Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
by
Audra Simpson
A radical intervention in anthropology, and a fascinating portrait of an Indigenous community that refuses to see itself through the eyes, modes, and methods of colonizers.
This book, by Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, is engaged in three interesting (and overlapping) projects. The first is an attempt to explore and theorize the idea of “refusal” as a social and political strategy, which emerges from the Kanienke’ha/Mohawk community of Kahnawa:ke, whose reserve is located in what is, today, Quebec, Canada, but whose ancestral territory stretches across much of New York State, and whose members currently regularly cross the border for work or to reconnect with southern kin. Refusal, in Simpson’s articulation, is a kind of ethic of sovereignty, in which contemporary Mohawk people refuse to be seen as subject-populations to either the Canadian or the United States settler colonies and instead foreground their own continued sovereignty of their land, their cultural and poltical processes, and their rights. This philosophy of refusal manifests across a variety of social domains, including at border crossings (Mohawk people are permitted to cross the border under the terms of the 1794 Jay Treaty, though they are often harassed), regarding debates over membership, and in the Oka uprising of 1990, among many other examples. Such refusal, as Simpson notes is not merely a kind of cultural stand-offishness or distance. Instead it is, “having one’s political sovereighty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing…” (p. 11). In other words, refusal is a political-philosophical position that says that the settler-colony, in all of its political, social, economic, and cultural manifestations, has no authority that the Mohawk recognize. This ethic of refusal draws on older Haudenosaunee political forms (particularly the Kaianere’ko:wa or the “Great Law of Peace” of the Confederacy) but also was a response to other more recent relations with colonial powers, including the complex multi-ethnic nature of Kahnawa:ke as a town of “praying Indians”, the imposition of the Canadian Indian Act and its dramatic racial and gendered inteventions into the lives and possibilities of Mohawk men and women, and the failure of the Canadian government to deal justly with the people of Kahnawa:ke in the 20th century, particuarly as regards to land taking along the St. Lawrence River . All of these factors created a philosophy of refusal that is not “traditional” as anthropologists often think of such things, but according to Simpson is uniquely Mohawk (or even Kahnawákeró:non) in its approach, vision, and mobilization.
The second project is an interrogation of why anthropology is so obsessed with tradition, and why the people of Kahnawa:ke have so thoroughly been viewed by anthropologists as being “perverted” or distant from the seemingly “authentic” and traditional forms of Haudenosaunee cultural production. Simpson explores Lewis Henry Morgan’s “The League of the Iroquois”, arguably one of the origin points for American Anthropology, and certainly the template for “Iroquois Studies” that followed in its wake. Simpson helpfully recasts Morgan’s almost chance meeting with Seneca Chief Ely Parker, who provided much of the source material for Morgan’s subsequent work, as a product of Haudenosaunee displacement, since Parker was visiting Albany (where Morgan was also visiting on a business trip) to research treaties and plead with the State Legislature for redress of land loss. Thus, from the moment of its creation, American Anthropology operated as a kind of salvage project, seeking to document ancestral “traditions” of indigenous people in a context in which they were thought to be disappearing, and were fighting against this disappearance. Simpson argues that subsequent anthropology has continued this intertwining of colonialist “verification” of tradition with a lack of emphasis on the processes of colonialism itself and their role in determining who gets viewed as anthropological subjects.
The third project is a re-thinking of anthropological methods, ethics, and practice in light of both the politics of refusal and the colonialist origins of anthropology. Simpson says that anthropology’s paradigmatic insistence on verifying traditions has prevented it from seeing the role of settler colonialism as it manifests in both colonizing and colonized (though not eliminated) populations. Because of the disciplinary focus on tracking down utterances and articulations of traditional forms of governance in the face of “disappearance”–a salvage operation–anthropology became invested in what was said, rather than focusing on what wasn’t said and what was being challenged. For indigenous people, what they said about their own past would take precident over their lives and possibilties in the present, at least as far as anthropology was concerned. Chapter 4 “Ethnographic Refusal, Anthropological Need” charts out how Simpson’s interlocutors in Kahnawa:ke were very attuned to the impacts of what they said about themeselves and how that might impact their sovereignty and their futures. Talking about these issues as they manifested in debates about membership (particularly the recent post C-31 tensions between blood quantum and clan membership) opened up Kahnawa:ke people to danger and they knew it. Simpson began to understand this when she would encounter moments of refusal in her interviews, and she interpreted these refusals of explanation as theoretically sophisticated political critiques of settler colonial apprehension. Simpson calls this, and other ambiguities, silences, metaphorical or circular language and other Kahnawa:ke rhetorical feints a “labor intensive process of assertion: around membership, which registered then to me as a kind of stubbornness, an excess of will. " (p. 113) As an alternative, she advocates for a re-invention of ethonography “which takes into account the history of anthropology, settlement, and power relations at once” (p. 190 emphasis in original). This was the task she set for herself, as a way of moving outside of the verification and tradition paradigm that has dominiated the discipline, and rendered communities like Kahnawa:ke as deviant, unusual or anomalous.
This was a good book to think with, both as someone who lives in Haudenosaunee territory and also as someone who was trained as an anthropologist and works in a Museum with both ancestral and contemporary indigenous objects in its collection. I often wrestle with the extent to which colonialism can ever be disentangled from the Museum, which owes its modern institutional form to the colonialism, conquest, and extraction by Europeans in Africa and the Americas. One reasonable response is that it can’t, and that the most ethical thing that we can do is return all objects to the communities that made them, and shut museums down–essentially conceding that there is no Museum after colonialism. The same might be said of ethnography; Simpson makes clear that Anthropology has frequently served as a kind of cataloging arm of the colonial state, artfully articulating that under settler colonialism
“People became differentiated, their spaces and places possessed. ‘Culture’ served a purpose of describing the difference (always against a norm of presumed sameness) that was encountered in those places. Describing difference also inovlved the analysis of difference, one that had (and still has serious implications for Indigenous peoples.” (p. 112)
And yet, Simpson does not call for an abolition of ethnography in the face of this history of elimination through categorization. Instead, she repeatedly champions ethnography, calling in her (very thoughtufl and insightful) methodological appendix for “a less intrusive, more critically inflected anthropology of colonialism and Indigenous North America.” (p. 199) Given the book’s engagement with and committment to honoring refusal, I found myself wondering why one might not simply refuse anthropology and its trojan horse of colonial analysis all together. Can there be an ethnography after colonialism?
The other question I found myself wondering about was the uniqueness of Kahnawa:ke refusal. Is refusal something uniquely Kahnawa:ke, Mohawk, Haudenosaunee or even Indigenous? Simpson frames refusal as a kind of sovereignty “nested and embedded” (p.12) within the broader colonial imposition of the US and Canadian settler states; refusal was a political formation that emerged from the logic of elimination, a kind of incipient nationalism. But I found myself wondering about how refusal might manifest in other moments of the contradictions of states. In other words, does Mohawk refusal allow us to think through the presence of refusal in other non-indigenous locations? Despite the wildly different contexts, I found myself thinking about American rural conservatism, and its many recent refusals of recognition of the state. White settler conservatives may have only a fictive or tenuous set of grievances regarding loss, compared to the genocidal elimination of Indigenous lands under colonialism, but they frequently articulate loss in perhaps analogous ways, as a kind of de-territorialization. This got me thinking about nationalisms big and small, and whether all nationalism is ultimately a kind of refusal. I’m not even sure it’s helpful to think this way, and I recognize the rhetorical violence of trying to abstract Mohawk refusal out into something applicable to the communities and nations that sought to eradicate them, but I couldn’t shake the sense that Mohawk refusal might be comprehensible or even comparable to more general forms of white settler rural grievance.
All in all, this was a fascinating and theoretically rich book that got me pondering both the history and culture of contemporary and historical Indigenous communities, and my own place as a settler in the land of those communities and in a discipline that has worked (albeit unevenly) to categorize them as part of an genocidal-eliminationist project. Quite apart from that, it’s a beatifully and thoughtfully written book, full of anger, humor, and insight, and is rightly deserving of the praise and accolades it’s been given. Simpson opens the book by stating that it “is about the labor to live a good life” (p. ix) and the book artfully asks that we (settler people) see what that requires of Mohawk people and what it costs.
