Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States - Softcover

Simpson, Audra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356554 ISBN 13: 9780822356554

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

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 Kahnawą: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 Kahnawą: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.

About this title

About the Author

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.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mohawk Interruptus

Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

By Audra Simpson

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5655-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
CHAPTER ONE - Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State, 
CHAPTER TWO - A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawą:ke, 
CHAPTER THREE - Constructing Kahnawą:ke as an "Out-of-the-Way" Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy, 
CHAPTER FOUR - Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need, 
CHAPTER FIVE - Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty, 
CHAPTER SIX - The Gender of the Flint: Mohawk Nationhood and Citizenship in the Face of Empire, 
CONCLUSION - Interruptus, 
APPENDIX - A Note on Materials and Methodology, 
NOTES, 
REFERENCES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Indigenous Interruptions

Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State

Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from somewhere else. The story of immigrants in America isn't a story of them. It's a story of us.... For just as we remain a nation of laws, we have to remain a nation of immigrants.

—US President Barack Obama, July 4, 2012

We are representing a nation, and we are not going to travel on the passport of a competitor.

—Tonya Gonella Frichner, Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team spokesperson and negotiator, World Lacrosse Championships, July 19, 2010

What does it mean to refuse a passport—what some consider to be a gift or a right, the freedom of mobility and residency? What does it mean to say no to these things, or to wait until your terms have been met for agreement, for a reversal of recognition, or a conferral of rights? What happens when we refuse what all (presumably) "sensible" people perceive as good things? What does this refusal do to politics, to sense, to reason? When we add Indigenous peoples to this question, the assumptions and the histories that structure what is perceived to be "good" (and utilitarian goods themselves) shift and stand in stark relief. The positions assumed by people who refuse "gifts" may seem reasoned, sensible, and in fact deeply correct. Indeed, from this perspective, we see that a good is not a good for everyone.

The Mohawks of Kahnawą:ke are nationals of a precontact Indigenous polity that simply refuse to stop being themselves. In other words, they insist on being and acting as peoples who belong to a nation other than the United States or Canada. Their political form predates and survives "conquest"; it is tangible (albeit strangulated by colonial governmentality) and is tied to sovereign practices. This architecture is not fanciful; it is in place because the Mohawks of Kahnawą:ke share a genealogical kinship relationship with other native peoples in North America and they know this. They refuse to let go of this knowledge. In fact, they enact this knowledge through marriage practices, political engagements, and the way they live their lives. Their genealogical and political connectedness is part of a covenant—the decision-making Iroquois Confederacy called Haudenosaunee—which is made up of clans that spread across territory. As Indigenous peoples they have survived a great, transformative process of settler occupation, and they continue to live under the conditions of this occupation, its disavowal, and its ongoing life, which has required and still requires that they give up their lands and give up themselves.

What is the self that I speak of that they will not give up? The course of this book will unpack this for us, but most commonly that self is conflated with the figure of the ironworker and understood, in largely celebratory terms, through this image. Ironworkers are (usually) men who put up the infrastructure for skyscrapers, bridges, and all sorts of other large-scale construction jobs all over the United States and Canada, but Kahnawą:ke labor is most associated with cities in the northeastern United States. They are famous for traveling from Kahnawą:ke on Sunday night to get to New York City (or Buffalo, or Ithaca, or as far as Detroit) by Monday morning. This is a life of difficult, dangerous labor, and intense travel, and a life that returns, the literature of various sorts tells us, back to the "reserve" as much as the job and drive time can allow. In his very popular New Yorker piece, Joseph Mitchell started his article on ironwork and Kahnawą:ke in the following way: "The most footloose Indians in North America are a band of mixed-blood Mohawks whose home, the Caughnawaga Reservation, is on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec" (1959).

This popular notion of the ironworking Mohawk, specifically from Kahnawą:ke, will not be lost because it is tied up with capital and the material reproduction of the community as well as postindustrial skylines. But much of this book charts out the other labor that these people have undertaken and still undertake to maintain themselves in the face of a force that is imperial, legislative, ideological, and territorial and that has made them more than men who walk on beams. Their masculinized labor on iron matters to them, and to others, and I suspect will continue to matter as long as there is a market for construction. Yet the community is more than that form of labor can signal.

This community is now a reservation, or "reserve," located in what is now southwestern Quebec, a largely Francophone province in Canada. It is a reserved territory of approximately 18.55 miles. However, it belongs to people who have moved through the past four hundred years from the Mohawk Valley in what is now New York State to the northern part of their hunting territory—partially where they are now. Present-day Kahnawą:ke was a seigniorial land grant that became a reserve held in trust for the use and benefit of these "footloose" mixed-blood Mohawks—Mohawks, who, I will demonstrate through the course of this book, are not "mixed blood." In fact, they are Indigenous nationals of a strangulated political order who do all they can to live a political life robustly, with dignity as Nationals. In holding on to this, they interrupt and fundamentally challenge stories that have been told about them and about others like them, as well as the structure of settlement that strangles their political form and tries to take their land and their selves from them. As with all Indigenous people, they were supposed to have stepped off the beam that they walked on and plummeted to the ground several times through the course of their historical lives. Staying on top of a beam has involved effort and labor that extends beyond even the hard work of putting up steel. Since the time of Lewis Henry Morgan, this is the labor of living in the face of an expectant and a foretold cultural and political death. As such it is the hard labor of hanging on to territory, defining and fighting for your rights, negotiating and maintaining governmental and gendered forms of power.

Much of this labor I am talking about is tied up with a care for and defense of territory—so I will tell you first about this place and its institutions. If one desires a sociological sketch, the community has, as a federally recognized First Nation, accepted transfer funds from the government of Canada to build these institutions; other times they are completely self-funded. There is a Band Council, or "tribal government"; an in-patient hospital; a community services center with an economic development office; a bank with tellers; an ATM; a post office. Thus they have their own postal code, a sports arena, an Elders Lodge, a police force with a negotiated power to issue warrants and tickets for arrest (The Kahnawą:ke Peacekeepers). They have an AAA junior hockey team (the Condors), online gaming, an adult male lacrosse team (the Kahnawake Mohawks), a community court, grocery stores (two with fresh produce and a butcher), gas stations, golf courses, two children's schools, a middle school, a high school (the Kahnawą:ke Survival School), a Catholic church, a Protestant church, two Longhouses, between five to ten sit-down restaurants, an Internet provider, a bilingual (Mohawk-English) TV station, a radio station, an offshore gaming host site (Mohawk Internet Technologies), poker houses, smoke shacks, cigarette manufacturing factories, a bingo hall, a tae kwon do gym, poker houses, a fabulous restaurant to get mixed drinks: "The Rail." There is a funeral home, a bakery shop, an education center, an optometrist with expensive, designer frames. There is a flower shop; antique stores; a shop that sells hypoallergenic and handcrafted soaps and bath salts; craft shops that sell moccasins, blankets, and objects for community members and tourists. In its economic past, there have been chip stands (selling French fries and pickled eggs) lining the highway, a dance hall, pizza parlor, a taco stand, beloved and now closed convenience stores such as Evelyn's, sit-down and takeout restaurants such as Rabaska's—closed due to fire and mourned as the passing of truly great pizza. There was a great bookstore, Mohawk Nation Books. The one public, coin-operated telephone is defunct but still in front of Rabaska's, on Highway 120, which connects Kahnawą:ke to Chateauguay, the south shore of Montreal and routes leading to the United States and north into Montreal and beyond, Oka, Quebec City, and so forth.

Indeed, there are many ironworkers, along with office workers; teachers; band councilors (called "chiefs" by the Indian Act); scholars; three lawyers; one professional, retired hockey player; at least two who were semipro; many lacrosse players; fast-pitch softball players; two Olympians; several journalists (and two award-winning newspapers); musicians; filmmakers (two specifically are documentarians); actors; actresses; two former professional wrestlers, one who has now passed (his son is a conductor). There are people on social assistance and people who refuse social assistance and medical coverage because they do not recognize Canada. There are veterans of every branch of the US armed forces, veterans of every war or conflict the United States has been in, even though this is on the Canadian side of the International Boundary Line. There are also veterans of the Canadian armed forces, members of the traditional Warrior Society who were en pointe during the "Oka Crisis," clan mothers, traditional people who live according to the precepts of the Kaianere'kó:wa, or Great Law of Peace, only. I have interviewed one person (out of thirty-six) who voted in a Canadian election. The Catholic Church at Kahnawą:ke houses the partial, bodily remains of the "first" Mohawk saint, and second Indigenous saint in church history, the blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, who was canonized in 2012.

That is the institutional face of the reserve. Its geographical limits are marked by two steel crosses, illuminated at night, that commemorate the passing of thirty-three (out of ninety-six) ironworkers who fell to their deaths when the Victoria bridge collapsed in 1907. There is now another memorial to their passing. The riverfront of this community was expropriated by an order in Canadian Parliament in 1954 to construct a seaway that would facilitate commercial transport from the Port of Montreal to Lake Erie through the construction of a "deep draft waterway" through the St. Lawrence River, so it seems today as if ocean liners and freights move through it or in front of it or in back of the reserve, depending on how you see things. There is a train bridge that cuts through the reserve and over it along with the Mercier Bridge. This is a bridge that is perpetually under construction—travel on it is slow, tedious, and feels dangerous as it is decrepit. It connects this reserve to Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River and the aforementioned seaway. You can drive to Chateauguay in the opposite direction in five to ten minutes. When traffic is right you can get to LaSalle (Montreal) in 10, downtown Montreal in 15, and Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in 20 minutes to 25 minutes; Vermont in 2 hours; Plattsburgh, New York, in 1.5 hours; Oka or Kanehsatą:ke, in 2 hours; Ahkwesįhsne in 1 hour; Toronto in 4 to 5 hours; New York City in 6 to 8 hours; and Ithaca, New York, as I did regularly for three years, in 6.5 hours. There are people who have walked the train bridge to Lachine, took boats to cross the seaway to Montreal.

As with the territorial body that was just described, the content of the corporeal bodies that inhabit and care for the place, are also crossed by markers and other histories of intent. With settler colonialism came "reservationization" and a radical shift in Indigenous diets and their bodies. As a result their blood is excessively "sweet" and has a high prevalence of diabetes—a bodily indicator of these spatial and dietary transitions. Rates in Kahnawą:ke are high, and there are people who have had to have their toes and sometimes their feet and legs removed (Montour, Macaulay, and Adelson 1989). There is an aggressive campaign to educate the community on the perils of obesity and the importance of nutrition and exercise in order to prevent and control this condition (Potvin et al. 2003). Nonetheless, "bad carbs" have a great taste and take a traditional turn on Sundays, when it is common to make the savory, filling, sleep-inducing meal "cornbread and steak." This is cornbread bathed in thick gravy, sometimes served with sausages as well as or in place of steak. Long before the Internet, you could find people reading the New York Post or the New York Daily News in restaurants, on porches. One woman used to ask me to bring her the New York Times from the city, and when I lived in Montreal, I brought it for her from "Multimags" whenever I came home. Older women tend to wear their hair in tight, short perms, and speak in Mohawk; ironworkers retire, go home, and amble arthritically and from the looks painfully behind their wives. My earliest memories of Kahnawą:ke were of my own grandmother, the late Margaret K. Diabo (née Phillips) fixing people's bones in her kitchen and switching back and forth from English and Mohawk with everyone who came into her home. She spoke this way with the man I call my grandfather, Eddie "Cantor" Diabo, who switches back and forth from Mohawk to English to everyone, whether they are Indian or not. Most emphatically, it seems, when there is talk of the Boston Bruins or the border. Ten percent of the community now speaks Mohawk, but there is an aggressive campaign to educate everyone to speak the language. There is an adult immersion program with a graduating class of approximately fifteen to twenty people every year. There is a Catholic cemetery and a Protestant cemetery, and traditional people are buried according to Longhouse custom. There is also a pet cemetery. There are no addresses.

For those who are familiar with reserves, this sociological and historical sketch is both familiar and very different. There are no traplines mentioned; nor is there an emphasis or mention even of commodity cheese or of exorbitant poverty. There are institutions, professionals, the righteous.... There is a lot that goes unsaid.... There are those who drive "hummers" and gas guzzlers, Cadillacs, and Volkswagens; people who ride bikes or jog; young mothers who walk with strollers; one man who pushes a cart with great purpose every day in warm weather. There are highways, paved roads, train tracks, two bridges that cut through and connect this community to every place, if you want. There is relentless discussion of how things should be, relentless critique and engagement about what some would call "politics," of again, how things are, how they should be. There are unprompted, monologic "state of the nation" addresses. All of this exceeds the simplified figure of the ironworker. And yes, there are a lot of ironworkers there and, now, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. But the story that I am telling in this book is of a place and people through time and their labor to live a good life and, in this, their imperative to live upon and move through their territory in the teeth of constraint—constraint of various forms but that we may gloss as settler colonialism. Although ironwork is a part of their story, one that we all seem to like and admire, other things I will talk and not talk about are less easy to like, such as refusal.

Like many other Iroquois people, the Mohawks of Kahnawą:ke refuse to walk on some beams, and through this gesture they refuse to be Canadian or American. They refuse the "gifts" of American and Canadian citizenship; they insist upon the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance. Moreover, some in this study answer only to that governmental authority. So the bestowal of settler citizenship has been received with a certain "awkwardness" if not outright refusal—a refusal to vote, to pay taxes, to stop politically being Iroquois. The language that this book uses to tell this story of refusal is the language that people use to talk about themselves. They speak in terms of nationhood, which stages a fundamental difficulty given that "Indigenous" and "nation" are two terms that seem incommensurable. "Indigenous" is embedded conceptually in a geographic alterity and a radical past as the Other in the history of the West. Although seemingly unable to be both things at once, the Mohawks of Kahnawą:ke strive to articulate these modalities as they live and move within a territorial space that is overlaid with settler regimes that regulate or circumscribe their way of life. Their struggle with the state is manifest in their ongoing debate and discussion around a membership law within their community. This registers as a conflict and a crisis, as something eventful rather than structural. My argument is that it is a sign, also, of colonialism's ongoing existence and simultaneous failure. Colonialism survives in a settler form. In this form, it fails at what it is supposed to do: eliminate Indigenous people; take all their land; absorb them into a white, property-owning body politic. Kahnawą:ke's debates over membership index colonialism's life as well its failure and their own life through their grip on this failure.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822356554
• ISBN 13: 9780822356554
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280