An Ethnography of and in Refusal: Simpson’s Decolonized Anthropology on Mohawk Nationhood

Introduction

In character with the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, who refuse simplified representations and expropriated nationhood, Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus presents an ethnographical refusal to the authenticity-driven preservations of dying indigeneity conducted by past scholars of Iroquois studies. By tracing through Mohawk's histories of refusals to settler states' limited recognitions, and their constant negotiations of territories, memberships, and nationhood, Simpson decolonizes her ethnography with refusals to a complete pathologization that would erase the dynamical resistance and vibrant humanities in the Mohawk people.

This essay surveys the theoretical and ethnographical accounts of the political refusals initiated by the Mohawks to assert indigenous nationhood. I argue that Simpson's research constitutes an ethnographic refusal that deviates from the assimilating gaze of colonizers and manifests as an intertwining personal and political project of refusal that epitomizes the anti-colonial and desire-centered approach to indigenous studies.

Refusals to Recognitions and Demands for Sovereignty

Simpson locates a Mohawk refusal to the multicultural assimilations through bestowed citizenships. This refusal is also in solidarity with the Iroquois sovereignty to reject the politics of recognition, which is the theoretical underpinning of her research.

Simpson explains political recognition to be "as one wants to be seen" (2014, 23). It stems from the Hegelian dialectic, where the slave can only be free until recognized reciprocally by the master, which Fanon elaborates to be a revolutionary force that releases the colonized from the subjugating gaze of the colonizer (1967). Modern interpretations of recognition further suggest that in refusing recognition, the subjugated subverts the gaze and asserts its own political will (Coulthard 2014; Povinelli 2002). In the Iroquois context, the political will ascends to national independence that refuses the "rationalizing dispossession" of migrant absorptions conducted by settler states. Mohawks construct their identities outside the scope of empires to be governed by "The Great Law of Peace – Gayanerekowa" (Simpson 2014, 25-28).

On the one hand, Canadian and U.S. Citizenships mean the passage of rights and protection and forceful allegiance to state laws. On the other hand, the indigenous refusal to citizenship opposes the implications of the Indian Act. This policy disrupts the blood quantum required for band memberships and exiled Mohawk women under patrilineal marriages. It also symbolizes the confiscations and appropriation of Mohawk lands such as the removal of the Kahnawà:ke lakefront to build the St. Lawrence Seaway (Simpson 2014, 50-55). Therefore, it is of great importance for the Mohawks to reclaim their cultural identity as brave people on the river tied together through matrilineal descents and escape the bureaucratic controls that subject them as status Indians under Canadian jurisdictions to be free and self-governing entities.

Ethnographic Refusal and Decolonized Anthropology

Simpson's ethnography is a political yet personal project of belonging. In addition to the historical archives of the structures of dispossessions and exclusions, Simpson described the present belongingness as a Mohawk herself who relates to the unarticulated and inexplicable feelings of an Iroquois national (2014, 109). This valuable emic perspective on Mohawk identities draws boundaries on her research practice, where she refuses the spectacularizing, pathologizing, and fatalistic attitudes that would freeze the Mohawks in the "cultural fetishization and timeless tradition" (2014, 112).

Theoretically, Simpson refuses the demonstrations of assimilability practiced by white anthropologists such as Franz Boas on marginalized cultures in racialized communities (Hitchens 1994, 240). Instead, she follows Said's power structure in the knowledge production of indigeneity (1994) and rejects the historical narratives of Mohawk identity posed by settler ethnologists. These ethnographic refusals arise from her personal refusals embodied in the exasperating border-crossing experiences. To persist as a self-identified Mohawk, Simpson had to unwillingly accept U.S. citizenship by birth to pass through borders (2014, 116-119). These experiences charge her epistemology of the depth to Mohawk refusals, which are convoluted with tolerance and compromise, making the demand for nested sovereignty within state borders most pronounced at the sites of state borders.

With Simpson's lived realities as a Mohawk, her ethnographical method is hyper-aware of the decolonized and desire-focused approach. Simpson's auto-ethnographical storytelling of indigenous histories subverts the colonizer’s perception of them and reclaims the indigenous authorship (Tuhiwai 2021, 33). Moreover, in these experiences, hopes and desires were profoundly honest. For example, Simpson discusses the women who suffered dismembering and incarceration to actively protest and petition during the Oka crisis and their relentless pursuit of national belonging. By shifting the center of writing away from the colonizer to the language of the colonized in action (Tuhiwai 2021, 40) and embedding the "complexity, contradiction and self-determination" required for a desire-focused framework (Tuck 2009, 416), Simpson achieved a decolonized anthropological endeavor.

Conclusion

Overall, Mohawk Interruptus is an ethnography on indigenous refusals to settler assimilations, which also displays ethnographic characters of refusals in its theoretical and methodical structure. Through the storytelling and experience of the colonized, Simpson presents the complexities of Mohawk agencies that actively identifies political recognitions and continuously denies them in nuance to insist on indigenous sovereignty.

 Works Cited

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin: White Masks. Boston: Grove Press.

Hitchens, Janine. 1994. Critical Implications of Franz Boas’ Theory and Methodology.  Dialectical Anthropology 19: 237-253.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Said, Edward. 1994. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus. Duke: Duke University Press.

Tuck, Eve. 2009. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review 79(3): 409-427.

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 2021. Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books. Pp 21-47.