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 Audra Simpson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the American Indian Program, Cornell University. She holds a Ph.D. from theDepartment of Anthropology at McGill University, an M.A. from McGill University and a B.A. from Concordia University. Her manuscript, "To the Reserve and Back Again: Kahnawake Mohawk Narratives of Self, Home and Nation" is a cross-border, ethnographic examination of the cultural contours of citizenship and nationhood amongst Kahnawake Mohawks (under contract, Duke University Press). Her research and dissertation write-up were supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Anthropological Association, Dartmouth College and theNational Aboriginal Achievement Foundation. Her interests reside in nationalism, citizenship, colonialism, borders (US-Canada) and narrative. She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.

Nationalism and Its Contents: Mohawk Citizenship-Formation in the Face of Empire

Contemporary political theorists assign forms of indigenous nationalism to the space of self-designation and thus to the normative and vexing question of accommodation and recognition. Indigenous nationalism is used as a test to the limits of the legal and liberal imagination and in the case of deliberative democracy, as a test to reason itself. Expressions of Indigenous nationhood and nationalism, palpable in Canada and in some pockets of Indian country in the US, force liberal theorists to ask ’how are we to accommodate claims to difference that may fundamentally challenge our own sense of what is just and right?’ The task of this paper is to vex this question further, to reveal the "universalist" and ethnocentric premise that underpins citizenship theory, and concomitant processes of recognition and ’accommodation’ by taking an ethnographic turn to the logics and limits of political recognition within an Indigenous nation. This ethnographic turn will dwell within the interior frontiers of sovereignty, as questions and claims to citizenship are worked out within a reserve ("reservation") community in Canada.The citizenship-formation of this community happens resolutely against the face of colonialism and empire as its citizenry not only works matters out in the face of the Canadian State, but also as they travel across the International Boundary line into other spaces and places of settler society.