Name: Noopiming
Rating: 4.583333333333333 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9781487007645

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for "in the bush," and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie's 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. Set in the same place as Moodie's colonial memoir, this genre-fluid novel is offered as a cure for Moodie's racist treatment of Mississauga Nishnaabeg in her writing. The giant Sabe meditates on the gifts and challenges of their recent sobriety. Migrating geese make a case for coordinated formation as a way to get out of "one's own cycling head." Racoons turn Bougie Kwe's Zen-garden pond into their personal urban spa. This is a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits who are all busy with the daily labours of healing -- healing not only themselves, but their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them all together. These stories gather up tiny pieces, one at a time, as they slowly circle through the perspectives of different characters, in a breathtaking act of world-building that rewards patience and deep listening. This is the real world, the one where meaning accumulates through close observation and relationship. Enter and be changed.

The Cure for White Ladies

Noopiming

Natalie

Less of a novel, and more of an experience of contemporary Canadian indigenous life and interactions between beings (human and otherwise) in an environment altered for human use. There's a lot to think about here, in the literary sense, in regards to the effect of colonialism on the indigenous way of life, and in regards to the consequences of human activity on the natural world. Noopiming deserves multiple readings.

https://www.gencontrolz.com/all-that-jazz/against-taxonomy-noopiming-book-review

fairuza hanun

https://www.gencontrolz.com/all-that-jazz/against-taxonomy-noopiming-book-review 

Fraser Simons

I’m not sure I’ve read a book, especially in such short a text, despite it being 350 pages, the audiobook is 3 hours and change, that can communicate so much about people as ecology and community. 

With sparse words and highly effective use of white space to give, sometimes just a sentence a much needed pause and breath. There’s a kind of weight to every page that feels like the author has actually weighed it as too heavy or too light and how much white space it needs between this vignette or fragmentation or whatever you’d like to call it, to “make the point” of it especially keen. 

We follow 7 different people in a atemporal manner and the most striking things to me is how much it reinforces it’s non-western-centric gaze while situating a few of the character in western culture. You would think the urban environment would radically alter the characterization of a character in some kind of dichotomy, but it, again, simply reinforces the larger community. Because even in the urban, where nature is harder to find, sure, there is obviously still natural elements, captured in raccoons or the local park. It can’t ever be stamped out, though it is always and forever classified as inferior by the legitimately sociopathic institutions western society, and so we all, to some degree, must worship. 

As it goes on this social construction that delineates the differences between people and animals and trees, and basically anything of nature—simply isn’t even recognized as a notion to confront. It is so baseless it has no air. Instead we see how the people perceive no differences, and either does nature. In many ways, all natural aspects of people are Trees or Geese or Raccoons. Just because we have chosen not to internalize the natural in our socio-political constructs does not mean that others have.

Many indigenous languages don’t distinguish between gender and the words that are synonymous have a great deal more sense than English and other languages. And so the people here and they, just as the trees and the raccoons, and so on. I was very happy to see the Dene given some space, with those correlations reinforcing aspects of this story telegraphing that this is outside the prescriptive, western bounds of how to tell story. How to talk about a person or a people or a character. How to communicate what is intrinsic and fundamental to them. And how long that “needs” to take. Just a stunning work. I have no idea why this wasn’t on more Canadian prize lists. It better be on the next Canada Reads, I will say that.

Noopiming The Cure for White Ladies

Reviews

Highlights