimed Nishna Begg Scholar, musician and author of nine books, the latest being Theory of Water,

which won the 2025 Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction. Special thanks to the Jackman Humanities Institute and Isabel Bader Theatre at Victoria College at University of Toronto. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.cai slash ideas, and you can find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. Technical production, Sam McNulty.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.