biiskabiyang
le retour à soi
The *Anishinaabemowin* word carried by Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (*As We Have Always Done*, 2017): the process—individual and collective—of returning to oneself: reclaiming what was left behind, re-emerging, unfolding from the inside out. Not a step backward: a return to the present, achieved through practices (*the language, fishing, wild rice, ceremony*) rather than introspection. For Simpson, it names decolonization and resurgence lived from within.
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.
The spelling follows the book’s—biiskabiyang—and the word stems from the Nishnaabeg scholarly lineage: Simpson refers to her own Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) and to the work of Anishinaabe researcher Wendy Makoons Geniusz. “Le retour à soi” is merely a makeshift French rendering, flagged as such.
What it fills is clear. French has “se retrouver” (private, introspective, suspended in moods), “se ressourcer” (a pause before resuming as before), “revenir en arrière” (nostalgia). It lacks a word for a return that is both individual and collective, oriented toward the present, and enacted through the hands: you return to yourself by fishing, harvesting wild rice, relearning the language—because the self in question isn’t an interior but a fabric of relations and practices. The elders of Long Lake #58 demonstrated this without stating it: when asked about governance, they spoke of trapping; about treaties, they took people fishing. Theory lived in practice.
The word is so unpsychological that Simpson applies it to an animal nation: in a story she revisits, deer wounded by disrespect leave the territory and turn inward to rebuild themselves as a nation—a turning inward toward the essence, a pivot toward the core.
Like Momaday’s (Kiowa) remembered earth, biiskabiyang refuses to let what has been lost remain simply lost—but otherwise: Momaday holds the land through memory and speech, while Simpson returns to it through repeated action. And like akinananti (Shipibo-Konibo), it conceives of agency first as connection: what we do together makes what we are. Puhpowee comes from the same Anishinaabe language family—among the Potawatomi of Kimmerer, a nation neighboring and distinct from Simpson’s Nishnaabeg.