Audra Simpson | The Challenge of Ethnic Fraud to Indigenous Citizenship: A View from Haudenosaunee Territory

Please join us on March 5 for the final Property, Territory, and Sovereignty on Indigenous Land workshop meeting of the winter quarter. We are delighted and honored to be hosting Professor Audra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk), known for her far-reaching and fundamental contributions to Indigenous studies, anthropology, and ethnographic methods. Her landmark first text Mohawk Interruptus is now in its thirteenth printing, a testament to its enduring significance, alongside the numerous awards that it has won. 

In 1924, the Snyder Act conferred citizenship to Native peoples in what is now the United States. This was not universally embraced across Indian Country as some Nations view themselves as sovereign entities. Using the near 101st anniversary of the act as a prompt, this paper examines what the false claim to Indigenous relationality/belonging/”identity” means in the context of an already contested idiom of Indigenous citizenship. Many are now rightfully preoccupied with a question of ethics and mechanics, “how does one who stands outside of Indigenous kinship and relationships to land and water render themselves a relative to those orders/political philosophies and knowledge?” But there is a more contextual question about each nation that is claimed and their political and legal histories that is submerged within settler states and remains outside of these discussions. Confusion, or ignorance of these histories has allowed for significant confusion about who Native people are. A consistent theme taken up by frauds themselves are their own, profound and retrospectively stunning lack of understanding of those histories and their actual family history. This paper will focus upon one admitted fraud who has publicly apologized to “those effected by” their presumed lack of knowledge about themself and their family, and will place that move into a deeper context of Haudenosaunee history and law in New York State.

Note: Attendance is limited to 30 registrants.