As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas)

by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The doors of the complex have Trent’s logo on them—the French “explorer” Champlain’s sword, jutting into waves,

I see a strength in them that I don’t see in myself. I see an ability to point out and name colonialism, resist and even mobilize to change it.

intimate resurgence

I was recognizing that the land I know as my home has been devastated by settlement, industrial development, the construction of highways and roads, the Trent-Severn Waterway, and four centuries of dispossession.

I began to start my own talks with a narrative of what our land used to look like as a quick glimpse, albeit a generalized one, of what was lost—not as a mourning of loss but as a way of living in an Nishnaabeg present that collapses both the past and the future and as a way of positioning myself in relation to my Ancestors and my relations.