"Children have a knack for opening themselves to possibilities because they are not bound by ideas of reality and how the world works...For Anishinaabe, children are our teachers, because they are fresh from the spiritual worlds. We relish how babies teach us about gathering love together, how toddlers teach us how to say no and set boundaries, how teenagers teach us about expansion. In our tradition, when children came through the spiritual doorway to the physical earth, they were welcomed into extended families and communities. They were welcomed with an understanding of their self-determination and an ethic of non-interference--children were given the freedom to explore and learn without the confines of rigid authority, violence, or the institutions of school or church. They were woven into a society that modelled sharing knowledge and that existed without police or policing. As such, our stories tell of times when children's own self-determination made massive contributions to Anishinaabe politics, economies and knowledge." Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, #TheoryOfWater

I've finished Theory of Water and am just going to be catching up on the quotes I'd marked to share. Also retroactively adding the same hashtag to previously shared quotes so they're all findable! #TheoryOfWater

"What if, in resisting colonialism and capitalism, we didn't focus on being recognized within the knowledge, political and ethical systems of the state, which means being recognized in the category of 'human' as defined by the state? What if, instead, we obliterated the categories of gender and human and rights altogether, and created lateral, co-operative systems of sharing, all in service to bringing forth more life?" Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, #TheoryOfWater

"Elite capture ensures that despite forty years of political projects focused on Indigenous self-determination, land rights and our ability to make decisions in our homelands for our peoples, we have less land than before, and we are enmeshed in a comprehensive land claims process that refuses self-determination as a necessary condition for being involved in the negotiating process at all." Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, #TheoryOfWater

"For centuries, Indigenous peoples have built societies in formations that are anti-state, with a social contract that isn't a contract at all but an ecology of caretaking. Nation-states were built on top of us, using our bodies, minds, spirits and land as resources and materials, or as threats to state sovereignty that were targeted for elimination. Our relationality was considered extractable and disposable. At the same time, since the arrival of the white man, we have also engaged in anarchistic resistances, without necessarily laying claim to anarchism as a politics." Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water #TheoryOfWater

"The trees are planted close together, in rows, like corn. They are the wrong species for this place. They form a forest that doesn't have any parents or language because there is only one kind of tree, and they are all the exact same age. There were only children, and they grew up as best they could." Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water #TheoryofWater

"In this period of expanded daylight, event after event can occur as life continues long into what was previously understood as night. Plants grow at phenomenal rates. Animals adjust their circadian rhythms to the ever-changing levels of light, with birds seemingly singing at all hours. While this measurement is non-spatial, it is informed by place, space or land. It is informed by days, months and seasons. And these, in turn, are informed by the movement of the sun, the rotation of the earth, one's location on the planet. Cyclical time comes from land. Linear time is a European construct that overlays cyclical time--a mechanism to organize the world in a homogenous way to facilitate, of course, capitalism." Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water #TheoryofWater