“I had this amazing political education that took place outside of the university system,” Simpson says. Her first two years at University of Guelph coincided with the Montreal massacre, the Oka crisis, and the activism of the James Bay Cree around the Great Whale Project. Simpson says it “took getting into university and encountering Indigenous writers and academics, and some of the activism that was on campuses in the ’90s” for her to be able to articulate this paradigm. But in a deeper sense, this act of fragmenting herself and her work is a reaction to what she calls the “violence I feel from the process of colonialism,” she says, which is deeply engrained in the structure of Canada’s institutions, practices, ideologies, and, ultimately, the way the culture tells its stories. Simpson is prolific in ways that seem perfectly at one with a multi-tasking, multi-platform world. Simpson, a Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg First Nations artist in her mid-40s, has managed a strikingly similar feat by establishing herself variously as an activist, academic, editor, short-story writer, poet, songwriter, and musician. It’s tempting to view Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as a contemporary manifestation of the shape-shifting spirits that feature in Indigenous storytelling, their changing forms meant to teach through their transitions.
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