I AM NOT A NATION STATE: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in conversation

Join us from 3pm on Wednesday 13th November for I AM NOT A NATION STATE, a special in conversation event with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Nat Raha.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her writing, grounded in Nishnaabeg “poetic knowledge”, explores how to build Indigenous resistance movements that refuse the destructive thinking of settler colonialism. She locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organising, and thinking. She makes clear that the goal of Indigenous resistance can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic, and instead calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.

Venue
Bourdon Lecture Theatre (Second Floor)
GSA Bourdon Building, Scott Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ

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. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Leanne is the author of eight books, including A Short History of the Blockade and the novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies which was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and the Dublin Literary Prize. This Accident of Being Lost was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Her new project, a collaboration with Robyn Maynard, is a National Best Seller and was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Leanne is also a musician. Her latest release Theory of Ice was named to the Polaris Prize short list, and she is the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award.

Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the United States and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land-based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is member of Alderville First Nation.

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the more-than-human. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Nat’s work is anthologised in 100 Queer Poems and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Her poetry has been translated in numerous languages. Recent performances include epistolary (on carceral islands), co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland, 2023.

Recent critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), New Feminist Literary Studies (CUP, 2020) and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and co-author of the article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ in Social Text.

This event is co-hosted by Glasgow School of Art Fine Art Critical Studies Department and Race, Rights & Sovereignty series, and is part of Arika Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, which takers place from 13th - 17th November. For more information please visit arika.org.uk.

This event is part of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty 'What Will Be the Cure?' strand. ‘What Will Be the Cure?’ is a programme strand geared towards artists and practitioners who wish to collectivise, experiment, and conspire towards transformative change.

Race, Rights and Sovereignty is a programme supported by GSA Students Association in partnership with GSA Exhibitions.

Host or Publisher The Glasgow School of Art