All quotes from
Audra’s book
Like many other
Iroquois people, the Mohawks of Kahnawa:ke refuse...the "gifts" of
American and Canadian citizenship; they insist upon the integrity of
Haudenosaunee governance.
How to proceed as a
nation if the right to determine the terms of legal belonging, a crucial
component of sovereignty, has been dictated by a foreign government.
Sovereignty may
exist within sovereignty. One does not
entirely negate the other, but they necessarily stand in terrific tension and
pose serious jurisdictional and normative challenges to each other: Whose
citizen are you? What authority do you answer to? One challenges the very
legitimacy of the other.
Like Indigenous
bodies, Indigenous sovereignties and Indigenous political orders prevail within
and apart from settler governance.
Under the conditions
of settler colonialism, multiple sovereignties cannot proliferate robustly or
equally.
In situations in
which sovereignties are nested and embedded, one proliferates at the other's
expense; the United States and Canada can only come into political being
because of Indigenous dispossession.
No matter how deeply
Kahnawa'Kehro:non and other Indigenous nations understand themselves to be of
their own philosophical systems and, simultaneously, no matter how deeply they
understand the scene of their objectification as "Indians" or, even
more ghastly, as "minoritized peoples", they are rarely seen or then
treated in the eye of the settler as that which they are and wish to be
recognized as: nationals with sovereign authority over their lives and over
their membership and living within their own space, which has been "held
for them" in the form of reservations.
In refusing to go
away, to cease to be, in asserting something beyond difference, lies the
position that requires one to "coexist" with others, with settlers,
with "arrivants"...meaning the formerly enslaved or the indentured
who did not voluntarily come to North America - and to live tacitly and
taciturnly in a "settled state".
In this there is acceptance of the dispossession of your lands, of
internalizing and believing the things you have been taught about you to you:
that you are a savage, that your language is incoherent, that you are less than
white people, not quite up to par, that you are then "different",
with a different culture that is defined by others and will be accorded a
protected space of legal recognition if your group evidences that
"difference" in terms that are sufficient to the settlers' legal eye.
In settler societies
such as the United States and Canada, citizenship is key to this process of
rationalizing dispossession.
The Indian Act had
transferred matrilineal descent and property holding to the father's line -- an
unambiguously raced and gendered injustice fought against by Indian women,
disenfranchised from their Indian status across Canada.
The Indian Act, a
specific body of law that recognizes Indians in a wardship status in Canada --
not a nation-to-nation arrangement by any stretch -- created the categories of
personhood and rights that severed Indian woman from their communities when they
married white men. It did the reverse to
Indian men; white women gained Indian status upon their marriage into an Indian
community. This created the conditions for the adoption of blood quantum.
Settler colonialism
requires an Indigenous elimination for territory.
