Rehearsals for living, By RobynMaynard, Leanne BetasamosakeSimpson, Knopf Canada. 2022. pp. 336. $32.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978‐1039000650

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of writing which presents the destruction of the planet as coterminous with colonial, racial, and patriarchal hegemony.Works like Pollution is colonialism (Liboiron, 2021) and Empire and environment: Ecological ruin in the Transpacific (Ana et al., 2022) have demonstrated how modern ecological crises are entangled with colonial structures of domination.Rehearsals for living, too, makes clear that the world as we know it is unsustainable and uninhabitable.However, the book gains its momentum from the idea that the end of the world as we know it offers a chance to remake the world anew.The current order of things might be irredeemable, but for Robyn Maynard, a Black Canadian writer, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, this provides an opportunity to imagine abolitionist, feminist, and decolonial futures.Rehearsals for living is a six-part epistolary dialogue between two highly accomplished authors, intellectuals, and activists that weaves together insights from Black and Indigenous elders, knowledge holders, scholars, and community organizers to consider possibilities for living otherwise.The intersecting crises of the climate catastrophe, the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, and now COVID-19 have brought the unviability of dominant systems into sharp relief.The consequences of these calamities are experienced with much more intensity by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities because they are inextricably tethered to the "unfinished catastrophes" (p.10) of slavery, colonialism, genocide, and capitalism.Other scholars have commented on the inextricable links between racial and ecological violence, and the fact that Black and Indigenous peoples have long been, and continue to be, globally positioned as the first to die in the face of crisis (Liboiron, 2021;Whyte, 2021;Yusoff, 2019).As Maynard describes, Black and Indigenous histories are reflected in these "racially and geographically differentiated vulnerabilities" (p.10) to catastrophe.However, while the authors acknowledge that they are writing from "the end of this world" (p.11), they reassure readers that not all world-endings are tragic.Although the letters between Maynard and Simpson are tinged with frustration and exhaustion, there remains a sense of hope because even after centuries of being made "vulnerable and fragile by the ravages of capitalism and colonialism," Black and Indigenous peoples "Organize.Endure.Resist."(p.42).Through the age-old practice of letter writing, Maynard and Simpson weave together Black and Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing to ask what it means to build worlds that affirm, as opposed to destroy, life.To answer this question, the authors "go backward in order to go forward" (p.19), drawing lines of continuity between the histories of slavery, ongoing settler colonial structures, and the ways in which contemporary crises continue to disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous communities.In doing so, the authors reject the ways in which Black and Indigenous struggles have often been positioned as oppositional (Habtom & Scribe, 2020;Kelley, 2017), and instead nourish a "Black and Indigenous politics of solidarity" (p.32) grounded in the liberation of lands and bodies.Maynard and Simpson converge around the "unquestionable importance" (p.86) of land-based politics as a means of challenging the legitimacy of the settler nation state and its structures of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.Black and Indigenous communities have disparate yet linked experiences with the recursive dispossession of land and lives (Coulthard, 2014;McKittrick, 2006;McKittrick & Woods, 2007).The afterlives of slavery (Hartman, 2008) and current manifestations of colonialism create an ethical and political imperative to resist continued exploitation and expropriation.As Simpson summarizes, there can be no justice in #LandBack if it is not tied to the decimation of racial capitalism, nor can there be justice in Black liberation if it depends on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples.The authors find synergistic potential in the coming together of Black and Indigenous land politics; a Black and Indigenous land-based politics offers a shared vocabulary and framework through which to turn abolitionist and decolonial dreams into action.The notable achievements of the book are twofold.First, Maynard and Simpson provide a meaningful contribution to a growing body of literature seeking to draw Black and Indigenous studies into conversation (Karuka, 2017;King, 2019;King et al.

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