Common Read

The purpose of the Common Read Program at Colorado College is to create a common intellectual experience for incoming undergraduate students, to introduce them to our core values as an academic community, and to teach them how to engage as members of our community of scholars.

2026-27 Common Read

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's collection of essays shows how situated, embodied knowledge matters, and she illustrates how interdependence—understood through indigenous epistemes about water, snow, ice, and respiration—provide important alternatives to ways of knowing grounded in colonial and capitalist praxis of extraction. Simpson's work calls for a radical shift in recognizing how we learn and where we learn from.

Theory of Water also helps our CC community think about ways forward in the wake of global violence by encouraging us to situate ourselves more fully at the bodily and local level. At its core, Theory of Water is a reflection on the scale and scope of interdependent resistance and alternative ways of being accountable to each other. Simpson explores how histories, memories, and generational knowledge layer across non-extractive and interdependent relationships with many lifeforms (human and non-human), through grief (loss of her Elder), ecological history (eel migrations moving from the Caribbean to Thunder Bay), and counter-organizing against colonial and capitalist models of extraction.

Alongside CC's Anti-Racist Book Club selection, Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars, we hope Simpson’s Theory of Water  provides another important node in the larger network of texts prompting critical reflection on CC's sense of place in the wake of colonial occupation, anti-Native violence, and envisioning/making more equitable futures—especially animated by the power of the liberal arts. 

If you are a member of a department, program, or office hosting programming related to the Common Read and would like your event added to the website, please contact Brett Gray: bgray@coloradocollege.edu.