Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.
Audra Simpson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is a coeditor, with Andrea Smith, of Theorizing Native Studies, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State 1
2. A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawà:ka 37
3. Constructing Kahnawà:ka as an "Out-of-the-Way" Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy 67
4. Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need 95
5. Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty 115
6. The Gender of the Flint: Mohawk Nationhood and Citizenship in the Face of Empire 147
Conclusion. Interruptus 177
Appendix. A Note on Materials and Methodology 195
Notes 201
References 229
Index 251
What People are Saying About This
Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West - Ned Blackhawk
"Few other works on contemporary Native American community politics are as wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated as Mohawk Interruptus. By examining many competing but linked understandings of Mohawk national identity, Audra Simpson exposes a uniquely Indigenous and Iroquoian conception of community that transcends national and ethnographic prescriptions of unitary and fixed social identities."
Taiaiake Alfred (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk)
"Mohawk Interruptus is Audra Simpso&ngrave;s bold challenge to the academic apprehension of the Iroquois. She has succeeded brilliantly. This book is now the authoritative history of Kahnawà:ke and a powerful statement that recasts our people and redefines how research on Indigenous peoples should be done. This is a long-awaited book by the most intelligent, passionate and incisive of Iroquois intellectuals. It makes me proud to be from Kahnawà:ke and deeply impresses me as a scholar."
Public Philosophy in a New Key, Two Volumes - James Tully
"This brilliant ethnographic and political study of how the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke live and enact their sovereign nationhood and refuse incorporation is a masterpiece. It challenges and transforms the way Indigenous politics is studied in Anthropology and Political Science and deserves the widest possible readership."
Taiaiake Alfred (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk)
"Mohawk Interruptus is Audra Simpson's bold challenge to the academic apprehension of the Iroquois. She has succeeded brilliantly. This book is now the authoritative history of Kahnawà:ke and a powerful statement that recasts our people and redefines how research on Indigenous peoples should be done. This is a long-awaited book by the most intelligent, passionate and incisive of Iroquois intellectuals. It makes me proud to be from Kahnawà:ke and deeply impresses me as a scholar."
