Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson (review)

AUDRA SIMPSON is a prominent and influential scholar in North American Indigenous studies circles. Her book, Mohawk Interruptus, was recently voted “Best First Book Published in 2014” by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and after reading it I can understand why. The book begins with the question “What does it mean to refuse . . . ?” (1). This is not a presupposition to something glib, but rather serves to intensely guide the book through the thick and thin of Indigenous postcolonial life. Most strikingly, Simpson refuses to curtail to the Western academic will toward thesis and antithesis (to sense, to reason), which almost inevitably, when “studying” Indigenous communities, equates to the binary of the noble and ignoble savage. That is, scholars, including Indigenous scholars, all too often either vilify Indigenous communities (principally via veiled and not so veiled discourses of pathology) or romanticize Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The latter can be the most violent because it simultaneously excludes alternative ways of being Indigenous. While not relenting in her attack on the false presuppositions of the settler nation (particularly in relation to the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke), Simpson refuses to enter simply into the colonizer/colonized binary; as she continuously points out to the reader, the Indigenous life is far too complex, meaningful, and not dead to be merely the Other in Hegel’s “system of mutuality”: “The Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke are nationals of a precontact Indigenous polity that simply refuse to stop being themselves” (2).

In the way that Simpson uses it, “refusal” should not be mistaken for nihilism—far from it. Rather, refusal is the will not to be contained within discourses that enunciate the “expectant death” of Indigenous communities, the already parched fate. This refusal, thus, reflects an Indigenous academic labor in the “defense of territory,” as land, as corporeality, as metaphysicality. This voice of defiance, however, does not equate to veiling those problematics that plague Indigenous communities. Simpson tackles issues such as the politics of community membership (who are you?), formal recognition, residency, on-reserve/off-reserve, urbanism, hetero-patriarchy, the artifacts of colonial law, borders, mobility, and the governance of Indigenous communities by councils, for instance, enabled by the Indian Act. Underpinning many of these yet to be resolved (or irresolvable) complexities is the notion of “sovereignty within an imposed sovereignty,” highlighted by the subsurface “fact” that the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke are partially federally funded, yet also more profoundly revealed in the assertion of settler precariousness as a symptom of the Mohawk refusal to be recognized or to relinquish a system of being, which predates occupation.

Chapter 1, “Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State,” outlines the complex spatial and corporeal configurings on the Kahnawà:ke reserve via “signposts” of membership, detention and recognition, and sovereignty (as opposed to recognition). In chapter 2, Simpson presents “A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquois and Kahnawà:ke” as a modern history of struggles for Kahnawa’kehró:non. The clear intent here is to rebuff the pathological colonial discourses that serve to make victims of Indigenous peoples and/or to preserve them as relics for anthropological study. Chapter 3, “Constructing Kahnawà:ke as an ‘Out-of-the-Way’ Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy,” reviews an anthropological genealogy of Iroquois politics, revealing a fetish for tradition, purity, and containment that, Simpson suggests, the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke refused to be defined by. In chapter 4, “Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need,” Simpson lays the groundwork for a methodology that negates the power of research imperatives produced by the neoliberal academy, in this case, via the subjection of Indigenous peoples. Simpson’s ethnography of refusal quite simply rejects the will of the Western Enlightenment desire to violently translate Indigenous knowledge through its own taxonomy. Chapter 5, “Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty,” narrates a history of misrecognition and refusal to relinquish, which intimately reveals the importance of movement and mobilization to precolonial and...