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Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition

Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States Audra Simpson, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.Audra Simpson's book, Mohawk Interruptus, is an achievement of scholarship. It delivers what it promises, has a strong authorial voice that is both in keeping with rigorous academic prose and that is easily understandable by a wide readership. Her examples are rich, engaging, and accessible. She combines sophisticated theoretical analysis with rich ethnographic detail, making for a challenging but enjoyable read. Her stories, I imagine, would resonate with individuals inside and outside the communities she renders visible, quite deliberately foregrounding her ethical relation to the Mohawks of Kahnawa:ke. The stories she shares are clear, poignant, respectful, and at times simultaneously humorous and horrifying. Simpson seemingly effortlessly weaves her own embodied subjectivity, with rich ethnography, political theory, and compelling narrative in this excellent, robust, and nuanced study.Simpson makes three claims in this book: (1) "sovereignty may exist within sovereignty," and that such nested sovereignty has implications for the seemingly settled conditions of settler colonialism (p. 10-11); (2) there exists an alternative to "recognition" which is "refusal"; (3) hitherto this point, and as a result of their Western, institutional, and statist forms of analysis (p. 11), neither political theory nor anthropology have offered the conceptual tools required to make sense of Indigenous politics and their challenge to settler colonialism (p. 177). Simpson makes Mstrong arguments to support these claims throughout the book, presenting interruption and refusal as political forms and strategies, ultimately achieving what she sets out to do. Throughout her work, Simpson offers some compelling conceptual tools that launch a rigorous challenge to historical and contemporary forms of anthropology.Using the three signposts of "membership" (p. 13), "detention and recognition" (p. 18), and "refusing to play the game" (p. 25), Simpson deftly navigates the reader through her argument. Her argument builds methodically, and for this reason I structure my review in a way that mirrors the arc of her argumentation. She first maps a genealogy of history and context to orient the reader, she admits in a partial and event-driven way, to Kahnawa:ke (Chapter 2). She does this particularly to signal that the territorial history shapes the complex questions of membership that she later tracks throughout the monograph. This context is essential to her third claim: to make sense of the complexities of membership in Indigenous communities, conceptual tools that account for histories of colonialism and the ongoing dispossession upon which settler states are premised and maintained are required.Simpson moves to construct her ethnography of refusal (Chapter 4), arguing that if "we take this historical form of ethnological representation into account, we might then be able to come up with techniques of representation that move away from 'difference' and its containment, from the ethnological formalism and fetishism" (p. 97) that she describes in Chapter 3. In her articulation of ethnographic refusal, Simpson offers both a theoretical and experiential ethics of refusal in her writing, indicating her purposeful inclusion and refusal in the context of ongoing dispossession and colonialism. This is a deeply political and ethical move, in keeping with the refusals and interruptions that she documents throughout the monograph. This refusal is buttressed by her exploration of the "ethnographic limit" of her research and writing, punctuated by her questions to herself that guide the arrival at enough: "Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? …

Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States

Reviewed Medium: book
 Authors: Julie Cruikshank
 Year: 2005
 Pages: 288
 Publisher: University of Washington Press
 ISBN: $25.00 USD (hard cover). Prices: 0-7748-1186-2(hard cover).

Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination

At first blush, it seems a very long reach from the aboriginal hunting camps of the Kluane in Canada’s Yukon wilderness to the poststructuralist environs of modern French philosophy. Yet a careful reading of Paul Nadasdy’s prodigious new work of contemporary ethnography reveals that geographically, culturally, and philosophically the distance involved is much less than might be expected. On the basis of three years of intimate fieldwork in the Kluane aboriginal nation’s main settlement of Burwash Landing, Nadasdy shows that the much-lauded land claims and treaty processes in Canada are, in fact, double-edged swords. The modes of thought, discourse, and organization required by these processes frequently do more to accomplish the erosion of cultural sovereignty than they do to protect or enhance it. Nadasdy starts by questioning the widely held assumption that the state is the monolithic structure its critics (and sometimes its proponents) imagine it to be. This allows him to discuss the complexities of state–nation interactions in the southwest Yukon in interesting ways. He can acknowledge, for example, the genuine concern many bureaucrats have for the well-being of wildlife and for the cultural and political integrity of the Kluane nation while simultaneously calling attention to the dangers for native people inherent to the land claims and treaty negotiations processes. This tactic is not, however, without its perils, as we shall see. Nadasdy stands in a scholarly tradition in ethnography that is best represented, perhaps, by Hugh Brody’s landmark Maps and Dreams or Bruce Chatwin’s slightly earlier. The Songlines, both of which are products of intensive participation in aboriginal communities; the former in Canada, the latter

Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal–State Relations in the Southwest Yukon

Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean WorldsMarisol de la CadenaDurham and London:Duke University Press, 2015. 315 pp.

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Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds

Indigenous peoples often view water as a living entity or a relative, to which they have a sacred responsibility. Such a perspective frequently conflicts with settler societies’ view of water as a ...

Jody Inkster

Papers

Respecting water: Indigenous water governance, ontologies, and the politics of kinship on the ground:

Community-Based Monitoring as the practice of Indigenous governance: A case study of Indigenous-led water quality monitoring in the Yukon River Basin.