Noopiming
The Cure for White Ladies
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
shortlisted for the dublin literary award
finalist for the foreword reviews indies book of the year award – Multicultural adult fiction
WATCH: THE AUTHOR IN CONVERSATION WITH NATALIE DIAZ
BOOK DISCUSSION GUIDE
The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism
In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy. A bold literary act of decolonization and resistance, Noopiming offers a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits—and the daily work of healing.
"The tenderness and sly wit of these snippets coalesce into a beautiful image of Native resilience and a piercing, original novel." —Publishers Weekly
In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy.
Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce the seven characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman, their conscience; Sabe, a gentle giant, their marrow; Adik, the caribou, their nervous system; and Asin and Lucy, the humans who represent their eyes, ears, and brain.
Simpson’s book As We Have Always Done argued for the central place of storytelling in imagining radical futures. Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush”) enacts these ideas. The novel’s characters emerge from deep within Abinhinaabeg thought to commune beyond an unnatural urban-settler world littered with SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, and Fjällräven Kånken backpacks. A bold literary act of decolonization and resistance, Noopiming offers a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits—and the daily work of healing.
Awards
Dublin City Council – Dublin Literary Award – Shortlist
Foreword Reviews – INDIES Book of the Year Awards – Finalist
$18.95 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1126-3
368 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 2022
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician. A member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, she is the author of several books, including As We Have Always Done (Minnesota, 2016) and This Accident of Being Lost. Her latest album, The Theory of Ice, will be released in 2021.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming once again confirms her position as a brilliant, daring experimentalist and a beautiful, radical portraitist of contemporary NDN life. The prose hums with a lovingness that moved me to tears and with a humor that felt plucked right out of my rez adolescence. The chorus of thinkers, dreamers, revolutionaries, poets, and misfits that Simpson conjures here feels like a miracle. My heart ached and swelled for all of them. What I adored most about this book is that it has so little to do with the white gaze. 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!
Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms
I'm pretty sure we don't deserve Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. But miracles happen, and this is one. This book is poem, novel, prophecy, handbook, and side-eyed critique all at once. This book doesn't only present characters you will love and never want to leave, it doesn't only transform the function of character and plot into a visibly collective dynamic energy field (and hallelujah), but it also cultivates character in the reader, that we might remember what we first knew. Which is that what seems separate was never separate. What feels impossible is already happening. And it depends on our most loving words. It requires our most loving actions towards each other. The ceremony has been found.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony
Noopiming is a rare parcel of beauty and power, at once a creator and destroyer of forms. All of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s myriad literary gifts shine here—her scalpel-sharp humor, her eye for the smallest human details, the prodigious scope of her imaginative and poetic generosity. The result is a book at once fierce, uproarious, heartbreaking, and, throughout and above all else, rooted in love.
Omar El Akkad, bestselling author of American War
The tenderness and sly wit of these snippets coalesce into a beautiful image of Native resilience and a piercing, original novel.
Publishers Weekly
Simpson's skill as creator allows those outside Indigenous traditions to apprehend a complexity of meaning-making whose fluidity challenges Western reliance on notions of fixed boundaries and discrete categories of being and nonbeing.
Star Tribune
Probably unlike anything you’ve ever read, this remarkable novel is written in prose and fragments and is an alarmingly beautiful tale of decolonial resistance and the uncovering of a world of natural abundance, connection and compassion.
Ms. Magazine
Fascinating, brief, vivid.
Novel Gazing Redux
Noopiming is an important literary work that transcends form and breaks molds of storytelling in contemporary Western consciousness.
Colors of Influence
If you are reading more diversely to learn about different cultures, then dive into the culture. Embrace the language. Open your mind to perspectives that are different from your own.
Carry a Big Book
A novel that is intellectually challenging both as literature and as a commentary on colonialism. Fragments of poetry and prose bring the reader into the Anishinaabe way of storytelling as an essential element of the good life.
Ely Summer Times
Jumping amongst seven characters who represent the machinations of human life, the text challenges the racism and modern absurdities that affront, but can never replace, traditional lifeways.
Tribal College Journal
Award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson combines narrative and poetic fragments in this truly original novel about a long-ago time of hopeless connection and finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension.
The Story Exchange
Anishinaabe for ‘in the bush,’ Noopiming offers a different approach at telling a story, a revisioning and decolonizing of narrative that deconstructs everything we might expect from a story.
Chicago Review of Books
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson discusses Noopiming in Nov. 2020 with the Columbia Center for Oral History.
About This Book
Related Publications
Related News & Events
Tribal College: The Best Native Books of 2021
Ms. Magazine: February Reads for the Rest of Us
Colors of Influence: "An absolute gift of awakening."
Tribal College: The Best Native Books of 2021
Last year witnessed a high-water mark for Native literature. Not only did a wealth of Indigenous texts flood the market, but the democratization of virtual platforms meant that one could stream author events from every corner of Turtle Island. With a few clicks of a mouse, book lovers were able to join their favorite authors’ tours or drop in to hear a new voice.
Ms. Magazine: February Reads for the Rest of Us
Probably unlike anything you’ve ever read, this remarkable novel is written in prose and fragments and is an alarmingly beautiful tale of decolonial resistance and the uncovering of a world of natural abundance, connection and compassion.
Colors of Influence: "An absolute gift of awakening."
Renowned writer and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers an absolute gift of awakening through “Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies.”
Canadian writer Simpson (As We Have Always Done) draws on indigenous Abinhinaabeg beliefs to create a bold, affecting portrait of an urban landscape and its network of living beings.
Native America Calling: Noopiming is Book of the Month
In “Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies,” seven beings within one entity named Mashkawaji help the narrative along through literary prose, dialogue and poetry.
How does one write a novel in static English language using material that is derived from a dynamic system of Indigenous oral storytelling and performance? Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who is a member of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people of southern Ontario, uses a combination of genres — poetry, literary prose and dialogue — in her most recent novel, "Noopiming."
Bookforum: A constellation of books that teach us to reimagine the present
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's syllabus for Bookforum. The works below can teach us how to encounter them if we pay attention. These writings refuse whiteness and colonialism by breaking open space, making room for worlds otherwise. This is world-building work, and these books’ exploratory nature makes them similar, in some sense, to speculative fiction. But these texts arise from and are rooted in the lived experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. The worlds they envision allow us to see the present—and the past—anew, and are life-giving precisely because they refuse the efforts by white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism to undermine them. They offer a study on how to read, or how to read differently, or perhaps how to listen.