A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (review)

Reviewed by: A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (bio) A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson University of Alberta Press, 2021 a short history of the blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin is a powerful reframing of blockades and Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism. This beautiful piece of prose immediately captures the audience. Initially delivered as a public talk for the Canadian Literature Centre's (CLC) Kreisel Lectures, a literary forum that brings great thinkers to the fore to consider the challenges and subjects that concern us all, this book both details the importance of story and demonstrates its powerful impacts on our understanding of the world. Refusing the narrative that non-state-sanctioned forms of activism are merely or exclusively negations, Simpson beautifully weaves together four stories of Amik the beaver to think through blockades as sites of negation and affirmation, both a disavowal of settler colonialism's attempts to devastate our territories for capitalist gain and an avowal of our long-standing relationships in and of place. Simpson's attention to the beaver as a worldmaker beautifully centers Anishinaabe thought that understands life as continual, reciprocal, and reflective; as "a persistent world-building process" (4). She reminds us that colonial mindsets frame the beaver as "Nature's engineer," recognizing Amik as having a greater impact on the environment than any other species—aside from humans. Understood as a keystone species, beavers dramatically transform landscapes while also creating sustaining habitats. Amik reminds us that engaging with our place in transformative ways can be generative. Indeed, as Simpson shows us, by examining the beaver and their work in building blockades we can see the important distinction between impacts as forms of negation versus forms of affirmation. In these distinctions we can understand beaver as a worldmaker. Through the stories of beaver and an understanding of Amik's relational impacts, the reader is challenged to think through Indigenous forms of resistance as not just refusals of the state or capitalist extraction but also as affirmations of alternative ways of being and living with one another. The blockade, then, can be understood as [End Page 165] not just stopping the flow of something but also ensuring the pooling of an alternative. The blockade enables regeneration. Throughout A Short History of the Blockade, Simpson weaves together different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, capturing the complexity of settler colonialism's impacts on Indigenous nations while letting Indigenous knowledge and visions for living in this place we call Turtle Island drive the narrative. Simpson somehow escapes speaking to her audience in reactionary frames. While there are clear applications to the political conditions we face today as Indigenous nations, her beautiful words are also timeless, a visionary declaration of how to understand what it means to live in a relational world. Though this book is short in terms of page count, it is expansive in the gifts it offers the reader. Just as the beaver's dam transforms the landscape, this provocative framing of beaver stories and blockades provides substantively different ways of thinking about diplomacy and regeneration. I will never again be able to consider the work of blockades without thinking about my relatives, the beaver, and the formidable forms of world-making they carry forward with every nibble and placement of a log or stick. Simpson has given the reader a powerful language for thinking about both the generative aspects of Indigenous resistance and the importance of the everyday work of worldmaking. She reminds us that this assiduous work can be tiring and that we can feel as though it will be dismantled the moment we finish building a single, small dam; but in the activation of this work, worldmaking occurs. In these spaces we are both able to imagine alternative worlds and begin bringing them into form. [End Page 166] Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark HEIDI KIIWETINEPINESIIK STARK (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is associate professor in Indigenous governance at the University of Victoria. Copyright © 2023 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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