Mohawk Interruptus

In Chapter 4, “Ethnographic Refusal,” Simpson outlines the history of anthropology in its relationship to colonialism. “These techniques of knowing were predicated upon a profound need, as the distributions in power and possibility that made Empire also made for the heuristic and documentary requirements of an ecclesiastical, metropolitan, and administrative readership.” These representations of people, as stories of difference “were required for governance, but also so that those in the metropole might know themselves in a way that fit with the global processes under way” (95).

We see these same processes at play in the late twentieth century, as sociology promulgated the “culture of poverty,” and social work engaged in client surveillance via casework and streetwork. While African-American and Latino communities were the focus of the “culture of poverty,” Southern white migrants were widely characterized as problematic “hillbillies.” The ongoing identification of difference in these (migrant) communities not only determined social service provisions, but also shaped the approaches of social workers and VISTA volunteers, whose primary goal was to “help” clients assimilate.

When Simpson explains that anthropological discourses if indigeneity are structured by the aims of settler colonialism—eliminate Indigenous people, absorb them into a white, property-owning body politic (8)—can I make the same claim about social work in the time and place of my project, and is that a methodology?

In “A Note on Materials and Methodology,” I was initially disturbed that Simpson had to explain that she “did everything” she “could do to not make people uncomfortable or to jeopardize their sense of safety, their well-being, and their self-consciousness” (198). Shouldn’t that always be the goal? Although, that probably didn’t occur to me often enough when interviewing sources as a journalist, and archival research is so far removed from the interpersonal, in both time and space. As a historian, how do I employ an “ethical barometer”? Do I have an equal responsibility to all of my subjects, or just those who I perceive as being oppressed?

I was also drawn to Simpson’s assertion that her “engagements did not allow in any way for a proprietary or possessive stance with regard to narrating Mohawk life” (198). I will need to be mindful of this, not just to avoid perpetuating the views of those writing about my subjects, but in not developing a new set of erroneous perceptions. It is once again clear that an oral history component that allows my subjects to construct their past selves will be necessary, in order to “respect and honor the individual privacy of people and the ethics of collective representation within deeply asymmetrical fields of power” (198).