Biiskabiyang

In the mid-1990s, a young Nishnaabeg researcher spent long months with the community of Long Lake #58, deep in the boreal forest of northern Ontario. The project was timely: mapping the land’s uses with elders, hoping that better-informed planners would destroy less. The maps filled with travel routes, springs, ceremonial sites—then clear-cuts, dams, mines, railroads. Standing at the foot of a map of loss is clarity, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson would later write. But what struck her most were not the maps. It was the sight of those same elders riding a school bus down the Trans-Canada Highway, laughing all the way to their trapline. A life that carried on, unshaken, alongside a world gnawing at its edges. They refused and generated something different—every day, as their ancestors had before them. Years later, Simpson would name what she had witnessed there with a word from her language.

English

Biiskabiyang—the process of returning to ourselves, a reengagement with the things we have left behind, a reemergence, an unfolding from the inside out—is a concept, an individual and collective process of decolonization and resurgence.

English

Biiskabiyang—the process of returning to oneself, of reclaiming what we have left behind, of re-emerging, of unfolding from within outward—is a concept, an individual and collective process of decolonization and resurgence.

The word is Nishnaabemowin, the language of her nation, and Simpson did not invent it: she drew it from the Nishnaabeg scholarly lineage—her own Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) and the work of Anishinaabe scholar Wendy Makoons Geniusz, whom she cites in support. Three images hold within its definition: returning, reclaiming what was left behind, unfolding from within. None of them look backward. This is the word’s crucial precision: the return is not a step back. It was a returning, in the present, to myself, she writes of her own journey—a return, in the present, to myself; an unfolding of a different present. Biiskabiyang does not restore a past: it opens a present that had remained folded.

Yet one must know where to return. At Long Lake #58, Simpson sought answers as a theorist; the elders answered differently.

English

I kept asking them about governance, and they would talk about trapping. I would ask them about treaties, and they would take me fishing. I’d ask them what we should do about the mess of colonialism, and they would tell me stories about how well they used to live on the land. I loved all of it, but I didn’t think they were answering my questions. I could see only practice. I couldn’t see their theory until decades later.

English

I kept asking them about governance, and they talked to me about trapping. I questioned them about treaties, and they took me fishing. I asked what to do about the mess of colonialism, and they told me how well they used to live on this land. I loved all of it, but I didn’t think they were answering my questions. I saw only practice. I didn’t see their theory until decades later.

The answer lay in the act, and the act was the answer. What the elders showed her without saying, other elders from her own territory would later confirm: centering ourselves in this Nishnaabeg process of living is both the instrument and the song—recentering in this Nishnaabeg way of life is both the tool and the melody. Not a means to an end: the path and the destination in the same motion. Simpson builds her book’s thesis on this. The process, she writes, not only frames the outcome, it is the transformation. And more bluntly: The how changes us. The how transforms us.

What, then, is this “self” to which one returns? Not an inner depth. When Simpson searches for words to describe what she found entering the elders’ world, she does not write that she found herself; she writes: It was freedom as a way of being as a constellation of relationship, freedom as world making, freedom as a practice. It was biiskabiyang. The self that returns is woven from land, ancestors, language, and kin—human and otherwise. The word is so far from psychological that Simpson applies it, in the book’s conclusion, to an animal nation: in an old story she revisits, the deer, wounded by the Nishnaabeg’s own disrespect, leave the shared territory—the deer withdrew and turned inward to rebuild themselves as a nation and a clan. A biiskabiyang, she says: a turning inward toward the essence—here, the essence of the deer nation.

We must distinguish before drawing parallels. Our language knows “returning to oneself”—but we have lodged it within: one withdraws from the world and its tasks, suspends action to descend into one’s inner sanctum, and the self sought there is private, reached by ceasing to do. Biiskabiyang takes the opposite path: one returns to oneself with hands occupied—fishing, harvesting rice, relearning a language—because the self it aims for is not an interior but a fabric of relations and practices, which is not contemplated: it is remade. And this word belongs to a precise history—it speaks of a people’s return to itself, against dispossession. To detach it from this struggle and turn it into a self-help recipe would be to take it, not receive it. What we can receive is its lesson on the how. The elders of Long Lake #58 were not dodging questions; they were answering deeper, at ground level. What if what each of us has left behind—a language, a place, a bond—can only be found again not by thinking of it, but by doing it?