Anthropological Perspectives

By Marta Makuchowska

We keep hearing about new tragic events and crimes committed by the colonialists against Native Americans. People whose ancestors committed these acts (or people who still do) try to look at the story from the other side and say yes it was tragic, but the indigenous people also received some valuable gifts from us. These gifts would be for example citizenship and the rights that come with it. Why, at least some native people don`t consider this as a gift? Because being a Canadian citizen means that you are not a member of your own nation, a nation that existed before Canada, and the contemporary concept of nationhood. Abandoning your own nationhood is like abandoning yourself, which the author of the text Indigenous Interruptions, Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State argues presenting the worldview of Mohawks – Iroquois people. They fight over their truth and their right to form a nation with political forms and land rights.

Contemporary Indigenous people live using things that came with Western civilization like clothes and food, they have churches and cemeteries, they (not because they wanted to) use English and French, and they even participate in wars. But many of them refuse to vote in Canadian elections, to pay taxes, and they refuse to be Canadians. Indigenous doesn’t only mean “the first people to inhabit the area”. Indigenous means a nation. But how to create a nation when you had been displaced and others don’t recognize you as one? In Mohawks` words: the right to determine their own membership is fundamental to survival.

So, who they are? Contemporary Mohawks belong to what used to be in the past the Iroquois Confederacy. Clans (Turtle, Wolf, Bear) are matrilineal and comprised of a polity. That means membership relates to beliefs and identification. It seems complicated but Iroquois have a simple explanation “This is how I am, to you,” and if you want to understand that you have to operate social and genealogical knowledge, which is almost impossible when you’ve came from country where nation means basically place where you or your parents were born.

It’s never possible to achieve political homogeneity and ideal correspondence of ethnicity and territorial boundaries. Still Indigenous people in my opinion deserve to decide at least in the matter of membership, taxes, nation language or currency. But do I believe this “dream” may come true? In the face of modern powers it might be really hard.

Mohawks who try to refuse the Canadian citizenship face many problems. Because they refuse to travel with Canadian passport or emergency travel documents and insist on using the Iroquois Confederacy passport, they cannot travel abroad, because the Confederacy Passport is not recognized as an official international document. Still, many Mohawks do it in the name of their own nation and rights, and they want to achieve political recognition – to be seen as a nation and as a state. In my opinion not only, Iroquois deserve that, but many other minorities suffer under authority and power. Political rights are a peaceful way to support culture and the ability to keep and grow it. This seems like an idyllic version of the future world. For that to happen dominant nations would have to change their understanding of “nation”. It’s not only a matter of justice, power, and empathy but the definition behind this concept. And as we have already seen, this definition varies depending on whom it applies to. Only the nation knows what it means to itself and how to define its sense of belonging. We can only try to establish fair formal rules that must be met in order to form a nation politically. Nations that functioned within their own definition of the nation faced a situation in which a foreign government expected them to identify themselves as the nation of their colonizers, for example, as Canadians. We should not separate nationality from the state if the nation is able to demonstrate its own sense of belonging, willingness to be represented on the political scene, and its own history of statehood.

We don’t know what the future looks like for Mohawks or other Indigenous. Hopefully, it will be full of freedom and respect for unique culture, but the whole process would be hard and complex. Anthropologists may observe and describe the metamorphosis of the concept of nation.

Bibliography:

Simpson, Audra. “Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State.” In Mohawk Interruptus, pp. 1-36. Duke University Press, 2014.