Occupying Selves or How to be an Indian via Unciteable Pain

How has trauma has come to operate as a claim in the making of oneself? How is this element of one’s familial past been operationalized by now exposed “ethnic frauds” or so-called “pretendians”?  What is the narrational and experiential raw material that constitutes a self that must be and therefore is settled and in this, defined definitively as a Native person? Emerging as a near sociological fact, the snippets and narratives of now-exposed fakes tend to a claim of trauma rather than relation. These claims fly in the face of Native modes of relationship to land, families or political orders and undermine Indigenous systems of descent and governance systems while claiming, obliquely, gesturally, to accord to them. What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point and constitution of selfhood? This paper examines the invocation as trauma in the biographical accounts of well-known frauds to analyze both the content of their story of self-making but also the its imbrications with race and gender as features of a settler colonial society that no longer only claims lands, but also claims selves, and historical experiences as their own.

Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She researches and writes about Indigenous and settler society, politics and history. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association, the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society (2015) and CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2014. She is co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in South Atlantic Quarterly, Postcolonial Studies, Theory & Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems, Wicazo Sa Review and Annual Reviews in Anthropology. She was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto in 2018, the Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Unit for Criticism and Theory at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in 2019 and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago in Spring, 2023.  In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2020 she won the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching.  She was the second anthropologist in the history of the award to do so. She is a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk.