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Mohawk Interruptus

Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
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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 Kahnawa: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 Kahnawa: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.
Acknowledgments ix 1. Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State 1 2. A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and KahnawA:ka 37 3. Constructing KahnawA: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
"This brilliant ethnographic and political study of how the Mohawks of Kahnawa: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. " - James Tully, author of Public Philosophy in a New Key, Two Volumes
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