Authors Meet Readers: Indigenous Theories of Relationality, Worlding and Repair for the Times Ahead

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable brings together scholars and authors around themes related to Indigenous geographies, worldings, and forms of speculative thinking. It focuses on two recent publications, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (Knopf/Haymarket, 2025) and Joseph M. Pierce’s Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke UP, 2025), both of which engage with Indigenous methodologies and theorizations from an embodied, grounded perspective that forewards the relations and relationalities at the heart of Indigenous epistemologies. Simpson’s work theorizes futurity as an expression of Nishaabe water-relations, while Pierce’s work proposes relational thinking as an ongoing act of future-oriented speculation. Taken together, these books refuse the legitimacy of settler colonial knowledge systems, histories, politics, aesthetics and enclosures by centering deep and expansive relationality towards social worlds of intercommunalism and interdependence.

As a roundtable, the panelists will think, write and reflect alongside these two books, expanding their methodologies toward new geographies and sites of encounter. The panelists have disciplinary grounding in anthropology (A. Simpson), literary and film studies (Goeman), and geography and environmental studies (Whetung), while also centering Indigenous methods of engagement and theory. Through critical engagement with the two works, the panelists and authors will explore grounded relationality as an organizing politic and ethic in Indigenous worldings and highlight implications of this approach within various disciplines, including Indigenous Studies, Geography, Political theory, and in Gender and Queer theory. Attentive to our present moment of late-stage American empire, and our relationships to the living beings with whom we share our planet, this interdisciplinary panel of scholars will approach these works as creative ground for new intellectual and political possibilities, new solidarities and shared futures, by bringing Indigenous otherwise from the peripheries of American Studies to our current moment.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Joseph M Pierce, Stony Brook University

Panelists

• Joseph M Pierce, Stony Brook University

• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist

• Audra Simpson, Columbia University

• Mishuana Goeman, University at Buffalo

Biographical Information

Joseph M. Pierce
Joseph M. Pierce is a 2024-25 Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025), co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” He has published work in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, as well as in popular outlets such as Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg independent scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight previous books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary prize and the Governor General’s award for fiction. Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, released by You’ve Changed Records was released in 2021 and short-listed for the Polaris Prize and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project Theory of Water was published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket books in the spring of 2025. Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Audra Simpson
Audra Simpson is a political anthropologist whose work is focused on contextualizing the force and consequences of governance through time, space and bodies. Her research and writing is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and crosses the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics. Her recent research is a genealogy of affective governance and extraction across the US and Canada. Her book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014, Duke University Press) won the Sharon Stephens Prize (AES), the “Best first Book Award” (NAISA) as well as the Lora Romero Award (ASA) in addition to honorable mentions. It was a Choice Academic Title for 2014. In 2010, she won the School of General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” In 2020 she won the The Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching from the Academic Awards Committee of the Columbia College Student Council.

Mishuana Goeman
Mishuana Goeman, PhD, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a professor of Indigenous studies at University of Buffalo (on leave from UCLA’s gender studies and American Indian studies). Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021) which won the choice award in 2021. Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as co-pi on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous LA (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities. Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is the principal investigator of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the Mukurtu California Native Hub (2021) housed at UCLA through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She is also a co-pi on Haudenosaunee Archival Research and Knowledge (Hark), a Mellon funded project at University at Buffalo (2023). She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the inaugural special advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. From 2020-2021 she was a distinguished visiting scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University at Buffalo, located in her home territories. She was the 2023-24 President of the American Studies Association.