Rehearsals for Living (Abolitionist Papers Book 3)

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As an invocation for collective resistance, the book succeeds, but it’s also powerful when the authors share the small details of their lives – Simpson’s meditative nighttime runs with her daughter, Maynard effortfully tolerating the spider on her stairs – that ground their ethics in the reality of daily living. At times, their dialogue wades so deeply into critical theory that the epistolary structure is obscured. But when Maynard writes, “I miss you, Leanne,” in the midst of one didactic letter, it is a heart-rending jolt of intimacy. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. As a musician, rehearsal is what you spend most of your time in. You spend most of your time engaged in that repetition, in that space — a kind of safe space, because there isn't an audience and it isn't a performance. I like this idea of coming together and trying to make or build something with a group of people in real time, and then practicing it as a way of generating the knowledge that we all need to be engaged in these little making practices. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, "Practice makes different," which I really like a lot.

Liane, you say the absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst — and you reference Mariame Kaba's idea of hope as a discipline or a practice. Can you talk about hope as a practice? Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, activist, musician, artist, author and member of Alderville First Nation. Her books include Islands of Decolonial Love, This Accident of Being Lost, As We Have Always Done and Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies.Maynard’s first letter was written a few months before the pandemic’s onset, and Simpson’s last reply came shortly after the 2020 U.S. election. Both are lyrical, compelling writers, and their early letters are infused with the energy that defined the early months of COVID-19. “People are revolting for wildly imaginative things: for worlds radically transformed, for the end of policing, the end of prisons, the end of ICE and the CBSA, of militarism and colonialism,” wrote Maynard in May 2020. Reading that line now is almost painful; by November 2020, Simpson wrote, “We aren’t banging pots and pans every afternoon in support of health care workers. No one is baking sourdough.” If you find yourself, in 2022, crushed by exhaustion and despair, you might ask yourself: is there any hope left to truly change things? Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard envision a future shaped by freedom in Rehearsals for Living Abolition was at the core of this book. No more policing, prisons, capitalism, land abuse and title. A return of land and a return of community. No more individual gain at the core of interaction. Gift economies and reciprocity. Homelessness and sharing not hoarding. Limiting use and honouring all parts of this world beyond the human. No more change from within. Abolish it and start anew. Listen to the folks who have been resisting and rehearsing other ways of living in perpetuity. This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.” Get Rehearsals for Livingfrom Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1880-rehearsals-for-living

In Rehearsals For Living, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson showed me how to find reassurance in world-changing. They showed me how world-changing is happening all around us, all the time. It's an incredible book, probably the best I've read all year, and I'd recommend anyone interested reads it. (I'll lend you my copy if that's what it takes.) In our group work and play, we practice living in the here and now. The work evolves out of the work that we do together, we co create from the efforts of the group participants. Rehearsals for Living explores our dynamic relationship conundrums in engaging and revealing ways, helping us to release patterns of behavior that are no longer working for us. We practice new ways of responding. We learn to become fluid, connective, and responsive to ourselves, the people in our lives, and society. . The epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada.The exchange grew into their new book Rehearsals for Living — an urgent demand for a different way forward that offers new insights into where we go from here. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and live captioning will be provided.*** My only wish was that they spoke more about practical ways to tear down capitalism and these structures. A lot of talk about how bad certain people, groups and structures are but not how to create real change. Advocating and taking naps is not enough. Real change happens within our political and legal systems. Having conversations is the first step, advocating is the second - but real change occurs in the third.

This Lansdowne lecture is online, free and open to the public. It is co-hosted by the School of Social Work, School of Indigenous Governance, and the Centre for Indigenous Research and Community-Engaged Research (CIRCLE) at the University of Victoria. Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again. ” It’s the first book i’ve ever read with a dialogue between two authors, written in the form of a letter. Not only does it feel like i’m learning something new from the two as they dissect very real racial, spiritual and ecological plights, but I get to learn more about their friendship and the lives/communities they’ve worked hard to uplift. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes different. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.”

Well, Leanne is somebody who I had already had a deep respect for as an intellectual, and somebody who was becoming a friend. I really needed to reach out in the sense of what it means to be coming up against so many crises, to somebody who was very much a part of freedom-making traditions and comes from a history of work and thought in Indigenous radicalism. Mariann earned a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and a Teaching Certification in 1972 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from York University in Ontario, Canada in 1976. She taught Art and Humanities part-time at Whatcom Community College, 1982-1985. She practiced as a Certified Acupressure Practitioner, a form of mind body work incorporating Chinese Five Element Theory and emotional health from 1985-2000, during this time she held a Washington State Massage License. Robyn Maynard: This is a dangerous question to ask me! [laughs] You have no idea how much Star Trek content didn't make it into the book based on the amount that I actually talk and think about Star Trek in my everyday life. For me, in the Star Trek world, The Next Generation universe is this world free from want — this world in which the divisions of race and gender are now seen as foolish; in which capitalism and the senseless destruction of the planet is seen as foolish; that people have what they need. They don't have a cash economy. It's not based on extreme wealth and poverty. Leanne Betasamosake Simpsonis a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. And to me, that also just means, "What kind of actions do we need to take every single day?" So if every day I wake up and rehearse the kind of person I want to be, this is who I become. So in the everyday acts and work toward freedom, we are building more liberatory worlds all the time — and that's something that I think we are really focusing on. In the everyday acts and work toward freedom, we are building more liberatory worlds all the time. - Robyn Maynard

Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, activist, musician, artist, author and member of Alderville First Nation. Her work often centres on the experiences of Indigenous Canadians. Her books include Islands of Decolonial Love, This Accident of Being Lost, As We Have Always Doneand Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Why Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson wrote Rehearsals for Living This story first appeared in Broadview’ s October/November 2022 issue with the title “Remaking the world.” also, audiobook-wise, there's power in hearing the voices of these phenomenal activists read aloud their own writing, but because there are constraints (as opposed to them giving a speech at an event) that audiobook narrators know how to navigate, it really made me appreciate how much of a difference one's skill in their profession can provide.

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left to right: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Credit: Nadya Kwandibens) and Robyn Maynard (Credit: Stacy Lee Photography) A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. Our team is working hard to bring you more independent, award-winning journalism. But Broadview is a nonprofit and these are tough times for magazines. Please consider supporting our work. There are a number of ways to do so: Simpson similarly details how, in her Nishnaabeg culture, there is a deep reverence for water as life-giving — leaving the reader to imagine a world where water is respected more and First Nations communities in Canada, as well as poor communities in the Global South, don’t have to fight for safe drinking sources. Robyn Maynard: The title has so many different meanings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote the foreword for our book, describes abolition as "life in rehearsal." And that's really a way of thinking about the kind of world that we want to live in — about the kind of world that freedom could mean.