Mohawk Interruptus

“What does it mean to refuse a passport…What does this refusal do to politics, to sense, to reason” (p. 1)? Simpson’s one of the main arguments of the book is “sovereignty may exist within sovereignty” (p. 10). Mohawks view themselves as “nationals of a precontact Indigenous polity” other than the U.S. or Canada, although the Canadian and the U.S governments deny them these political actions (p. 2). Simpson's work is placed between anthropology and political science. She criticizes that neither anthropology and political science had accounted the politics and cultural authenticity of Indigenous peoples. Westernized and institutional disciplines of political science fail to examine the forces of colonialism, and anthropology studies exclusively examine Indigenous people in "an ahistorical and depoliticized sense” (p. 11). The author examines the tension between sovereignty practices with the concepts membership and citizenship. Membership entails "formal recognition by Mohawk Council of Kahnawake," while "citizenship entails a complex social belongings, of family, of intracommunity recognition and responsibility” (p. 188).

The distinctive recognition/feeing or refusal of membership or citizenship is interesting, although there is overlap between membership and citizenship (p. 188). Both membership and citizenship are imageries, but citizenship is particularly constructed with a sense of political empowerment, political efficacy and social trust. The author examines why these forms of recognition are "at play for some and not for others” (p. 189), and led me to think social and historical conditions that create people who feel only membership, not citizenship.

Questions

The author turned off her recorder or did not write up notes when her interlocutors asked to do so or when the author thought that things they were explaining "might jeopardize them or diminish the claims of others" (p. 198). I wonder how authenticity are established in a process of textual production in ethnographic projects. Should ethnographers place field notes or interview data (narratives created in real time) at the core of the project or more reliance on their writing process (rewrite and reconstruct these narratives)?