People & Culture
In her new book, Theory of Water, renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a vision of water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world
Excerpted from Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Copyright © 2025 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Alchemy, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
My collaborators on this book were snow and ice, slush and rain. I would get up before sunrise in the winter, which isn’t that difficult where I live, and write. And then I would either groom the nearby ski trail, skate-ski or both. Every day. When I could no longer write, I skied. On the trail, my brain made connections and found ideas that it couldn’t make or find when I was sitting in front of a computer screen. All my thinking was done on that trail, sometimes when my skis were slow and the snow was fresh and cold, and the demands on my body were the greatest; sometimes when it was near zero and the snow was hard-packed; and sometimes when it was icy, and I could fly.
I’ve skied for as long as I can remember. My parents took a photo of me at two years old in my first pair of skis, plastic blue Super Slider Snow-Skates. I can remember every pair of skis I’ve owned, and I still use the first pair of skating skis I bought when I was sixteen. I ski if it is at all possible to do so. In blizzards and in rain—and even when there isn’t enough snow left to ski without stopping, I ski and portage. When it is absolutely impossible to do this, I run along the same trail, dreaming of skiing.
Even so, it wasn’t until several years ago that I first paid close attention to water and all its transformations. For more than a month one spring, I witnessed a lake in the Northwest Territories melting from ice into water in the spring. Every day was different. Every hour was different. The sounds of ice breaking were unlike any other sounds I’d ever heard. I saw how the people and animals living on the shore of the lake continually adapted to the state of the lake. During breakup, the lake is their focus, and it is constantly changing.
I made a record of that thinking and experience in an album called Theory of Ice. Normally, playing the songs by touring with my band would have deepened my understanding of the album. The rehearsals, the repetition, the playing to different audiences in different places. The pandemic truncated all that. We barely played Theory of Ice.
But even when the record was long released, I couldn’t stop thinking about theories of ice, theories of snow, theories of water.
Skiing depends on those understandings.
Skiing is not a particularly Nishnaabeg practice. I say “particularly” because there must have been some Nishnaabeg in the past, unknown to me, who strapped boards or bark to their feet and slid across the snow. The word for toboggan comes from our word zhooshkodaabaan: zhoosh meaning smooth or slippery, and daabaan meaning vehicle or sled.1 Skiing is, however, widely known to be part of a Sami way of living. Like most Indigenous practices, it was primarily utilitarian: sometimes, and in some conditions, skiing is a fast way to travel in the winter.
When I was a kid, I remember watching Sharon and Shirley Firth, Gwich’in members of the Canadian Cross Country Ski Team at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid. It was their second Olympics and eventually I would watch them race a third time, in 1984 at Sarajevo. I remember their long dark braids.
In June 2021, during the pandemic, instead of a large gathering, the annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association was marked by several smaller regional gatherings. My colleagues and I hosted one of these at the Yellowknife Ski Club, near the northern boundary of the city. The chalet was perfect for our purposes. It had a kitchen, a meeting space, an outdoor space and lots of windows and doors to open for good air circulation. And on the walls of the main room were framed photographs of competitive skiers from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, many of them Dene. I recognized the writer and artist Antoine Mountain, the Elder, journalist and broadcaster Paul Andrew, and of course Shirley and Sharon Firth.
I knew that some of these skiers had been part of the Territorial Experimental Ski Training (test) program, which had been created in 1967 in Inuvik “to see how the sport of skiing might contribute to the motivation and success of Indigenous youth navigating a rapidly changing world.” The program was started by a French Oblate priest, Father Jean-Marie Mouchet, who had been part of the French Resistance patrolling the French-Italian border on skis. He’d ended up in a Nazi concentration camp before immigrating to Canada to be a priest. Indigenous students in the program came from Grollier Hall, a Catholic hostel, and Stringer Hall, an Anglican hostel, both of which were part of the residential school system.
These hostels were sites of horrific abuse, and while the internet is full of quirky and loving stories about Mouchet, I still can’t help but remember that he was there at a time when his colleagues were doing unspeakable things to children. Many of the participants in the test program speak of skiing, with its intense cardiovascular and physical demands, and of spending long hours on the land as a flight from residential school. The Dene journalist Paul Andrew wrote: “Skiing provided students with a vital connection to the land—a connection the residential school system, through its removal of children from their families and territories, actively sought to break. For others, it was an escape.”
Former student Harold Cook, who spoke openly about the abuse he endured while at Grollier Hall, also described this fugitivity: “‘I imagined the abuser being the one ahead of me and I took all of my aggression out on the skis,’ he told a group of Aklavik students in 2016, during a speech about the benefit of sports.” Angus Cockney was another who found skiing to be an “escape hatch”: “For me back then, being in that system, skiing became my escape hatch from the abuse that happened at that school. For me skiing was a way out. I adopted it as a lifestyle and I’m glad my kids did, too.”
Now, when I’m on the trail, I think of those kids at residential school, skiing to escape. For me, Father Mouchet isn’t the hero in this story; it’s those kids, who were able to find themselves in the land, the ice, the snow, and who used this as a fugitive way to dream beyond their present moment.
In the bush, and in snow.
I know this escape hatch. Through it, and through my collaboration with ice and snow, this book came to be.
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