Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Books in Order

If you want her key nonfiction first: Dancing on Our Turtle's Back → As We Have Always Done → A Short History of the Blockade
If you want fiction and short forms first: Islands of Decolonial Love → This Accident of Being Lost → Noopiming
If you want a collaborative, letter-driven book: Rehearsals for Living
If you want a younger-friendly entry point: The Gift Is in the Making
If you want movement history through many voices: This Is an Honour Song

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was born in 1971 and raised in Wingham, Ontario. She is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation. Readers often meet her first as a writer, but her work has long moved across books, music, performance, teaching, and political thought, with each part feeding the others.

She did not arrive through a standard literary route. Simpson studied biology, earned a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and then returned to her own community with different questions. She began learning from Elders, spending time on the land, harvesting wild rice and maple syrup, listening closely to language, and treating research as something lived with the body as much as the mind.

That shift stuck.

In interviews, she has said that growing up she rarely saw the lives she knew on the page. Her books answer that absence. They make room for aunties, kids, lovers, organizers, knowledge keepers, and people who are tired, funny, angry, tender, and still trying. Even when she is writing theory, there is usually a story nearby, and even when she is writing fiction, land and responsibility are never far away.

If you want a clear place to start with her nonfiction, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back and As We Have Always Done show how she thinks. Both turn to Nishnaabeg stories, language, and land-based knowledge to talk about governance, education, resistance, and freedom. A Short History of the Blockade takes a shorter, stranger path, using stories about Amik, the beaver, to think through blockades as acts of protection, relation, and world-building.

Her fiction opens outward in a different way. Islands of Decolonial Love and This Accident of Being Lost move through short pieces, songs, and fragments, following contemporary Indigenous lives across reserves, towns, and cities. Noopiming goes further, bringing human and more-than-human voices together in a form that feels like a novel, a chorus, and a long act of listening all at once.

She writes as if story and song were never meant to be separated.

That makes sense because Simpson is also a musician. Rhythm, repetition, and voice matter in her prose, and some projects openly cross the line between page and performance. The Gift Is in the Making retells Anishinaabeg stories for younger readers with warmth and wit. Rehearsals for Living, written with Robyn Maynard, uses letters and friendship to think through Black and Indigenous life during a time of overlapping crisis.

Across genres, a few threads keep returning. Land is never just scenery. Language is not decoration. Community is built through care and obligation, not sentimentality. Her settings often move between bush and city, ceremony and ordinary daily life. Her characters are not symbols, they are people trying to protect what matters while still making room for desire, laughter, kinship, and beauty.

Simpson has spent decades teaching and working in Indigenous land-based education, including with the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning. She is based in Peterborough, Ontario. The books keep changing shape, but the core stays steady: she writes to think with other people, to tell the truth plainly, and to imagine Indigenous futures.