Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
Join Simpson's quirky cast of seven as they upend colonial myth-making and expose the unnatural strangeness at the heart of settler-capitalism. With warm humour and canny observation, The Cure for White Ladies breaks open the self to a world still alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits.

Genres: Indigenous, Fiction, Poetry, Canada, Audiobook, Queer, LGBT

361 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the United States and has twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research & Learning in Denendeh.

Leanne is the author of six previous books, including This Accident of Being Lost, which won the MacEwan University Book of the Year; was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award; was long listed for CBC Canada Reads; and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Quill & Quire. Her latest book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017, and was awarded Best Subsequent Book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Her new novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies is was release this fall by the House of Anansi Press.

Leanne is also a musician combining poetry, storytelling, song-writing and performance in collaboration with musicians to create unique spoken songs and soundscapes. Leanne's third record, The Theory of Ice will be released in 2021.


Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Reviews

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, all of Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasomasake Simpson’s skills are on display in Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. We once again witness her cunning humour, her decolonial use of prose & format, and the love & honour in which she writes about Anishinaabeg and the land. This story comes alive from Sabe, from Geese, from Racoons, from Elders, from Young Ones keeping our traditions alive.

Because Simpson writes in such a unique and non-western fashion, I know that’s often going to be focused on in many reviews and while I do think this really is a huge, inspiring, technical, original, genius feat of writing in a new way, I also sometimes think that it’s simpler than that but that simplicity is what makes it unique and hard for anyone else to try and replicate. Because this is an Anishinaabeg writing for their people and writing from such a true place of Nishinaab-ness (for lack of a better term) and the genius is that this home has been carved out for us.

Because, for myself, holding a new work of Simpsons is like coming home, away from the city, for the first time in a long time. You gaze at your Kookoms house, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones and she’s waiting inside, or maybe you’re looking at that old house to remember her as you offer some tobacco. Either way, it’s all love and for those moments you remember where you came from and who you came from and why you’re so fucking lucky to be Anishinaabe.

Simpsons work is letting your guard down and just listening to what you’re being offered. It’s realizing that you and Sabe carry the same mashkiki in your medicine bag. That’s what Noopiming was for me and I am so grateful.

Miigwech to House of Anansi Press for gifting me this copy.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Nishnaabeg storytelling that isn't worried about making concessions to me. But there's enough here to grapple with, familiar snippets of Southern Ontario wrapped in beautiful poetry.

This is American Gods where the ancient deities move among us, not as rarefied icons bathed in golden light and imbued with glamour, but trudging among us looking for tarps to go on sale at Canadian Tire, cutting coupons, struggling with sobriety, hoarding knick-knacks. But still bigger, containing deeper histories.

There's sly humour here too, playing up stereotypes, winking at my need to see Indigenous peoples as tuned to the natural world, reading about trees ability to pull stress out of a body. But there's also riding around on a grey ten-speed Supercycle pulling an old kid's trailer to hold old toilets and sinks collected from rich neighbourhoods to place randomly on the reserve.

This isn't for me, but I loved it just the same.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't want to call NOOPIMING "experimental" because that implies the author is trying to create something entirely new, and it also implies that this novel is probably rather difficult to read, and maybe of interest only to the most intrepid readers among us...whereas this work, however unconventional in its structure, is endlessly delightful to read.

I feel the author's presence so strongly here. There is a constant, iterative, and loving questioning in the narrative voices in the novel that gives the story such personality and life.

It helped my reading to have these character descriptions, provided by the publisher, in front of me as I read:

"Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who represents their brain."

The above description of the characters allowed me to visualize them, and to know what they represent metaphorically. But it's important to say also that the characters as they live on the page don't feel metaphorical. They feel real. Their feet hurt. They think about their budget. They are lovingly connected, and they love one another, and yet they are constantly contradicting one another. The metaphor never gets in the way of experiencing these characters as fully real.

The novel unfolds as a constant conversation and interaction between the selves that make up Mashkawaji. As I read I felt as if I was encountering the author herself, and that she was recreating for me on the page her constant, contradictory life's work of defining self as a Nishnaabeg storyteller, one who lives in the modern world, and one who must find a way both to understand her past, and learn to thrive in the flotsam of modern life.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Welllll, this is not a book. Definitely not. I mean, it had pages but no cultural context, no explanations that would let people make sense for non-Indigenous people, like me.

Anyway, this is a lovely cultural experiment that I could only wish I could understand in more depth (maybe, after some cultural propaedeutics which I'm totally lacking here.).

I could call this one a white poetry blank verse collection. Vers libre du sort. But then again, maybe not.

Could this be a deliria diary? I'd say, yes, lots of delirium in here. Or maybe there are some deep cultural ideas in there - I wouldn't know.

I have no idea what it was about:
We got no plot, no anything. We do get a lot of disjointed rambling about pretty much random things.

A lot of 'terms' (for the lack of a better word) is thrown around. Were they really necessary?

Some further thoughts:
I do feel that this could've been a glorious book, had it been a bit more fleshed out. Had some context been included, some linguistic commentary, history of the culture, traditions ... - either with this one or, maybe, cross-referenced with some other book on those things.
It's really difficult for an outsider to delve into something that might've been written with an eye on Ulysses (I've been told by other readers. more knowledgeable about the Anishinaabe aesthetics that that might the case.) But I haven't any idea about that, obviously. What with not being this culture's insider or anything.

One might say that it's totally NOT the job of the writer to make oneself understood. And I would readily agree with it. But there's another side of this medal: is a reader really supposed to undertake a research of things that the writer couldn't have been bothered with making easily understandable? I could say that yes, it's totally the job of the reader.
I am totally the uncouth reader here and, had I been a professor on Ojibwe, I'm sure I would have a very different take on this experiment.
But, me being my humble self, suffice it to say, that this 'jobs allocation' doesn't improve my experience in any way. Hence, the rating. (It's not bad one. Just different.)

Some takeouts that I either loved or was confused with:
Q:
My world is muted. I look out. If something upsets me, I just wait, and the upset passes. I sit beside. Sometimes, I remember the other me, before I was frozen in the lake. I remember caring and engaging and the sharpness of unmuted feeling. I remember hopeless connection. (c)
Q:
Know this: Visiting is more of a dance than an event.
Akiwenzii is my will.
Ninaatig is my lungs.
Mindimooyenh is my conscience.
Sabe is my marrow.
Adik is my nervous system.
Asin is my eyes and ears.
Lucy is my brain.
I believe everything these seven say because ice distorts perception, and trust replaces critique, examination and interrogation.
I believe everything these seven say
even though,
even though.
I believe everything these seven say
even though
their truths are their own,
not mine.
I believe: In the absence of my own heart,
I will accept the hearts of these seven.
The geese fly overhead in the sheer grace of a carefully angled formation designed to take them elsewhere.
There are still stars. (c) This is peoetic. Even if nonsensical.
Q:
A book Asin does spend a considerable amount of time with in a less suspicious way is Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl, Ph.D. Asin is particularly drawn to the section on Canada geese. They read pages 483 and 484 over and over until it is paraphrased into their brain with a particular rhythm. Two Canada geese of the same sex sometimes pair-bond. Sometimes they even form triads, usually two females and a male. Sometimes, one of the females will mount another female. (c)
Q:
Shkaabewis
To the oldest sibling, Mandaminaakoog, these excuses can be summed up by one word: complacency.
...
Mashkodiisiminag and Kosimaanan are less sure, and less vocal. Mashkodiisiminag thinks less philosophically than Mandaminaakoog. They like the change of scenery and being in a different place every night. They like the freedom of flight, hours and hours of quiet. They like never being alone. They like the synergy of moving through waves of air like a body much larger than the sum of its parts. They like the accomplishment of being in a different place every night.
...
Kosimaanan is in it for the odd set of circumstances and the happenstance of travel. The poetry hidden in the space between left and leaving.
...
Mandaminaakoog does not hold anger for very long. They remember it matters more that some are going than that some are staying. They sing the songs that map the route. They read the stars. They hold all the ones that have come before. They think about which young ones to rotate into the lead. (c) Now, I've been informed (thanks, Dani!) that this intriguing term, 'Shkaabewis', means either a 'sweat lodge helper' or 'some other ceremony helper'. Thanks!
Q:
Gidigaa Bizhiw
One might describe Gidigaa Bizhiw as awkward.
Gidigaa Bizhiw
Painfully introverted.
Gidigaa Bizhiw
Incapable of the small talking. (c) Weird.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

My world is muted. I look out. If something upsets me, I just wait, and the upset passes. I sit beside. Sometimes, I remember the other me, before I was frozen in the lake. I remember caring and engaging and the sharpness of unmuted feeling. I remember hopeless connection.

I don’t feel stuck, in part because I don’t feel anything. Their song isn’t wrong, the ice is like a warm, weighted blanket. My form dissolved when tragedy came and if I am fluid, the ice is container.

Noopiming; The Cure for White Ladies is a challenging, lyrical, and rewarding read from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. According to the publisher’s blurb, “Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for ‘in the bush’, and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making.” The most challenging aspect of this book is its use of aesthetics from Simpson’s ancestral storytelling tradition; aesthetics that unapologetically refuse to conform to the expectations or comfort of someone (myself) raised solely on the Western canon. Words from the Anishinaabemowin language are untranslated, Anishinaabemowin grammar (including the nongendering of all nouns) sits uncomfortably on the English-speaking tongue, and confusion reigns as one attempts to discern if the character speaking is a human, a goose, or a sentient maple tree that conveys their prized possessions (beneath the white man’s notice) along the roads between Peterborough and Toronto in a shopping cart. And Noopiming is rewarding for these exact same reasons: The language is poetic, the characters are meaningful, and if I had trouble perfectly understanding everything, I acknowledge that I was probably not Simpson’s primary target audience; but I am here to listen and to learn. Well worth the mental exercise.

Mindimooyenh is sitting on a lawn chair on the ice visiting me, talking and talking. It doesn’t matter if you listen or pay attention or respond or talk to them back. And sometimes I like when they come around because it doesn’t matter if I talk, not even one little bit. It doesn’t even matter if I pay attention, because my response is irrelevant. Mindimooyenh is like that. Maybe because all those years in residential school they weren’t allowed to talk, and now their words have just built up and come bursting out.

Noopiming opens from the perspective of Mashkawaji (a word which can be translated as “frozen stiff”); a person who has spent the past two years trapped in a frozen lake. “They” introduce us to seven other human and nonhuman characters (I found it very helpful that the rear cover of my book had these names listed along with their identities [the old man, the caribou, the giant], but continually referring to it did feel like cheating), and Mashkawaji introduces each as their lungs, or their marrow, or their brain, etc. In very short passages (many pages have only a line or two), perspective switches between these characters (and others), and while the whole does not add up to a plot in the way that I might define it, Simpson does tell a story that confronts and adds to the dominant Canadian narrative.

Simpson seems unafraid to ruffle feathers, to get political or confrontational:

• Things seem pretty fucked for the humans, to be honest. The white ones who think they are the only ones have really structured the fucked-up-ed-ness in a seemingly impenetrable way this time. A few good ones get their footing, and then without continual cheerleading, succumb to the shit talk. It is difficult to know where to intervene or how to start. There are embers, but the wood is always wet and the flames go out so damn easy.

• They dream of driving their Jayco house trailer boat all the way to Palestine with the flotilla to resist the idea that this situation is complicated, that there are two sides, that there is no way to help.

• KOSIMAANAN STORY FIVE : A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INDIANS OF CANADA

Mashkodiisiminag begins by saying that they learned this story from Thomas King and that it is not their story by any means.

But Simpson also has important things to say about family, tradition, and ceremony:

They don’t need to try and explain that one can’t just look at or preserve a sacred site. That if the sacredness is to be maintained, Nishnaabeg have to continue the relationship. Fast. Pray. Sing. Carve. You cannot just ignore something and expect it to still be there for you when you need it.

And that last quote feels like the heart of Noopiming: Where once Susanna Moodie found her way in the “uninhabited” Canadian bush, Simpson’s characters explore a different kind of desolation; sleeping rough under the Gardiner overpasses, ignoring the toxic tang of the Don River, prevented from lighting a traditional fire in their own back yards because of Toronto’s bylaws against open air burning. The ultimate response to a collective consciousness finding itself frozen in the ice is to employ art as a political act; Noopiming is such an act of art that strengthens the Nishnaabeg people’s relationship to the sacred. I am grateful to have witnessed the act.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was first introduced to this author at AWP a few years ago, and enjoyed her collection, This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories.

From the publisher summary:

"Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush,” and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making. It is a lived experience. It is a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits, who are all busy with the daily labours of healing — healing not only themselves, but their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them all together."

I would like to invite the reader into a work that may not feel like it's for them, unless they come from the Anishinaabe tradition or something similar. You may not understand all the concepts at first. You can read it like poetry, let the words flow over you and then go back in. Try to put yourself in the place where the spirits/beings/presences of the natural world are present and play an active role in how you see yourself and your community.

I don't believe you have to have an ancestral understanding of this tradition to appreciate the beauty of the work. I probably spent as much time reading reviews and looking up terms as I did reading the work because I want to grasp it. I get closest when I think back to the Erdrich novels I've read, since she writes from a shared tradition, their patterns through the natural world and with each other. It's like another facet of that place, and was worth the journey.

This book came out last year in Canada but only in February 2021 in the USA. I had a review copy from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still laughing at "bargoon". This was weird and funny and poetic, also very queer!

[Big Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's best to go into this one with an open mind. Forget the rules about what a novel is "supposed" to be and just listen to the cast of non-binary (and sometimes non-human) characters as they present an utterly original decolonized vision of life in Toronto and the lands beyond.

[Penny (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a guess and added Noopiming to my Giller Longlist Predictions, and the day I published it the book came in for me from the library. I will be very surprised to not see this on the official Longlist.

It is wildly different, the description does state it is a unique take on the novel and indeed it is, and for me this worked so much more than Reproduction, last year's Giller Prize winner did. Its many messages inside were wonderful. There was humour in how she took down the whites for their silly ways and beliefs that had me smiling often.

Experimental and unique are good words to use, but whatever it was, I was completely absorbed by this book from the very beginning. There is never a full page filled with text, sometimes there is only once sentence on the page, sometimes there is only one word on the page, and sometimes there are chapters filled with poetry. But the story, the characters, the way this story was told really caught a hold of me. I really liked it and I hope to see this one on the Longlist announcement coming on the 8th of September.

[Annie MacKillican · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, this book was such a gift. I truly feel like I don’t deserve Leanne Simpson.

I feel almost sad that I’ve read this after leaving Toronto because this book provides the most beautiful, poetic manual for how to live and decolonize within the city. It shows how Indigenous people have sustained their identity through the emergence of a city and how they practice resurgence in a modern era.

I’m in love with Simpson’s style in this book. I came to love the characters, even if we only got to see small parts of them. The mixture of poetry and lyricism is similar to Tanya Tagaq’s style, and I loved it.

Yeah so, I definitely think everyone should read this. It’s brand new. Grab yourself a copy, it’s worth it.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really beautiful book that I think a lot of people will call "different," but it's really just not written for the white gaze, with a sort of decolonized prose that doesn't align with Western styles. The cast of characters that make up parts of the narrator is easy to keep track of and memorable, and I can see getting something new out of this story each time the book is read. Well worth a reread at some point.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure I’ve read a book, especially in such short a text, despite it being 350 pages, the audiobook is 3 hours and change, that can communicate so much about people as ecology and community.

With sparse words and highly effective use of white space to give, sometimes just a sentence a much needed pause and breath. There’s a kind of weight to every page that feels like the author has actually weighed it as too heavy or too light and how much white space it needs between this vignette or fragmentation or whatever you’d like to call it, to “make the point” of it especially keen.

We follow 7 different people in a atemporal manner and the most striking things to me is how much it reinforces it’s non-western-centric gaze while situating a few of the character in western culture. You would think the urban environment would radically alter the characterization of a character in some kind of dichotomy, but it, again, simply reinforces the larger community. Because even in the urban, where nature is harder to find, sure, there is obviously still natural elements, captured in raccoons or the local park. It can’t ever be stamped out, though it is always and forever classified as inferior by the legitimately sociopathic institutions western society, and so we all, to some degree, must worship.

As it goes on this social construction that delineates the differences between people and animals and trees, and basically anything of nature—simply isn’t even recognized as a notion to confront. It is so baseless it has no air. Instead we see how the people perceive no differences, and either does nature. In many ways, all natural aspects of people are Trees or Geese or Raccoons. Just because we have chosen not to internalize the natural in our socio-political constructs does not mean that others have.

Many indigenous languages don’t distinguish between gender and the words that are synonymous have a great deal more sense than English and other languages. And so the people here and they, just as the trees and the raccoons, and so on. I was very happy to see the Dene given some space, with those correlations reinforcing aspects of this story telegraphing that this is outside the prescriptive, western bounds of how to tell story. How to talk about a person or a people or a character. How to communicate what is intrinsic and fundamental to them. And how long that “needs” to take. Just a stunning work. I have no idea why this wasn’t on more Canadian prize lists. It better be on the next Canada Reads, I will say that.

[Orla Hegarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book before embarking on a staycation trip up to the viking settlements and Grenfell 'conquered' area of Newfoundland. I read (savoured) it while I was there and continued to enjoy it alongside my reflections on the whiteness of my tourist experience whilst travelling in my now 7 year long residence in this complicated vast province that manages to delete it's aboriginal history so thoroughly.

I do not claim to have understood all of this book of narrative and I will likely reread after sharing it with other white ladies. I think the cure lies in repeated treatment and the storytelling is mesmerizing in it's uniqueness, complexity and authenticity.

[Sunni | vanreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is pure literary art and it’s beautiful. This is my first time reading Anishinaabe literature and the storytelling really challenged my perceptions on how stories should be told.

In this dreamlike story, Mashkawaji is frozen under a lake as they tell a story of the seven characters that represent different parts of them. These seven characters represents their will, lungs, conscience, marrow, nervous system, and eyes, ears and brain. It sounds trippy to tell a story of different parts of one being, but I attribute this to what I perceive as conventional. It’s a bit hard to get into, but once again, it is a different storytelling style that I’m unfamiliar with. You don’t need to understand all of it to realize that the writing itself flows poetically and beautifully. As you read on, you’ll see it come together as a story built off the Anishinaabe traditions, heritage, into a powerful story of resistance and decolonization.

This is honestly a book I could see being taught as in a university literature class. There’s a lot to unpack and I feel like I could benefit from learning about the Anishinaabe traditions and history to understand this book better. Reading this made me wonder why I was never taught to read Indigenous literature despite attending a Canadian university. What makes the Eurocentric literature I read more “Canadian” than this? Why was my education another form of whitewashing the land the Canadian institution sits on. Why is this and other Indigenous literature not mandatory reading? Anyways, this is just my train of thought I had as I read this, because this is truly a literary masterpiece, and I think it would do well for readers to sit with it and study it to fully understand it, myself included.

Thank you NetGalley for letting me read and review this book.

[Lata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a conventional work of fiction, this Anishinaabe writer deals with dislocation, gentrification, tradition, colonisation and resistance to Western ideas and expectations through the eyes of several decidedly unconventional characters. There is a feeling of myth and the poetic through this story.
I had some trouble understanding parts, but found the writing lovely, and though not really having a plot, author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson talks to the dominant, Western ways of thinking and how they don’t work for everyone or for the environment.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful and wondrous. Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLojA...

[Elaine]

Dryly funny, referential, compassionate, original. I’m just obsessed with Leanne Simpson.

[Kate Savage · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book opens with a Fred Moten quote:

"Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong."

That's what this book is, the beauty against the grain of the terror. There are the best characters: raccoons, geese, mean old ladies, despairing elders, a maple tree who pushes around a shopping cart. This world is so full and beautiful and also everything has been taken and everyone killed. I don't know if I've ever seen so much grounded wisdom in one book.

I’m thinking of the lake again. And how government scientists use a contraption to collect sediments from the bottom of a lake called an Ekman grab. It is a metal box on a string, with claws on the end. You trip it and the claws close, taking a sample of the bottom. The scientists put the samples in Ziploc bags and use Sharpies to write coordinates on the front. The scientists send them to the lab. The results always come back the same: they were right and there is nothing to be done because because.

There is an important difference between testing and caring.

It’s in these moments that I know I’m still so, so hurt.

You can fall into toxic sediments at the bottom of your heart and not come out for months.

[Daniel Grenier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shit, c’était puissant, ça.

[Anne-Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noopiming is an exercise in decentering yourself (if you're a white/settler/non-Indigenous reader) and a masterpiece of storytelling.
I've seen a lot of non-Indigenous reviewers say that the cultural elements or the worldview needs to be explained because they're confused or "need" it. You don't.

All you need is an open mind to (potentially) new experiences and Simpson's storytelling and you'll be absorbed into the characters and their lives. Oh - and access to an Ojibwe/Anishinaabe dictionary if you want to translate some of the names and phrases used throughout the text (there's plenty of resources online).

Simpson's use of tense, pronounces, and voices was magnificently done and her use of structure and space really emphasized the text itself. The poetry section was especially beautiful and deserves a re-read at some point from me. Each section focused on different writing styles and/or character perspectives (many of whom interacted with each other) to bring a chorus of characters, stories, and experiences to life.

One of my favourite elements was the inclusion of non-human animals/trees as points of view characters - I loved their thoughts and voices and interactions with other non-human animals/trees and humans. The section on Geese was also very well done - to me it read as both a literal story of geese and their experiences and also as a metaphor for Indigenous (specifically Anishinaabe) Peoples living in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I could gush about this book all day and its brilliance, but I'll simply encourage everyone to check out this book and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's writing in general (her story/song collections are brilliant and I can't wait to dive into her nonfiction).
I also encourage you to check out some of the reviews by Indigenous readers on both Goodreads and the online bookish internet - their thoughts and reviews are so important (and much appreciated).

[OK · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Simpson is doing beautiful work to upend settler convictions on what fiction is and should be. This novel is interested in collectivity, memory, absence, voice, polyphony, land, language, and so much more. Also: Ancestral knowledge, negative space,
knowledge shimmering just beyond one’s grasp, blood memory.

Simpson’s trademark wit and clarity is present in all the pages, her humour and cynicism and reverence, her knack for verisimilitude, her keen eye for contemporary details of urban Indigenous and late capitalist existence, her deep love of Anishnaabe people and language. What I love most is how her characters hold exhaustion and cynicism alongside grit and refusal — refusal to succumb, refusal to be diminished.

ALSO I died laughing when Simpson calls a white girl doll “a mop of blond psycho hair” (176).

—-


Lucy spends a lot of time trying to lure Asin out of the city on the GO train or the Greyhound. […] Asin needs a lot of help to get moving, a lot of help to move outside of themselves. Although Lucy suspects that once in motion, the energy would be huge. - 71

I think about how the lake is more beautiful holding your hurt, and how I’ll drink the lake any day, because light is better than no light. - 181

[Stephi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly atmospheric exploration of Anishinaabe aesthetics and being. Wonderful form and language.

[Heather Semotiuk]

Hilarious, insightful, challenging, and confusing.

It feels wrong to give this book a rating - the five star scale feels so inadequate, and trivial.

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies was all of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's talents on show. Previously I would say that Islands of Decolonial Love was my favourite, but I think this succeeds that. I loved the characters so much. Especially Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents that protagonist's conscience and whose portions were full of so many hilarious moments and "bargoons" (their word for bargains). They reminded me of old ladies in my family. I didn't understand half of the plot and messages (it's intended that way for non-Anishinaabe readers, I'm sure) and I loved every moment of it. It is an important and special book that prioritizes Own Voices readers' ways of knowing and storytelling methods. It is a pleasure to be excluded from some inside jokes and references when it means that marginalised and underrepresented people are being privileged and included. The form was fantastic and fluid. Sometimes very short chapters (fragmented sentences), sometimes pages long. Prose, verse, lyrics. Simpson plays so much with form and sound. But the star for me will always be the cast of characters. I loved the different perspectives and how they related to the protagonist dreaming and thinking under the ice, Mashkawaji. I can't really tell you what this was about, you just have to experience it for yourself. This isn't structured like a traditional novel, it is a book of ideas, history, culture. Thematically, expect Simpson to touch on colonization, trauma, poverty, history, globalization, climate change, healing and medicine, slowing down to think, creating art, making change. It was beautiful, there is an energy to her writing. Here is a passage that I thought was especially moving.


"My world is muted. I look out. If something upsets me, I just wait, and the upset passes. I sit beside. Sometimes, I remember the other me, before I was frozen in the lake. I remember caring and engaging and the sharpness of unmuted feeling. I remember hopeless connection."

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a beautiful and unique experience to read this. I didn't fully comprehend it (I don't have the knowledge necessary or the lived in experience), but I did feel it. It was hopeful, sad, full of longing and also looking towards the future. It was funny at times and very poignant. I enjoyed the non-white western canon structure.

I used the GR synopsis and The Ojibwe People's Dictionary to give me a bit of a more stable foundation for understanding. I quite loved the section about the migration of geese and the ways in which the flying formation informs community organizing. All of the characters were so specific and alive on the page. (The way Ninaatig makes fun of The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World was delightful and funny, for instance!)

There were a lot of things I loved about this! And will probably try some more writing by the author in the future.

[Chey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simpson's writings are like a hug. NDN humour and care is woven into each page of this book in such a way that Simpson only knows how. Noopiming explores Indigenous love, community and connection outside of and in spite of settler colonialism through the characters' experiences with each other and with themselves.

Noopiming has been criticized for being too "experimental." However, it's funny to me that many celebrated writers throughout history have been experimental in their approach, such as Joyce or David Foster Wallace, but when an Indigenous writer is "experimental," it's in need of explanation or "cultural context," or, as one reviewer callously put it, its lack of conformity makes it "not a book" at all.

Anyway, I think Billy-Ray Belcourt assessed this book best: "Simpson writes for us, for NDNs, those made to make other kinds of beauty, to build other kinds of beautiful lives, where no one is looking. Noopiming is a book from the future! Simpson is our much-needed historian of the future!"

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Less of a novel, and more of an experience of contemporary Canadian indigenous life and interactions between beings (human and otherwise) in an environment altered for human use. There's a lot to think about here, in the literary sense, in regards to the effect of colonialism on the indigenous way of life, and in regards to the consequences of human activity on the natural world. Noopiming deserves multiple readings.

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that reads like sometimes poetry, some time dreams, some times lessons to learn. Always engaging the reader profoundly, forcing me to stop and think. The Ojibwe People's Dictionary was a crucial and helpful resource. There is so much in the text that I will read it again, after having listened to LEANNE several times.

[Jennifer Hoffert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not going to lie, this book was weird. Different than anything I’ve read, with a combination of prose and poetry that blended together traditional and modern aspects of Canadian indigenous life. The author’s clever and witty writing style made me laugh! The stories were zany yet subtle. Her use of anthropomorphism created these wacky scenarios that made me pause and just crack up. At the beginning, I was confused by some of the character names and had to loop back to reference, but despite this it was definitely worth the read. Also felt that I was missing something at the start, but glad I pushed through and finished.

[Lexie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book as it is a major departure from the western perspective of storytelling. This book wasn't written for me but I feel an incredible privilege reading and sitting with its teachings. It is heavy in content but also evoked laughter and joy. I've never read a book like this and I will 100% be re reading this one.