Audra Simpson is a Mohawk scholar from Kahnawake and a political anthropologist at Columbia University. Her work theorizes refusal as both a political practice and a methodological commitment — Indigenous peoples’ active declining of settler-colonial categories, borders, and knowledge-extraction.
Core ideas
- Refusal: the Mohawk practice of refusing Canadian and American citizenship, border regimes, and state-defined Indian identity is not mere non-participation but an assertion of Mohawk sovereignty. Refusal is generative: it creates political space that the settler state cannot govern.
- Nested sovereignty: Kahnawake exercises sovereignty within and against the settler states that claim jurisdiction over it, producing a condition of layered and contested authority that cannot be resolved on the settler state’s terms.
- Ethnographic refusal: as a methodological commitment, Simpson refuses to make all of her research legible to the academy, withholding knowledge that the community considers private. This challenges the extractive assumptions of social science research.
Significance for this research
Simpson’s theorization of refusal connects to the relational framework in its insistence that political subjects are constituted through their relationships — to land, to community, to the structures they refuse — rather than through the identities the state assigns them.
Notable works
- Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014)