With a small group of co-moderators, a cohort of OHMA Students participating in the Workshop course had the opportunity to host a seminar with Dr. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. For three and a half years I’d been poring over her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, and I was finally meeting her in person—well via Zoom. As a student of economics, I had always wanted to ask about integrating politics of decolonization, radical resistance, and black-feminist politics into disciplines like economics or STEM. The following is a meditation on the wisdom that Dr. Simpson shared in our seminar, and the personal strategies I have been cultivating based on that dialogue.
In reading Dr. Simpson’s work over the years, one of the clearest lessons I have learned is that there are other ways and other worlds possible—and livable—outside of whatever hegemonic rendering into which we have been hailed. In other words, she has taught me that there is space outside of the dominating systems of our time (globalization, capitalism, heteropatriarchy etc.). There is something beyond that constitutes a space where new worlds can exist. In discussing her upcoming book, Noompiming: The Cure For White Ladies, she shared a set of strategies she mobilized to build scholarship and art ‘outside’. One strategy that resonated with me was the work of transforming readers’ and editors’ understanding of what a novel is and can become. There is a canon, a foundational paradigm through which we are trained to understand novels, and then there is what lies beyond. And it was a privilege to hear Dr. Simpson articulate what it was to choose to write a novel that looked nothing like what people knew how to recognize. Instead, she wrote and built the story she knew had to be told, in whatever way she knew was liberatory.
When do we attempt to expand and stretch dominant models, such as the novel, to be what we need them to be, and when do we choose instead to transform them? How do we learn not only to stretch but to rupture the mold of these models based on our needs? (And for clarity, ‘our needs’, here, means liberation). These questions began to unfold before me as I listened to Dr. Simpson speak to the process of constructing Noompiming. Hearing her narrative made me remember what it felt like to attempt to stretch dominant methodologies for economics and economic history to my needs. It reminded me of how I felt as I simultaneously attempted to stretch the dominant molds, while also attempting to squeeze myself inside of the construct. I am not against that type of labor, in fact it was important that I learned to fit that ‘stretched mold’—else I may never have submitted a thesis in Economics that passed inspection. But I think I’m hungry for some other strategy too.
I wondered how Dr. Simpson might graph her experience with writing her novel upon other pursuits of transformation—particularly transformation of empirical disciplines within the academy. Could we understand her transformation of the format of the novel as a potential strategy for other disciplinary work? I asked especially because I knew that she had, for some time, learned within STEM disciplines in the academy.
TT: When you were speaking of moving out of biology and STEM and that realm— I’m personally really curious [about], and I suppose invested in, how we address those topics [of decolonial liberation and radical resistance] in that realm too. I am curious about: do you have a vision around what that looks like—expanding that?
LBS: I think I’ve been thinking about that in terms of consent. Consent is really important in my culture and people….When I was a biology student—when I was a masters student—I was studying salmon and I was supposed to be harvesting a bunch of baby salmon and cutting them open and looking at what was in their stomach contents. And that really bothered me. That was one of the things that I thought like: taking this much life for my silly masters project—that is not going to, in any way, change the world, or make the world a better place, or help the salmon—...it really made me question those ethics around consent.
And now seeing how consent plays out in the dominant society—in Canadian-American Society—in terms of gender, and how difficult a concept it is for people to understand. That you can't just do what you want with someone's else, with a woman’s body, with a two-spirited, or trans body. I think that’s one way that I’ve been thinking about it. In terms of expanding it [consent] beyond humans and including the lands and animals, which then kind of feeds into the sciences as well.
...It’s much more difficult to have [those conversations] in the sciences.
In answering me, Dr. Simpson referred to a moment while studying biology in which she knew that something about the methodology did not align with what she knew was right—what she knew was liberatory. I have had many moments such as that within Economics, moments in which the core ethics that I live by have been challenged under the methodological demands of the discipline.
Dr. Simpson ended up stepping away from the pursuit of formal biology within the academy. She now pursues a wholly radical experiment of her own, at the intersection of many different disciplines, that leaves me in awe. I still feel wedded to Economics in some strange way, not yet ready to walk away. But after listening to Dr. Simpson’s work in building things outside of hegemonic methodologies, I began to dream differently about how I might build economic methodology and research based not in what is typical or publishable, but based in the ethics I know, in my bones, must be observed.
I feel confident in that conviction because as Dr. Simpson explained: the ramifications of methodologies that do not align, even on a small scale, with our personal ethics (i.e. not having the consent of the salmon she was being asked to cut open) are dire and indicative of larger politico-ethical misalignments (i.e. a culture that does not have a mature understanding of consent and people’s bodies). When we neglect certain vital ethics on seemingly small scales that we find breachable or okay-to-trespass, like a fractal pattern those violations repeat and echo onto larger and more complex/brutal scales.
What this taught me is that the stakes are as high as they feel, even when I am told otherwise. What this taught me is that even while I understand the need to work on stretching hegemonic boundaries and squeezing best I can into the spaces that I can, transformation of these boundaries must be the true vision. I learned that sometimes, transformation looks like acknowledging that something exists outside of conventional boundaries and that with that conviction, I can step outside of them. And build what I need.
Taylor Thompson (she/hers) is an Oral History Fellow with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project. Taylor is a student at Columbia's Oral History Masters of Arts Program and a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she majored in Economics and Social History. As an undergraduate Taylor wrote her thesis in economics on alternative economic models developed by Black women in Harlem, New York in the early 20th Century.