An Indigenous woman who feels socially anxious relies on text messaging to access comfort from an Indigenous man she has never met. Indigenous characters are made to get gun licenses to use for hunting on their own land after attending certification courses given by white men. The stories in This Accident of Being Lost showcase the inequities in the fabric of everyday life. I wanted to get at it from a place of grounded strength, to cast off narratives around victimhood and come at it with fire and humour and love.” “I wanted to present an honest reality of what it’s like to be Indigenous in 2017. The structure of her book breaks from colonial modes of storytelling that cement their own hierarchy across peoples. “I set out to write stories for an Indigenous audience,” she says, an act that’s equal parts community allegiance and political reclamation.

Its pages alternate between short stories and poems that comprise the lyrics of her most recent album, f(l)ight. Simpson’s latest book, This Accident of Being Lost (House of Anansi Press), is a testament to that political transformation. “Seeing these indigenous people on TV every night was a transformative experience – one that propelled me over the next two decades.” “I had this amazing political education that took place outside of the university system,” Simpson says. Her first two years at University of Guelph coincided with the Montreal massacre, the Oka crisis, and the activism of the James Bay Cree around the Great Whale Project. Simpson says it “took getting into university and encountering Indigenous writers and academics, and some of the activism that was on campuses in the ’90s” for her to be able to articulate this paradigm. But in a deeper sense, this act of fragmenting herself and her work is a reaction to what she calls the “violence I feel from the process of colonialism,” she says, which is deeply engrained in the structure of Canada’s institutions, practices, ideologies, and, ultimately, the way the culture tells its stories. Simpson is prolific in ways that seem perfectly at one with a multi-tasking, multi-platform world. Simpson, a Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg First Nations artist in her mid-40s, has managed a strikingly similar feat by establishing herself variously as an activist, academic, editor, short-story writer, poet, songwriter, and musician.

It’s tempting to view Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as a contemporary manifestation of the shape-shifting spirits that feature in Indigenous storytelling, their changing forms meant to teach through their transitions.

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