Refusal is the practice of declining to participate in structures that require the colonized to make themselves legible to the colonizer on the colonizer’s terms. It is a political act, not mere withdrawal or silence. Audra Simpson (Mohawk, Kahnawake) develops the concept in Mohawk Interruptus (2014), documenting how Mohawk people refuse the categories of Canadian and American citizenship, border regimes, and state-defined “Indian” identity — not because they are unaware of these structures but because participation in them would confirm the sovereignty they contest.
Refusal operates at multiple scales. It can be individual (declining to answer a census question, refusing to carry a state-issued passport) or collective (a nation refusing to participate in a treaty process it considers illegitimate). In research contexts, refusal means Indigenous communities declining to be studied, declining to share knowledge that will be extracted and recontextualized, declining to produce the “data” that settler institutions demand. Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” (2009) argues that research on Indigenous and marginalized communities has overwhelmingly served the researcher’s career and the colonizer’s knowledge apparatus, and that refusal of this extraction is itself a form of sovereignty.
Refusal is generative, not merely negative. By refusing settler categories, Indigenous peoples create space for their own governance, knowledge, and practice to operate without being filtered through colonial frameworks. This connects to Indigenous resurgence: refusal clears space; resurgence fills it.