Inspired by actions surrounding the 1990 Oka Crisis and one of the notable women leaders, Ellen Gabriel, of the Mohawk nation, Simpson understood that she needed to actively nurture a reconnection to her indigenous Anishinaabe roots.
She specifically critiques the ways in which government and corporate environmental reforms extract pieces of indigenous knowledge in the search for sustainable solutions while lacking a related cultural context and that their efforts only serve to reinforce extractivist methodologies.
She articulates the potentiality of a collective future as one necessarily built without the exploitation of the earth and absent the ongoing acts of aggression against Black and indigenous peoples.
Glen Coulthard draws upon Simpson's philosophies in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition to explain that the solution to settler-colonialism cannot be found in Western epistemologies.
[18] Simpson articulates that such resurgence must remain focused on bringing traditional lifeways into the present but enriched with an understanding that indigenous ways of being are rooted in a fluidity that lends themselves to future application.
She is an alum of Jason Collett's Basement Review[21] and her album f(l)ight was produced by Jonas Bonnetta (Evening Hymns) with James Bunton (Ohbijou, Light Fires).
[23] Author of Policing Black Lives Robyn Maynard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Rehearsals for Living is a powerful exchange between two of Canada's most important contemporary thinkers, authors and activists – one Black, and one Indigenous; both women and mothers — on the subject of where we go from here: an unusually vital and arresting epistolary book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers sending notes to each other under stay-at-home orders during the stormy present, articulating Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, the long history of slavery and colonization that has brought us here, and what possibilities a post-pandemic future might hold.
In her latest work published in 2020, the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, Simpson continues with her earlier projects, this time via a blend of prose and poetry, in trying to counter the logics of colonialism and reclaim indigenous alternatives and aesthetics.
Simpson uses an artful rather than polemical writing style to expose readers to an alternative world involved with the daily labors of healing and indigenous transformation.
[27] In chapter 9, "Land and Pedagogy", an essay for which Simpson won the 'Most thought-provoking" award in Native and Indigenous Studies, she uses stories of the Nishnaabeg people to argue for a radical break from state education systems designed to produce settler colonial subjects and advocates instead for a form of education that reclaims land as pedagogy, both as process and context for a rebellious transformation of Nishnaabeg intelligence and identity.
Simpson explains that Nishnaabeg peoples’ rich tradition of humor has enabled them to survive and find joy in spite of histories of colonialism, dispossession and genocide.
The title of this book and its preceding poem is a nod to the condition and ongoing struggle of Indigenous peoples who have suffered an ontological loss due to the violence of colonialism.
Ultimately, Simpson created this work so that Indigenous women would have some sense of seeing their lives and experiences reflected in a piece of literature, something she describes as markedly absent in most writing.
Finally, the combination of the two create the word “flight” to denote the utopic pleasure in absconding into the worldview of Nishnaabewin, the Eastern Ojibwe language, in order to imagine and formulate potential Indigenous futurities.
Specifically, the sounds of rustling minomiin (wild rice) and sugar bush as well as the water flowing in the Crowe River were all recorded locally within the Anishnaabeg Indigenous landbase and were foundationally inspirational to the development of Simpson's lyrics on f(l)ight.
Throughout both, Simpson utilizes English and her native Nishnaabemowin and deliberately offers only partial translations so that those unable to speak the language may glean a sense of her text.
She also makes the stylistic choice to avoid capitalizing her poetry in this work to disrupt her readers’ sense of colonized language use and its associated power relations.
Embedded in Simpson's writing is a resistance to the conquered and sorrowful Native, wherein the processes of colonialism have engendered a sense of persistence and strength against structures of oppression.
Simpson's work frames decolonial love in a way that disrupts temporal, spatial, and gender frameworks and challenges normative notions of writing and communicating with the reader.
They are both commonly known stories as well as more obscure tales but Simpson's tellings are reworked to account for modern day life so they retain their relevance to young audiences.
These matrices perpetuated European patriarchal norms that included moral shaming of female characters in addition to encouraging adherence to authoritarianism.
[32] Published in 2011, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence offers a critique of neocolonialism and state reconciliation politics.
Reconciliation further ignores the ongoing present day ramifications of colonialism and actively silences and criminalizes Indigenous dissent while dissolving white Canadians responsibility in their complicity to the project of the neocolonial state.
Simpson's work offers a clear critique of the Indian Act as it has been utilized by the state to perpetuate ongoing settler colonial occupation and extraction of Indigenous lands as well as encouraging racist and sexist modalities.
[33] Simpson contributed as one of several leading editors for The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future and the Idle No More Movement (edited with Kino-nda- niimi Collective) published in 2014.
While this book is primarily understood as a compilation of academic essays it notably incorporates the soul of the movement through the interspersion of photography, artwork, and poetry.
In alignment with the spirit of Idle No More's activist base, all proceeds from the sale of this book are put directly back to Indigenous Canadian communities and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network in particular.
[34] This Is an Honour Song: 20 Years Since the Blockades, An Anthology of Writing on the “Oka” Crisis, published in 2010, is a collection edited by Simpson and political science professor Kiera Ladner.
This compilation explores the resonance of the events known as the Oka crisis in the summer of 1990 when a group of Kanien’kehaka people defended their territories against plans for a proposed golf course over a sacred grove of pines.
Each chapter is laid out in such a way that the past temporal landscape of Indigenous stories, histories, and modalities of spirit are relationally connected to present impulses of resurgence and potential futurities.