Like the people of Kahnawake, Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus defies all constraints of simplification. Kahnawake, a Mohawk community just outside of Montreal, represents what Simpson calls a “nested sovereignty” (11), geographically, historically, and legally embedded in Canada yet nevertheless distinct. First and foremost, Kahnawake:ronon (people of Kahnawake) are sovereign. The primary avenue through which this sovereignty emerges is, according to Simpson, “refusal,” which manifests itself in shared historical memory, political demonstrations, and everyday practices (or non-practices) of the people. Refusal stands as a useful counterpoint to “recognition,” a core facet of Canadian multiculturalism (Taylor et al. Reference Taylor1994; see Povinelli Reference Povinelli2002 on the Australian case). With its focus on indigenous agency and everyday practices, refusal may be a more productive conceptual tool than is “resistance” in the study of how peoples engage, or choose not to engage, with normative impositions of settler colonialism, including but not limited to the state.

Reading the text, I found myself comparing it to Yael Navarro Yashin's now classic Faces of the State (Reference Navaro-Yashin2002). Like Yashin, Simpson simultaneously highlights a “political life,” hitting fluently on the most locally important expressions of national identity while integrating those expressions into a broader exploration of how states work.

After introducing the project in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 looks at ways in which Kahnawake:ronon situate themselves in relationship to one another as such. As Simpson shows, the implicit question of “who are you to me?” underlies how Kahnawake:ronon position one another in terms of shared identity and memory. This memory is inexorably tied to land; citing Alfred (Reference Alfred1995), Simpson looks to the roots of contemporary political consciousness in Kahnawake in the political and physical restructuring of the community with the imposition of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1957. Chapter 3 provides a critical history of scholastic engagement, or non-engagement, with the community. Kahnawake, founded as a Christian community with a history of including other indigenous populations, was ignored or denigrated by generations of “Iroquois Studies” scholars who were trying to identify and impose “tradition” upon what have always been dynamic populations. Kahnawake, not fitting the model established by Eli Parker and Lewis Henry Morgan, represented an outlier and challenge to subsequent scholarship.

This critique is expanded in Chapter 4, the briefest chapter yet the widest in scope. Simpson, drawing heavily on Said's Orientalism (Reference Said1994), suggests that anthropological discourses of indigeneity have been fundamentally structured by the aims and assumptions of settler colonialism. She positions her own work as a refusal of those narratives, one that attempts to “move away from cultural fetishization and timeless tradition into the ambit of politics and critique that Indigenous peoples are articulating” (112). Chapters 5 and 6 offer a wide-spanning consideration of that ambit of politics and critique. Chapter 5 emphasizes the Canada-U.S. border—both movement across it and trade that is framed by Canada as “smuggling”—as a key site for refusal. Mohawks, by refusing to cross “as” anything other than Mohawk, activate and articulate their rights, reifying their identity as autonomous of both Canada and the United States. Chapter 6 seeks to understand “the so-called Oka crisis” (34) through a lens of ongoing gendered violence structurally embedded in Canadian law and public discourse.

Simpson's prose is simultaneously engaging and densely layered. The rhizomic style is justified when she frames the volume as an act of refusal, though the text remains a challenging read. One criticism might be that Simpson's critique of ethnographic research could do more to speak to the wave of contemporary scholarship on political indigeneity over the past decade in which she herself has been a key player. Additionally, a couple of Simpson's arguments would benefit from more explicit consideration of regional and contextual variations in refusal. Simpson successfully demonstrates Kahnawake's unique history and politics, though her conclusions and evidence often extend to members of other Mohawk communities and other Iroquois persons. As she critiques anthropologists for letting the Seneca, as “ideal traditionalists” (my phrasing), speak for all of Iroquoia, parts of the volume, taken out of context, risk privileging some Kahnawake:ronon as “ideal sovereigntists.” While some Mohawks refuse a passport, and more or perhaps even most would do so if given the choice, the majority still do not. The penultimate chapter's pages on “feeling citizenship” (171–76) tease at but do not expand upon a consideration of the context in which people may refuse to refuse.

I have used the dissertation and articles which informed this book in my teaching for many years, and now assign Mohawk Interruptus to my students. It is an essential read for any study of settler colonialism, native/indigenous/first-nation studies, or the study of sovereignty, and also stands on its own as an important narrative of North America's ongoing colonial history.