As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

In As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson does as she has always done—she provides a fierce critique of North American settler colonialism, while laying the groundwork for how resistance might be articulated, realized, and embodied. As an Indigenous poet, musician, author, and (at times reluctant) academic, Simpson is best known for her prodigious work on Indigenous issues and her activism with the ongoing protest movement, Idle No More. As We Have Always Done is, in part, a memoir of her experiences living and learning with the Elders at Long Lake 58 First Nation, a First Nation band government in Ontario; it is also an ambitious attempt to outline a system of radical resistance by taking seriously local, Indigenous, and alternative ways of knowing. The possibilities and the struggles outlined in As We Have Always Done stem from the desire to embody resurgent practices as a way of reproducing indigeneity and “generating” Indigenous freedom.