Do you consent to the lawful theft of your land? That is Audra Simpson’s question, and it is why some Mohawk refuse citizenship, voting, and paying taxes — because participating would move them out of their own sovereignty. Her further claim is that North America is not postcolonial at all (387), because they never left and the natives never disappeared. For The History of Anthropological Thought, after starting the section “On Agency,” we finish with two readings on struggle and refusal. For broader context see the Power Analysis hub.
- Yarimar Bonilla & Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States” (2015)
- Audra Simpson, “Consent’s Revenge” (2016)
Key Concepts
- Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus concerns territory spanning the US–Canada border, where free passage on tribal papers was already complicated and became more so after COVID.
- The band council’s evictions turned on a 50% blood quantum requirement — and blood quantum is itself a settler colonialist measure, kin to the one-drop rule used to assign people to socially inferior status.
- Most anthropologists would write the internal politics: how these ideas arose, who is doing this, what power relations are involved, leadership versus community members.
- Simpson, a member of the community, refuses that frame. What mattered were deliberate, willful, intentional actions taken against the expectation that people consent to their own elimination.
- The games refused include citizenship, voting, and paying taxes — participation would move Mohawks out of their own sovereignty into settler citizenship and into “the promise of whiteness.”
- Simpson refuses methodologically too, declining to be the “thick description prose master” whose florid detail outsiders would read as evidence of people not doing what they should.
- Refusal “holds on to a truth, structures this truth as set through time as its own structure, and co-mingling with the force of presumed and inevitable disappearance, operates as the revenge of consent” — not individual harm, but avenging a prior injustice and marking its ongoing life.
- Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa show Ferguson recontextualized as global: #Egypt #Palestine #Ferguson #Turkey, and “US-made tear gas, sold on the almighty free market, represses democracy” (382).
Mohawk Interruptus and the Border
Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States concerns an area not far from us in New York — one that spans a national border and several provinces and states. People there are supposed to have free passage between those places on their own tribal papers. It has been complicated for a long time, and it became more complicated after COVID. This is a real issue, close by.
“Consent’s Revenge” is her reflection on that book, and it opens on a curious situation: the band council was evicting non-native people from the community, evictions of a piece with a 50% blood quantum requirement for membership.
There are a couple of strange things there at once. Blood quantum is itself a settler colonialist idea — a very American one, used to measure race. In the United States it classified people as African American or Black, most famously through southern classifications based on the one-drop rule, or one grandparent, or one great-grandparent, all of which assigned people to socially inferior status. And for Indigenous people in the United States, a 50% threshold is a high bar. It would exclude a great many community members.
What Would an Anthropologist Say?
Suppose you went into this community to do an ethnography. People are being evicted; a blood quantum requirement is vigorously debated, contested, embraced, defended. What would you describe?
You would want to explain how it happened — where these ideas about blood quantum and membership came from, who is driving them, what power relations are involved. Most anthropologists would write about the complexity and the internal politics, the gap between what leadership is doing and what community members are up to. That is the shape of Delmos Jones’s work on studying one’s own community; see Native Anthropologist.
Simpson, a member of that community, takes a different approach entirely. What was crucial, she argues, were the deliberate, willful, intentional actions people were making in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination — that they consent to having their land taken, their lives controlled, and their stories told for them.
Things are going on internally. But the larger context is that people are having their lives controlled and their stories told for them. And they aren’t playing that game. Enough is enough.
Refusing to Play the Game
Among the games refused are citizenship, voting, and paying taxes — actions that would move Mohawks out of their own sovereignty into settler citizenship and into what Simpson calls the promise of whiteness. They refuse to consent to the apparatuses of the state.
I have to say I don’t entirely know what to think about this, because it is a hard thing. Voting and paying taxes are exactly what I am supposed to encourage — I am supposed to be telling you to vote, and I certainly don’t want wealthy people getting out of taxes. We are all supposed to be citizens here. And yet the argument is coherent: participation is consent, and consent is the thing being withheld.
Refusal as Method
Simpson says that as an anthropologist she is not going to play the game either. She refused to be the “thick description prose master” who would reveal in florid detail how these things were being sorted out.
Her reasoning is that thick, rich description of a community’s internal politics gets read by outsiders — possibly including me — as evidence of people who are not doing what they should be doing. So she would not write in a way that could be conscripted into those stories.
That is an intense choice for an anthropologist: refusing not only politically but methodologically, and giving up the discipline’s signature move to do it.
The Posture of Refusal
Refusal, for Simpson, is a cognizance of differing social and historical facts that makes for a posture. There is a refusal of people to do what we say they should, and a refusal of the anthropologist to document them in ways that serve settler purposes.
That refusal “holds on to a truth, structures this truth as set through time as its own structure, and co-mingling with the force of presumed and inevitable disappearance, operates as the revenge of consent.”
Revenge is a strong word, and she is careful: she does not mean individual harm. She means avenging a prior injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present. This is genuinely hard to grapple with, partly because it is hard to parse and partly because revenge is not something state societies sanction. The state is supposed to mete out justice; people are not supposed to take revenge, and not collectively either.
But her claim is that people are still living this out. It is not all gone. It operates like a grammar — a posture that sits through time.
North America Is Not Postcolonial
The most striking assertion in the piece is on page 387: North America is not postcolonial (387).
We use “postcolonial” for places like India, and across much of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It indicates that colonial structures remain in place despite technical independence.
Simpson says North America does not qualify, because they never left. The natives never disappeared. Read most simply, from an Indigenous point of view this remains a colonial situation rather than a postcolonial one. It is not as though sovereignty was returned.
Which produces her question: Do you consent? Do you consent to the lawful theft of your land? Because that is what consenting would mean.
Ferguson in Global Context
Bonilla and Rosa place the 2014 protests after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri within a longer trajectory. It runs back to the Rodney King beating in 1991 — one of the first captured on home video, showing four Los Angeles police officers, and followed by marches and the so-called Los Angeles riots after the officers were acquitted despite what looked like convincing evidence. Then Trayvon Martin in 2012.
What everyone commented on at Ferguson was that police departments had acquired military equipment — gear designed for use abroad, deployed on American city streets. Even ABC News covered it, which is worth noting given that ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Company.
Bonilla and Rosa track how tweets recontextualized Ferguson as part of global affairs (382): #Egypt #Palestine #Ferguson #Turkey. “US-made tear gas, sold on the almighty free market, represses democracy.” This was 2014, during the fights for democracy in the Middle East — cross-border movements pushing for justice at the same moment.
Simpson’s line lands here too: “The condition of indigeneity globally is to know this. Indigenous peoples are grappling with the fiction of justice while pushing for justice.”
How Did We Get from 2020 to Here?
Reading these articles raises a question I don’t have an answer to. In the summer of 2020, police violence was top of mind, and so was militarization. As I remember it there was a decent amount of support for Black Lives Matter and for reforming the police. There was support for the Standing Rock protesters — people from here went out to stand with them. And through that period people were fighting against family separation at the border, and were on the side of refugees.
What I don’t understand is what is going on now. The same institutions — the colleges and universities that put out statements against police violence, that certainly did not oppose Black Lives Matter and were against police militarization — are now bringing in the police.
The buildings that Columbia protesters occupied were occupied during Vietnam, when Columbia did call in the police. They were also occupied during the protests against apartheid in South Africa, when the university did not: the 1985 Hamilton Hall blockade ran three weeks and Columbia responded with a court injunction and internal discipline rather than arrests, and divested that year.
So I am confused about why so many people want to bring in the police, and why so many are calling for students to be expelled and arrested. I know there is a lot of support for protesters, but there are also a lot of people mocking or misunderstanding them. I don’t know whether that is new. It doesn’t feel the same as 2020. And instead of policies limiting family separation there are increasingly loud calls for border enforcement and militarization.
I’m not sure how we got here. Any ideas?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the anthropology of refusal?
Refusal is Audra Simpson’s term for a stance that rejects the legitimacy of settler authority rather than contesting outcomes within it. It is a “cognizance of differing social and historical facts” that becomes a posture — and it includes the anthropologist’s refusal to describe a community in ways that could be used against it.
Why would anyone refuse citizenship, voting, or paying taxes?
Because on Simpson’s account those acts would move Mohawks out of their own sovereignty and into settler citizenship — into “the promise of whiteness.” Participation reads as consent, and consent is what is being withheld. The question underneath is: do you consent to the lawful theft of your land?
What is blood quantum, and why is it a settler idea?
Blood quantum measures descent as a fraction, and it comes from the same apparatus that produced the one-drop rule — American racial classification used to assign people to socially inferior status. A 50% requirement for tribal membership is a high bar that would exclude many community members, which is what makes its appearance in a band council’s own eviction policy so striking.
Why does Simpson say North America is not postcolonial?
Because the colonizers never left and the natives never disappeared (387). “Postcolonial” indicates that colonial structures persist after technical independence, as in India or much of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In North America there was no such transfer — from an Indigenous standpoint the situation is colonial, present tense.
What does “Consent’s Revenge” mean?
Not individual harm. Simpson means avenging a prior injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present — refusal that “holds on to a truth” through time and “operates as the revenge of consent.” It is hard to sit with partly because state societies reserve justice to the state and do not sanction revenge, collective or otherwise.
Course Navigation
This material was for The History of Anthropological Thought 2024, closing the section “On Agency.” The discussion continues with “Antiracist Anthropology.”
Related: Resistance, Refusal, Revolution, Reconciliation (the four Rs at intro level) | Native Anthropologist (Delmos Jones on studying one’s own community) | Necropolitics | Power Analysis Hub