Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush”) is a novel-poem hybrid that resists traditional Western storytelling and brings forth Anishinaabe perspectives, language, and relational worldviews. Rather than following a conventional format, the book unfolds through poetic fragments and interconnected voices that together become a meditation on identity, land, community, and colonial/ Western and patriarchal encounter.
At the heart of the book is Mashkawaji — a narrator who lies frozen in ice and reflects on memory, disconnection, and transformation. From this suspended place, Mashkawaji introduces a chorus of seven characters, each of whom embodies a different part of themself:
• Akiwenzii (their will)
• Ninaatig (their lungs, embodied as a maple tree)
• Mindimooyenh (their conscience)
• Sabe (their marrow)
• Adik (their nervous system, a caribou)
• Asin (their eyes and ears)
• Lucy (their brain)
These beings — part human, part nonhuman — strive to engage with both the unnatural settler world (full of things like branded coffee mugs and disposable consumer goods) and the natural world that is increasingly constrained by hierarchical property systems.
One theme is how separation from land and relational ways of knowing alienates us from deep parts of ourselves.
The narrative responds to and challenges settler literature, especially Susanna Moodie’s 19th-century memoir Roughing It in the Bush. The author, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, reclaims the term Noopiming and in this book expresses what it means to be in the bush from an Indigenous standpoint — alive with spirits, ancestors, kin, land, and reciprocal relations rather than wilderness to be conquered.
This book is a mosaic of moments — humorous, lyrical, political, and reflective — a relational field of healing, resistance, and reimagined futures grounded in Anishinaabe cosmologies and lived experience.
Excerpts from Noopiming, the cure for white ladies.
…..trust replaces critique, examination and interrogation.
even though their truths are their own, not mine.
The tenderness is gone, only relentless irritation remains, and staying becomes another word for love.
Mindimooyenh says: “We live in an ecosystem of hurt.”
There are two parts to Asin. The defence and the heart: don’t get tripped up by the defence.
“If it is a performance, the spirits refuse to show up. You guys are so full of shit you don’t even notice.”
….pretty fucked for the humans, to be honest. The white ones who think they are the only ones have really structured the fucked-up-ed-ness in a seemingly impenetrable way this time. A few good ones get their footing, and then without continual cheerleading, succumb to the shit talk. It is difficult to know where to intervene or how to start. There are embers, but the wood is always wet and the flames go out so damn easy.
Akiwenzii is tired. Tired of acting like they are too old to be scared. Tired of acting like they are too old to care what they look like. Tired of acting like life experience has made them wise. Tired of being positive and having faith in the young people. Tired of the way what is most dear to them gets deployed and misused and performed. Tired of putting a happy goddamn spin on the end of the world.
Art by Kate W 
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