“ARE THEY GETTING IT?”: Texting with Water in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “Big Water”: More-Than-Human Worlds

For many material ecocritics, water’s unique chemical properties and discursive fluidity is a vital source for tracing human entanglement with the more-than-human world. The question is, however, in the technological world we live in would we be more likely to heed the ecological impacts of our actions if water were to manifest this material agency by sharing hashtags and liking our tweets?

In her collection This Accident of Being Lost (2017), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asks just that. Rooted within traditional Nishnaabeg storytelling practices, Simpson actively resists authoritative Western literary norms through a fluid, nonlinear narrative of fragmented songs and stories. This resistance bleeds into the stories themselves, and is manifested within “Big Water”, in which the narrator engages in text communication with Chi’Niibish, the technologically astute spirit of Lake Ontario. While it is unlikely that we will find Lake Ontario sharing our tweets, this critical analysis of Simpson’s work will explore the possibility of ecological connection mediated through technology. The question is, however, whether social media can allow us to reconnect and to reconsider our ecological impact on the more-than-human world, or whether it is time for us to look up from our screens to seek voices of ecological sensitivity.