June 9, 2025

Theory of Water, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Both the big and small pictures in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Theory of Water meant a lot to me, although the entire book is underlined by the understanding that the micro and macro are the very same, and that we can’t make a distinction, certainly not in the case of water, which flows and flows, escaping containment. Water is inherently connection, sometimes in the most surprising ways imperceptible to the naked eye. Simpson’s own connection to water comes from skiing, from water in winter, and she introduces me to the concept of “sintering,” which is when a snowflake forms bonds with other snowflakes to create “the fabric of a snowpack.” One thing leading to another, ordinary and miraculous at once.

The waterways that Simpson writes about are the rivers and lakes most familiar to me from growing up in Peterborough, and spending my summers on lakes in the Trent Severn System, and it occurs to me how little I really got to know these lakes and rivers. How I took for granted (or barely thought about) the few places where Jackson Creek had been allowed to surface in downtown Peterborough (and never made the connection between its burial and the massive floods that occurred in 2004), and never considered how the lock system, which permitted my family to so easily pass from Sturgeon to Cameron and then to Balsam lakes, changed and damaged the eco-system, destroying the wild rice on which Indigenous peoples had based their economy. Simpson writes about the eels that used to come from the Sargasso Sea and populate the Great Lakes and lakes in the Kawarthas and beyond until the St. Lawrence Seaway made their passage impossible. She writes about how giving waterways over to commerce and capitalism has been corrupting, and the necessity of a different kind of future.

So many answers to questions about what this land is and who we need to become to live well here are found in littoral places, shorelines whose boundaries are neither here nor there, hard to map, bursting with biodiversity and possibility, the places where life happens. We are not just of the water, but water is literally so much of what we are, and exploring this idea is key to a livable future.