Award-winning Anishinaabe storyteller and author joins Lakehead University for online reading

By Rick Garrick

PETERBOROUGH — Alderville First Nation storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson looks forward to speaking about her latest book, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, during a Nov. 24 Lakehead University online reading and conversation presentation.

The book was published by the House of Anansi Press in September and is available online.

“I’m excited about this Lakehead event — it will be an opportunity to share the work hopefully with a wider audience and also to discuss some of the intent behind the book,” Simpson says, noting her book is a response to an 1852 book by English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie called Roughing It in the Bush. “I wanted to show the Anishinaabe world in all of their beauty, and I wanted to create an Anishinaabe world in the present time. There is a cast of seven main characters that are interacting — some of those are in human form, some of those are Elders and grandparents and others are young people. But there are other characters who are not human, so there is a maple tree and there is a caribou character as well.”

Simpson says she wrote the book for the Anishinaabe with plenty of humour, poetry and Anishinaabemowin.

“It’s sort of a very different format than one might think of a novel in a western sense,” Simpson says. “It kind of speaks to our oral storytelling traditions and how we might tell stories differently.”

Simpson says she has been lucky to have experienced some of the Anishinaabe practices of hunting, fishing, making maple syrup and harvesting manomin.

“That’s been a very generative practice for me,” Simpson says. “I get lots of creative ideas from participating in that way of life. There’s so much knowledge that’s included in that bush life that I think is really relevant and really important to us today.”

Simpson’s reading and conversation presentation is being held by Lakehead University’s Department of English with support from the Office of Indigenous Initiatives and Thunder Bay Public Library. Limited spaces are available for people who are interested in joining the live moderated Question and Answer session through the Zoom platform, but the presentation is also being live-streamed for people who are interested in watching on the Department of English at Lakehead University’s YouTube channel.

Simpson says this has been a different year for writers who are looking to speak to people about their newly published books.

“Normally there would be lots of in-person events and meetings and discussions about books but this year because of COVID-19 (the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic) everything has moved online,” Simpson says. “So there’s been a series of literary festivals that I’ve done readings at, but going back to the beginning of the pandemic, I was trying to think about not so much to promote the book but how the book could travel in the world in a time of pandemic, in a time where I physically couldn’t go and visit with people and share the work in person.”

Simpson also created a collaborative album with her sister Ansley Simpson, a singer/songwriter, called the Noopiming Sessions, which is a series of four readings from the book that are overlaid with music by Ansley.

“And tonight (Oct. 22), we are releasing a video of the first track called ‘Solidification,’” Simpson says. “So it’s just a way of trying to engage people outside of Zoom and outside of being able to talk in-person.”

The Noopiming Sessions are posted online.

Information about the presentation is available online.