Indigenous Interruptions

Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State

Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from somewhere else. The story of immigrants in America isn't a story of them. It's a story of us.... For just as we remain a nation of laws, we have to remain a nation of immigrants.

—US President Barack Obama, July 4, 2012

We are representing a nation, and we are not going to travel on the passport of a competitor.

—Tonya Gonella Frichner, Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team spokesperson and negotiator, World Lacrosse Championships, July 19, 2010

What does it mean to refuse a passport—what some consider to be a gift or a right, the freedom of mobility and residency? What does it mean to say no to these things, or to wait until your terms have been met for agreement, for a reversal of recognition, or a conferral of rights? What happens when we refuse what all (presumably) "sensible" people perceive as good things? What does this refusal do to politics, to sense, to reason? When we add Indigenous peoples to this question, the assumptions and the histories that structure what is perceived to be "good" (and utilitarian goods themselves) shift and stand in stark relief. The positions assumed by people who refuse "gifts" may seem reasoned, sensible, and in fact deeply correct. Indeed, from this perspective, we see that a good is not a good for everyone.

The Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke are nationals of a precontact Indigenous polity that simply refuse to stop being themselves. In other words, they insist on being and acting as peoples who belong to a nation other than the United States or Canada. Their political form predates and survives "conquest"; it is tangible (albeit strangulated by colonial governmentality) and is tied to sovereign practices. This architecture is not fanciful; it is in place because the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke share a genealogical kinship relationship with other native peoples in North America and they know this. They refuse to let go of this knowledge. In fact, they enact this knowledge through marriage practices, political engagements, and the way they live their lives. Their genealogical and political connectedness is part of a covenant—the decision-making Iroquois Confederacy called Haudenosaunee—which is made up of clans that spread across territory. As Indigenous peoples they have survived a great, transformative process of settler occupation, and they continue to live under the conditions of this occupation, its disavowal, and its ongoing life, which has required and still requires that they give up their lands and give up themselves.

What is the self that I speak of that they will not give up? The course of this book will unpack this for us, but most commonly that self is conflated with the figure of the ironworker and understood, in largely celebratory terms, through this image. Ironworkers are (usually) men who put up the infrastructure for skyscrapers, bridges, and all sorts of other large-scale construction jobs all over the United States and Canada, but Kahnawà:ke labor is most associated with cities in the northeastern United States. They are famous for traveling from Kahnawà:ke on Sunday night to get to New York City (or Buffalo, or Ithaca, or as far as Detroit) by Monday morning. This is a life of difficult, dangerous labor, and intense travel, and a life that returns, the literature of various sorts tells us, back to the "reserve" as much as the job and drive time can allow. In his very popular New Yorker piece, Joseph Mitchell started his article on ironwork and Kahnawà:ke in the following way: "The most footloose Indians in North America are a band of mixed-blood Mohawks whose home, the Caughnawaga Reservation, is on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec" (1959).

This popular notion of the ironworking Mohawk, specifically from Kahnawà:ke, will not be lost because it is tied up with capital and the material reproduction of the community as well as postindustrial skylines. But much of this book charts out the other labor that these people have undertaken and still undertake to maintain themselves in the face of a force that is imperial, legislative, ideological, and territorial and that has made them more than men who walk on beams. Their masculinized labor on iron matters to them, and to others, and I suspect will continue to matter as long as there is a market for construction. Yet the community is more than that form of labor can signal.

This community is now a reservation, or "reserve," located in what is now southwestern Quebec, a largely Francophone province in Canada. It is a reserved territory of approximately 18.55 miles. However, it belongs to people who have moved through the past four hundred years from the Mohawk Valley in what is now New York State to the northern part of their hunting territory—partially where they are now. Present-day Kahnawà:ke was a seigniorial land grant that became a reserve held in trust for the use and benefit of these "footloose" mixed-blood Mohawks—Mohawks, who, I will demonstrate through the course of this book, are not "mixed blood." In fact, they are Indigenous nationals of a strangulated political order who do all they can to live a political life robustly, with dignity as Nationals. In holding on to this, they interrupt and fundamentally challenge stories that have been told about them and about others like them, as well as the structure of settlement that strangles their political form and tries to take their land and their selves from them. As with all Indigenous people, they were supposed to have stepped off the beam that they walked on and plummeted to the ground several times through the course of their historical lives. Staying on top of a beam has involved effort and labor that extends beyond even the hard work of putting up steel. Since the time of Lewis Henry Morgan, this is the labor of living in the face of an expectant and a foretold cultural and political death. As such it is the hard labor of hanging on to territory, defining and fighting for your rights, negotiating and maintaining governmental and gendered forms of power.

Much of this labor I am talking about is tied up with a care for and defense of territory—so I will tell you first about this place and its institutions. If one desires a sociological sketch, the community has, as a federally recognized First Nation, accepted transfer funds from the government of Canada to build these institutions;...