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Note the language of “shall” and become”: these formulations are both normative and future oriented and are premised upon the belief that the past shall be made dynamic by the demands of the present and the hopes of the future.

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

#audra simpson

Despite its racial undertones, [the] 'angry Indians' stereotype is useful for understanding what [American Indian Movement] was trying to accomplish and how they became criminalized for it. AIM consisted primarily of Natives 'off the reservation.' 'Off the reservation' is an American English idiom that took on murderous meaning with the creation of Indian reservations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase as meaning 'to deviate from what is expected or customary.' The expression is also current in military and political spheres to describe someone who defies orders, who is unpredictable and therefore ungovernable. Those who 'go off the reservation' are rogues or mavericks in military jargon—the ones who 'cross the wire' of military bases (called 'reservations') or enter hostile territory (called 'Indian Country'). For Natives, to 'go off the reservation' refers to those who historically refused reservation life or refused to respect its borders, where they could be contained and managed. Those willfully crossing borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or hostiles and were usually hunted down and summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned. It is no coincidence the phrase arose from the language of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the murderous consequences inflicted upon those who refused reservation life. In this way, to go 'off the reservation' is to question territory and sovereignty, and a political practice. To evoke Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, Native trespass into the domain of what is considered 'settled' territory calls into question the legitimacy of settlement—asserting that indeed it is anything but settled. In other words, Natives off the reservation are the unfinished business of settler colonialism—the ones who refused to disappear, refused to sell their land, and refused to quit being Indians.

Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

#indigenous studies #nick estes #our history is the future #settler colonialism #colonialism #US politics #US history #critical theory #stereotypes #politics #US imperialism #Audra Simpson #off the reservation #indigenous resistance #indigenous #indigeneity

Native American stories and voices have been long ignored by mainstream social culture. (April 19 2017)

“I think it’s in all of our best interests to take on gender violence as a core resurgence project, a core decolonization project, a core of any Indigenous mobilization…This begins for me by looking at how gender is conceptualized and actualized within Indigenous thought because it is colonialism that has imposed an artificial gender binary in my nation.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Despite our profound contributions to our own communities and the nation as a whole, Native American stories and voices have been long ignored by mainstream social culture. Native Americans—and Native American women, trans, and nonbinary folks in particular—face a unique set of oppressions, including the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism works to erase Indigenous people, both literally and culturally: from physical war and violence, to removal from lands, to forced assimilation. These histories continue to render Native Americans and Native issues nearly invisible to the national eye. Even within intersectional feminist discussions and organizing, I find myself thinking, where are the radical Indigenous feminists? Why are our stories not valued and our voices not more amplified?

This erasure may lull us into believing that there simply aren’t Indigenous feminists who are as prolific as Audre Lorde or Gloria Anzaldúa. But this is far from the truth. From Sydney Freeland, a Navajo filmmaker who focuses on stories about trans communities, to Sarah Deer, a Muscogee (Creek) lawyer fighting violence against Native women, these activists, writers, creators, and scholars fight for justice for Indigenous people and for the voices of their communities.

#indigenous women #indigenous people #lgbtqia #leanne betasamosake simpson #LaDonna Brave Bull Allard #Audra Simpson #Haunani Kay-Trask #Beatrice Medicine #Chrystos #Winona LaDuke #Sarah Deer #Beth Brant #Mishuana Goeman #suzan shown harjo #brenda child #SYDNEY FREELAND #nicole tanguay #leslie marmon silko #queue

Refusal holds on to a truth, structures this truth as stance through time, as its own structure and comingling with the force of presumed and inevitable disappearance and operates as the revenge of consent—the consent to these conditions, to the interpretation that this was fair, and the ongoing sense that this is all over with. When I deploy the term revenge, I am hailing historical consciousness... Revenge does not mean individuated harm inflicted on a perpetrator in a transaction that renders justice. In my usage here, I mean avenging a prior of injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present. This refusal to let go, to roll over, to play this game, points to its presumptive falsity of contractual thinking.

Audra Simpson, "Consent's Revenge." Cultural Anthropology 31.3 (2016, 330)

#audra simpson #simpson #consent's revenge #consent #revenge #refusal #resistance #settler colonialism #colonialism #recognition #anthropology #Mohawk #kahnawake #history #state #politics #political

Recognition is the gentler form, perhaps, or the least corporeally violent way of managing Indians and their difference, a multicultural solution to the settlers’ Indian problem. The desires and attendant practices of settlers get rerouted, or displaced, in liberal argumentation through the trick of toleration, of 'recognition,' the performance postconquest of 'seeing people as they ought to be seen,' as they see themselves—an impossible and also tricky beneficence that actually may extend forms of settlement through the language and practices of, at times, nearly impossible but seemingly democratic inclusion. This inclusion, or juridical form of recognition, is only performed, however, if the problem of cultural difference and alterity does not pose too appalling a challenge to norms of the settler society, norms that are revealed largely through law in the form of decisions over the sturdiness, vitality, and purity of the cultural alterity before it. This fixation on cultural difference and its purity occludes Indigenous sovereignty. Looking for 'culture' instead of sovereignty (and defining culture in particularly exclusionist, nineteenth-century ways) is a tricky move, as sovereignty has not in fact been eliminated. It resides in the consciousness of Indigenous peoples, in the treaties and agreements they entered into between themselves and others and is tied to practices that do not solely mean making baskets as your ancestors did a hundred years ago, or hunting with the precise instruments your great grandfather did 150 years ago, in the exact same spot he did as well, when witnessed and textualized by a white person.

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler Colonialism

#Indigenous Studies #audra simpson #mohawk interruptus #recognition #politics of recognition #settler colonialism #tolerance #politics #political theory #critical theory #sovereignty #culture

Ashton Deroy's review Mohawk Interruptus by Audra Simpson

Ashton Deroy’s review Mohawk Interruptus by Audra Simpson

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I am sorry but if it wasn’t for my complete ignorance in perception to Mohawk Political culture I wouldn’t of picked up this Political theory book. Admittedly had I known the contents of this book I would not have bought it. This is going to be less of a quantifiable reviewand more of an emotional review. Sometimes we flip the script and just get real on…

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“Theresa Spence’s appearance, her fleshy appearance, was itself a site of ire by commentators on-line, in twitter flame wars, and in print journalism. She was too fat! We heard in different ways, over and over again, to be sincere, to be what she was supposed to be, which was a person in starvation. Yet her “excess” flesh, flesh that exceeds the western, normative Body Mass Index (BMI) of under 25, itself defies a logic of genocide and in this, settler domination. Why this link between fat, her fat in particular, and a resistance or refusal of domination? Because what she is required to do, with or without the starvation, is die. In fact, the lives of all Indian women in Canada is an anomaly because since the 1870s they have been legally mandated to disappear, in various forms – either through the Indian Act’s previous instantiation of Victorian marriage rules whereby an Indian woman who married a non-Indian man lost her Indian status (her legal rights based identity) and as such her right to reside on her reserve. With this legal casting out was the casting out as well of the possibility of transmitting that status to her children, a loss as well of governmental power with Indigenous governance itself, the political form that her body and mind signified.”

#Audra Simpson