Audra Simpson | Columbia University (original) (raw)

Papers by Audra Simpson

General Anthropology Newsletter , 2020

Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 2011

Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 2022

The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp e... more The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the
sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and
Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture
of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of
sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies,
and when the long-standing anthropological interest in colonialism was
reshaped by Indigenous studies attention to the distinctive form labeled set-
tler colonialism. Scholars working at this edge address political relationality
as both concept and methodology. Anthropologists, in turn, have con-
tributed to Indigenous studies a commitment to territorially grounded and
community-based research and theory building. After outlining the conjunc-
ture and its methodological entailments, the review turns to two directions
in scholarship: reinvigorated ethnographic research on environment and on
culture and economy. It concludes with reflection on the implications of this
conjuncture for anthropological epistemology and disciplinary formation.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020

This article offers a brief history of “sovereignty,” unmooring it from Western governance and th... more This article offers a brief history of “sovereignty,” unmooring it from Western governance and the right to kill, in order to trace the life of the term within the field of Native (Indigenous) politics and Studies. Within this field, the practice of “critique” is central, examining conditions of dispossession and exploitation within other disciplines that refuse or devalue knowledge about Indigenous peoples. Historically, “critique” has been vital to Native and Indigenous Studies, which emerged from the liberatory and resistant politics of the late sixties and seventies across North America, as well as from decolonization movements and the specificities (and sovereignties) of Indian country. A developing field at that moment, Native and Indigenous Studies saw that the needs of Indigenous communities were tied directly to forms of resistance and redress but as well to the terrains of knowledge within contemporary academic institutions. As such, disciplinary formation and the critique, if not dismantling of dispossessing disciplines, became key sites for liberation, along with lands and waters.

Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, 2018

This chapter builds on the po liti cal life of settlement, its operations, and its secrets. By se... more This chapter builds on the po liti cal life of settlement, its operations, and its secrets. By settlement I mean the imagined goal of massive demographic and bodily displacement of Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States and Canada and the replacement of those people with others, or the smooth move to a consent-based, multicultural, and liberal society that has settled all of its accounts and has taken, successfully, legally, and ethically the land that it occupies. This is an ongoing proj ect that is imagined to be in the past tense, to have had its primary work finished, as in the " settling of land, the settling of consciousness, the making of moral and po liti cal worlds " atop the worlds of others. The stories that North American nation-states tell themselves and others is that all matters in fact have been settled, that Indigenous people are no more, that if their sovereignties survive they are in an insignificant form, that their significance to both legal and ethical matters is so minimal that in fact, this is an " immigrant " society and is, from the visual likes of things, governmental things, suggested by the visuality of an African American president, a pretty tolerant place. Amer i ca must then be a place that embraces the difference of others enough to allow one to be led by the formerly subjected and enslaved (Obama's specificity and biography aside) and so, things are somewhat OK in regards to the past posing an ethical problem upon the pres ent. " Things are OK " as in " things are settled. " Yet even if we were to take these thin signs as history and historical redress— which I think is what the fixation with his blackness is supposed to tell us, and were we somehow to ignore the preponderance of black deaths at the hands of cops and civilians in the United States, the preponderance somehow of what this signals and means not only to their families and communities but to the larger publics that comprise the United States, then we would be forced to ask how it is that Obama's person, his politics, and his skin were to resolve a historical vio lence, how was his election at the very level of the body, of the

Visual Anthropology Review, 2018

If we were to take the traditional, reified, thought-to-be-disappearing subject of anthropologica... more If we were to take the traditional, reified, thought-to-be-disappearing subject of anthropological and governmental capture and erasure and flip the expectations that both structure and then attempt to govern this subject, what would we make of what they say or do or look? This commentary piece reflects on the decolonizing politics embedded within Indigenous cultural interventions, focusing in particular on two specific interventions: the " Desert Animations " trave-ling exhibition of experimentation in Central and Western Desert arts, and the Karrabing Indigenous Film Collective filmography. [normativity, recognition, settler colonialism]

Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, 2018

From the edited collection by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, _Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering... more From the edited collection by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, _Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas_, New Haven: YUP, 2018.

"This essay considers the significance of Boas’s treatise on race and culture, The Mind of
Primitive Man, attending to the text through a reading of its articulation of social ideals and their theoretical and political implications. Such a reading helps us see that Boas’ 1911 work was far from the revolutionary or paradigm-shifting text that it has been hailed as.1 Instead, a set of conclusions emerge that require further conceptual and political attention, particularly regarding the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Indeed, reading the text alongside the anthropological framework that Boas intended it to supplant—Lewis Henry Morgan’s social evolutionist ordering of the world’s peoples—one sees that the nineteenth-century cultural hierarchy that Morgan envisioned continued to inform subsequent theories of difference."

Postcolonial Studies, 2017

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settle... more This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.

This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life a... more This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that denied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance. The paper argues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life of settler sovereignty.

What is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? ... more What is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? By " easy answer " one might think of a diagnostic, a characteristic of action, a statement of effect, rather than analysis that may course to the unthinkable. Recognition, repair, resilience, resistance, revolution—all diagnos-tics, all characterological, all containers for describing the political. And in this, for grasping at intent and at outcomes. The political describes distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility, the imagination of how action will unfold to reach back to that distribution for a resort , but also for a push on what should be. For anthropologists this is a record of the observed and of the political, rendered objectlike. And this rendering of complexity is far from new. The early Africanists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) took structure and function to constrain action, and even Americanists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1851) saw gov-ernance and hierarchy converge into stages of civilization that one could sort people into, seamlessly, in a global project of naming and sorting. Morgan's gaze on material culture operated as an anthropological and political magic wand of sorting, ordering, and ranking. The context for both was the colonial and imperial

Cultural Anthropology, 2011

Law and Contemporary Problems, Jun 22, 2008

Wicazo Sa Review, 2009

Page 1. Captivating Eunice Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Au ara Sim... more Page 1. Captivating Eunice Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Au ara Simpson My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look'd after with a great deal of Tenderness. - John Williams, 1707^ WHITHER EUNICE? ...

Books by Audra Simpson

co-edited with Andrea Smith (UC-Riverside)

Book Reviews by Audra Simpson

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2019

The Creator's Game returns to a classic political question in colonial contexts: What forms of re... more The Creator's Game returns to a classic political question in colonial contexts: What forms of resistance and life meet material and symbolic theft and trickery in "new lands"? The book's anchoring in the philosophy, practice and economy of lacrosse offers an extensive account of an answer: by foregrounding Indigenous organizing and resurgence in Canada from the nineteenth century to the near present, the book extends its analysis beyond an account of state power or formation. Downey begins this history with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) creation story as retold by Delmor Jacobs of Six Nations of the Grand River. With this ancient narrative and theory of origins, we encounter a woman generating life, the cooperation and autonomy of animals , the axis of good and bad ("good twin / evil twin")-what some might see as some of the standard fare found in creation stories across the globe. But within this story of life, we also find something unique: sport. Known as the Creator's Game, lacrosse was brought from the Sky World to the earth by the first woman, Sky Woman, who introduced it to her grandchildren (the aforementioned twins) to resolve conflict (7). Jacobs explains that lacrosse, originally a stick-ball game, required that hands not touch the ball. Lacrosse sticks were made from spiritually loaded trees and tied to the spiritual, familial and political life of the sky and earth worlds (167, 191). As the twins staged one of their most dramatic conflicts through this game, it is considered a mode of resolution so powerful that it can guarantee life beyond the earthly world to the ancestors in the Sky World (11). With that, Downey sets the tone for all that follows: the political life of this practice; its deep metaphysical, medicinal and political purpose; its repackaging as "sport"; and its appropriation by Canada as a national sport, which is then rebranded as a symbol of white masculinity and civilization and used as a tool of assimilation for Indian students in residential schools. Downey draws from multiple sources to tell this story. He augments his work in the archives with oral histories and his rendering of an imagined present, introducing his readers to both himself as the book's author and to a trickster figure, "Usdas," who acts throughout the book to cue in readers to the location and timeframe of each chapter as well as the key organizing issue or conflict to follow. This playful figure, in Downey's hands, is also suggestive of trickery-of colonial deception and wrongdoing and of Indigenous responses to that wrongdoing. Not only was an Indigenous sport taken out of its context and then claimed as the "national sport" of Canada, Indigenous peoples were limited from play in 1867 and then barred entirely from competition in 1880 (43). This racialized and colonial exclusion was justified first by arguments that Indigenous peoples were perceived to be professionals and thus had an unfair advantage in a sport that was to be played by amateurs and then by arguments that they were too rough, that they played an "Indian style of the game" that was too savage, disordered and "ungentlemanly" (80). In spite of this ban, Indigenous players participated in exhibition games, including spectacular displays for white consumption during a visit to Queen

General Anthropology Newsletter , 2020

Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 2011

Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 2022

The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp e... more The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the
sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and
Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture
of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of
sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies,
and when the long-standing anthropological interest in colonialism was
reshaped by Indigenous studies attention to the distinctive form labeled set-
tler colonialism. Scholars working at this edge address political relationality
as both concept and methodology. Anthropologists, in turn, have con-
tributed to Indigenous studies a commitment to territorially grounded and
community-based research and theory building. After outlining the conjunc-
ture and its methodological entailments, the review turns to two directions
in scholarship: reinvigorated ethnographic research on environment and on
culture and economy. It concludes with reflection on the implications of this
conjuncture for anthropological epistemology and disciplinary formation.

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020

This article offers a brief history of “sovereignty,” unmooring it from Western governance and th... more This article offers a brief history of “sovereignty,” unmooring it from Western governance and the right to kill, in order to trace the life of the term within the field of Native (Indigenous) politics and Studies. Within this field, the practice of “critique” is central, examining conditions of dispossession and exploitation within other disciplines that refuse or devalue knowledge about Indigenous peoples. Historically, “critique” has been vital to Native and Indigenous Studies, which emerged from the liberatory and resistant politics of the late sixties and seventies across North America, as well as from decolonization movements and the specificities (and sovereignties) of Indian country. A developing field at that moment, Native and Indigenous Studies saw that the needs of Indigenous communities were tied directly to forms of resistance and redress but as well to the terrains of knowledge within contemporary academic institutions. As such, disciplinary formation and the critique, if not dismantling of dispossessing disciplines, became key sites for liberation, along with lands and waters.

Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, 2018

This chapter builds on the po liti cal life of settlement, its operations, and its secrets. By se... more This chapter builds on the po liti cal life of settlement, its operations, and its secrets. By settlement I mean the imagined goal of massive demographic and bodily displacement of Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States and Canada and the replacement of those people with others, or the smooth move to a consent-based, multicultural, and liberal society that has settled all of its accounts and has taken, successfully, legally, and ethically the land that it occupies. This is an ongoing proj ect that is imagined to be in the past tense, to have had its primary work finished, as in the " settling of land, the settling of consciousness, the making of moral and po liti cal worlds " atop the worlds of others. The stories that North American nation-states tell themselves and others is that all matters in fact have been settled, that Indigenous people are no more, that if their sovereignties survive they are in an insignificant form, that their significance to both legal and ethical matters is so minimal that in fact, this is an " immigrant " society and is, from the visual likes of things, governmental things, suggested by the visuality of an African American president, a pretty tolerant place. Amer i ca must then be a place that embraces the difference of others enough to allow one to be led by the formerly subjected and enslaved (Obama's specificity and biography aside) and so, things are somewhat OK in regards to the past posing an ethical problem upon the pres ent. " Things are OK " as in " things are settled. " Yet even if we were to take these thin signs as history and historical redress— which I think is what the fixation with his blackness is supposed to tell us, and were we somehow to ignore the preponderance of black deaths at the hands of cops and civilians in the United States, the preponderance somehow of what this signals and means not only to their families and communities but to the larger publics that comprise the United States, then we would be forced to ask how it is that Obama's person, his politics, and his skin were to resolve a historical vio lence, how was his election at the very level of the body, of the

Visual Anthropology Review, 2018

If we were to take the traditional, reified, thought-to-be-disappearing subject of anthropologica... more If we were to take the traditional, reified, thought-to-be-disappearing subject of anthropological and governmental capture and erasure and flip the expectations that both structure and then attempt to govern this subject, what would we make of what they say or do or look? This commentary piece reflects on the decolonizing politics embedded within Indigenous cultural interventions, focusing in particular on two specific interventions: the " Desert Animations " trave-ling exhibition of experimentation in Central and Western Desert arts, and the Karrabing Indigenous Film Collective filmography. [normativity, recognition, settler colonialism]

Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, 2018

From the edited collection by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, _Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering... more From the edited collection by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, _Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas_, New Haven: YUP, 2018.

"This essay considers the significance of Boas’s treatise on race and culture, The Mind of
Primitive Man, attending to the text through a reading of its articulation of social ideals and their theoretical and political implications. Such a reading helps us see that Boas’ 1911 work was far from the revolutionary or paradigm-shifting text that it has been hailed as.1 Instead, a set of conclusions emerge that require further conceptual and political attention, particularly regarding the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Indeed, reading the text alongside the anthropological framework that Boas intended it to supplant—Lewis Henry Morgan’s social evolutionist ordering of the world’s peoples—one sees that the nineteenth-century cultural hierarchy that Morgan envisioned continued to inform subsequent theories of difference."

Postcolonial Studies, 2017

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settle... more This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.

This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life a... more This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that denied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance. The paper argues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life of settler sovereignty.

What is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? ... more What is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? By " easy answer " one might think of a diagnostic, a characteristic of action, a statement of effect, rather than analysis that may course to the unthinkable. Recognition, repair, resilience, resistance, revolution—all diagnos-tics, all characterological, all containers for describing the political. And in this, for grasping at intent and at outcomes. The political describes distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility, the imagination of how action will unfold to reach back to that distribution for a resort , but also for a push on what should be. For anthropologists this is a record of the observed and of the political, rendered objectlike. And this rendering of complexity is far from new. The early Africanists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) took structure and function to constrain action, and even Americanists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1851) saw gov-ernance and hierarchy converge into stages of civilization that one could sort people into, seamlessly, in a global project of naming and sorting. Morgan's gaze on material culture operated as an anthropological and political magic wand of sorting, ordering, and ranking. The context for both was the colonial and imperial

Cultural Anthropology, 2011

Law and Contemporary Problems, Jun 22, 2008

Wicazo Sa Review, 2009

Page 1. Captivating Eunice Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Au ara Sim... more Page 1. Captivating Eunice Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Au ara Simpson My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look'd after with a great deal of Tenderness. - John Williams, 1707^ WHITHER EUNICE? ...

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2019

The Creator's Game returns to a classic political question in colonial contexts: What forms of re... more The Creator's Game returns to a classic political question in colonial contexts: What forms of resistance and life meet material and symbolic theft and trickery in "new lands"? The book's anchoring in the philosophy, practice and economy of lacrosse offers an extensive account of an answer: by foregrounding Indigenous organizing and resurgence in Canada from the nineteenth century to the near present, the book extends its analysis beyond an account of state power or formation. Downey begins this history with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) creation story as retold by Delmor Jacobs of Six Nations of the Grand River. With this ancient narrative and theory of origins, we encounter a woman generating life, the cooperation and autonomy of animals , the axis of good and bad ("good twin / evil twin")-what some might see as some of the standard fare found in creation stories across the globe. But within this story of life, we also find something unique: sport. Known as the Creator's Game, lacrosse was brought from the Sky World to the earth by the first woman, Sky Woman, who introduced it to her grandchildren (the aforementioned twins) to resolve conflict (7). Jacobs explains that lacrosse, originally a stick-ball game, required that hands not touch the ball. Lacrosse sticks were made from spiritually loaded trees and tied to the spiritual, familial and political life of the sky and earth worlds (167, 191). As the twins staged one of their most dramatic conflicts through this game, it is considered a mode of resolution so powerful that it can guarantee life beyond the earthly world to the ancestors in the Sky World (11). With that, Downey sets the tone for all that follows: the political life of this practice; its deep metaphysical, medicinal and political purpose; its repackaging as "sport"; and its appropriation by Canada as a national sport, which is then rebranded as a symbol of white masculinity and civilization and used as a tool of assimilation for Indian students in residential schools. Downey draws from multiple sources to tell this story. He augments his work in the archives with oral histories and his rendering of an imagined present, introducing his readers to both himself as the book's author and to a trickster figure, "Usdas," who acts throughout the book to cue in readers to the location and timeframe of each chapter as well as the key organizing issue or conflict to follow. This playful figure, in Downey's hands, is also suggestive of trickery-of colonial deception and wrongdoing and of Indigenous responses to that wrongdoing. Not only was an Indigenous sport taken out of its context and then claimed as the "national sport" of Canada, Indigenous peoples were limited from play in 1867 and then barred entirely from competition in 1880 (43). This racialized and colonial exclusion was justified first by arguments that Indigenous peoples were perceived to be professionals and thus had an unfair advantage in a sport that was to be played by amateurs and then by arguments that they were too rough, that they played an "Indian style of the game" that was too savage, disordered and "ungentlemanly" (80). In spite of this ban, Indigenous players participated in exhibition games, including spectacular displays for white consumption during a visit to Queen

The American Indian Quarterly, 2010

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2009

American Ethnologist, 2008

Native American and Indigenous Studies , 2019

American Quarterly, 2007

... the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (To... more ... the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995); Audra Simpson, “Paths ... See Dale Turner's discussion of this very question vis-à-vis “Radical Indigenism” in This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards ...