Mohawk Interruptus: Life across the borders of settler states by Audra Simpson (review)

Reviewed by: Mohawk Interruptus: Life across the borders of settler states by Audra Simpson Robert Alexander Innes Mohawk Interruptus: Life across the borders of settler states By Audra Simpson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. As a graduate student in the 1980s, Nesha Haniff became aware of how the anthropological literature had characterized Third World women as oppressed and uneducated victims who served their men without question. As an insider to a community of women to whom these characterizations applied, Haniff did not agree with these assessments: I could not accept this picture. It was not that these things were untrue; they were simply incomplete. To me, women were not oppressed, they were powerful; they were not weak, they were strong; and they were not abject, they were assertive. Why was it that a science aimed at discovering the truth was not discovering what I and others felt and saw when it was writing about us? The literature subliminally correlated low status with low self-concept.1 Haniff’s own experiences led her to pose new research questions for the study of Third World women. Insider researchers have a much different relationship with and perspective on the research group than outsider researchers. With the number of Indigenous researchers increasing in the past decade, it is not surprising many are conducting research into their home communities and that they find a disconnect between the academic literature and the lived experiences of people in their communities. The insights insider researchers possess allow them to develop unique research questions “that challenge preconceived notions of the group and expand scholarly understanding of the subject.”2 As an insider researcher, Audra Simpson, in her book Mohawk Interruptus: Life across the borders of settler states, asks the kinds of questions that provide a new perspective of the Kahnawá:ke Mohawks to demonstrates the extent to which they are engaged in the politics of refusal, while simultaneously shining light on how anthropological research has been complicit in state-sanctioned settler colonialism. Simpson’s main contention is that the Haudenosaunee in general, and Kahnawá:ke specifically, have engaged in a prolonged and continued process of refusing various colonial impositions from the Canadian and American governments and that these refusals underscore Haudenosaunee assertion of nationhood. Simpson encapsulates the “politics of refusal” by outlining how the people of Kahnawá:ke continue to express their sense of a nation by identifying themselves as Mohawk rather than Canadian, by resisting encroachments onto their lands and imposed external governing structures. However, the main focus of Simpson’s book is centred on the politics of refusal involving Kahnawá:ke’s ongoing and controversial issue of defining membership based on a 50 per cent blood quantum. How does a citizen and member of Kahnawá:ke conduct research into an issue that has garnered much publicity and has caused much tension within her community? How does she do this in way that is respectful to people in her community that are on either side of the debate, while at the same time maintaining scholarly rigor? She does this by placing the issue within the proper context of settler colonialism. For Simpson the academic literature of Mohawks is linked to not only the way in which non-Indigenous people view them, and other Indigenous people, which in turns informs policy, but also to the way in which Mohawks have responded to these ideas in attempts to preserve their sense of themselves as a distinct people. Simpson provides a careful analysis of how, from the inception of Henry Lewis Morgan and Ely Parker’s friendship, the anthropological imagination has influenced the study and perceptions of the Haudenosaunee. Simpson shows that the recording of the anthropologically “pure” Haudenosaunee culture was the basis for the creation of the state conceptions of “jurisdictional authority and legitimacy” over the Haudenosaunee. The anthropologists’ “inventive process” to reinterpret Haudenosaunee cultural traditions, as Simpson states, is “the textual inheritance of the Iroquois, and the dominant space for perceiving their actions and… Iroquois engagement with each other and with the state” (92). Simpson describes the Haudenosaunee of the anthropological imagination as reflecting and continuing to reflect settler notions of Indigenous difference that are then further...

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