Theory of Water – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

[Haymarket Books; 2025]

On my first international vacation with my wife, I discover I do not know how to swim. I can’t pinpoint when this knowledge left my body, but on this day, I found myself gasping and bobbing in the Mediterranean sea. My home state, Georgia, has no natural lakes, a fact my mother often bemoaned. She missed the lake that defined the small New Jersey town where she was born. On the shores of Lake Musconetcong, she saw her first fish, wore her first bikini, and met her first husband. What little I knew about Lake Musconetcong was limited, however, to those three big plot points. Like most of my mother’s childhood stories, the drama between her parents and their chosen vices took center stage. Whatever else happened on the shores of Lake Musconetcong remained a mystery to me until recently.

Water has been on my mind, in part because of the recent L.A. wildfires, and in part due to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s genre-blurring memoir Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. A timely meditation on relationality and worldbuilding, Theory of Water explores what it means to live and learn alongside water. From riverbeds to our breath, water connects us to each other, the land, and all other living beings past and present. Water’s connective power fuels Simpson’s ecological imaginings and anchors her generous approach to activism.

An accomplished Mississauga Nishnaabeg artist and academic working across genres, Simspon has authored six nonfiction and seven fiction books along with four musical albums. Theory of Water is emblematic of her experimental impulse, fusing autobiography with history, cultural commentary, art criticism, and ecology. All twenty-three essays in this book are intimately linked to place: the Great Lakes Region of Canada where Simpson currently lives. The first piece, When It Was Icy, I Could Fly, opens with snow. Simpson is skiing over hard packed powder, grooming a trail, and gliding across frozen flats. This corporeal opening sets the stage for Simpson’s broader approach to theorizing, which prizes embodied practice as much as theory.

It is often while Simpson is skiing or running alongside a creek that her brain and body make profound connections. Like most small bodies of water,  the creek itself is “unremarkable.” Yet, its humbleness does not make it any less significant. Jackson Creek, like Lake Musconetcong, has profoundly shaped all living beings that encounter it. Both bodies of water are conduits to diverse, spooling watersheds. As Simpson elegantly demonstrates, water constantly asks us to shift our vantage point to embrace an ever wider take of the world. “Water asks us to think on a scale beyond the present moment and immediate needs,” she writes in Nibi, titled for the Ojibwe word for water. By switching between the use of the English water and the Ojibwe Nibi, Simpson reveals the inexorable tethering of indigenous and colonial language and worlds. 

Simpson’s deep engagement with language flows through her physical practice. In Sintering, she reimagines the essay’s namesake, a term most often associated with metal and plastic manufacturing. In industrial production, sintering is the process of forming a solid mass of material through heat and pressure without melting to the point of liquefaction. By placing the word within a winter landscape, Simpson shifts its meaning. “When a snowflake falls from the sky and lands on earth,” she writes, “it immediately begins…a transformation as it forms bonds at temperatures below zero with its neighboring snowflakes to create a fabric of the snowpack.” This joining represents a “communal transformation” where the flakes weave themselves seamlessly into their environment without damaging it.

Out on her sled, cutting through heaps of snow, Simpson makes a crucial connection: sintering is how the Michi Saagiig Nisahnnabeg people make worlds, lacing themselves into the land in a way that creates more life. Sintering illustrates the ethic of “worldbuilding through creating alternatives,” and these alternatives are made through love and kindness. In the essay Liminal Mappings, Simpson notes that her beloved friend and gifted teacher Doug Williams used “love to build a learning community spilling over with kindness.” A kindness rooted in his unapologetic love of the land and of their ancestors. Doug is one of the only recurring characters in the book, highlighting his enduring impact on Simpsons’ intellectual and emotional life. His approach to education exemplifies how indigenous knowledge systems “hold the potential to not only critique capitalism but reveal multiple potentials to live otherwise.”

A core part of Simpson’s broader theory of water is that it “always creates more possibility.” In the dazzle of high winter, Simpson must cut out new ski trails after every big snow. Forging new tracks is part of her practice as a writer and activist. “The land has a way of leveling things, of cutting through what we think we know, of forcing us to engage in the practices of our peoples, knowing that our peoples are the priority,” she writes.

Throughout A Theory of Water, Simpson weaves indigenous knowledge with her lived experience and academic training to reclaim language and processes tainted by colonialism and capitalism. In Maps to Statelessness, she reimagines the practice of mapmaking by engaging with a diverse range of indigenous artists. In a painting by Métis activist Christi Belcourt, a water lily becomes a map charting the relationships that form the flower, from the “droplets of light from the sun” to the “internal workings of the stem.” These co-creators of life are given their glory as are the clouds in Inuit artist Pudlo Pundlat’s painting The Settlement. Departing from the horizontal standard in Westphalian mapmaking, Pundlat’s map is also vertical, charting connections between the stars in the sky and caribou in the grass. Simpson shows us how indigenous mapmaking decenters people and states. “Human life isn’t placed above the life of the beaver,” Simpson writes, “or that of raspberries.” By engaging deeply with each artist’s work, readers are encouraged to reframe maps as narratives of relationality.

Maps of Statelessness, like the whole of Theory of Water, can be read as a guide to ecological stewardship, or simply how to live without harming the land. But, as I continued to read, other, unexpected resonances in my life. I found myself dreaming about the shores of Lake Musconetcong where my mother spent so many summer nights listening to bullfrogs bellow. In my writing about her, I tend to conceive of her life as a series of events in time. Because of her reluctance to talk about her past, I prioritized solving the puzzle of her life’s timeline.

I often daydream about visiting Lake Musconetcong. Next time I’m in New York, if I drive fifty miles up the highway, I could be there. On my phone, I look for local bus stations in Netcong where the lake is located. I’m shocked by the sheer size of the blue splotch lighting up the map. The lake encompasses 329 acres, an area far larger than I had imagined as a child. When I text mom about the lake, she writes back about my nephew’s upcoming graduation party. The lake texts are left on read. I cruise the lake’s perimeter by myself. With the street view tool, I scroll close to the shore, past bunches of grass, saturated acid green. I stay zoomed in on the shore. When I close my computer at 1 a.m., I realize tonight is the first time I can remember in years that I’ve expressed curiosity about anything from my mother’s childhood beyond family trauma.

As I read further into the Theory of Water, my curiosity about the landscapes of her life grew. I spent hours in the blue light of my phone tracing the flow of the Musconetcong River to the Delaware watershed. I read about how, in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of dams were built by The Morris Canal and Banking Company, leading to  the creation of Lake Musconetcong along with much ecological destruction. At my writing desk, I try to imagine the grasses growing along the lake shore, how they felt against my mother’s shins. I wonder if she encountered snakes in the sand, or scanned for blue birds in the trees. Did she enjoy their chatter? As I sit and wonder, some light comes back into my writings about her. I consider how the narrative of our lives might look if viewed through the lens of flora and fauna.

Throughout Theory of Water, shores are zones of connection where “the division between land and water breaks down.” Shores represent both a departure and a beginning. “For life forms to spend their time on land, the shoreline is a passage to the water world,” writes Simpson. “For those whose entire world is water, the shoreline is world ending.” Shores are spaces of coexistence across vast differences. Responsive to the life forms in both water and land, they are also constantly changing. This makes them rich sites of regeneration, according to Simpson. In this ecotone, radical transformation is not only possible but inevitable.

Theory of Water gifts readers with a living model of embodied resistance to the logic of capitalism. But Simpson also gifted me personally with a potent model for relationality and reconnection. A fresh cut path in the snow. A new conduit into my mother’s story. I may not be able to visit the shores of Lake Musconetcong this year, or the next, but in my mind, I’m already there with her, breathing in the fog off the water.

Elizabeth Hall is the author of Season of the Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books) and I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Bon Appétit, Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, the Iowa Review, Pleiades Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her on instagram at @badmoodbaby.