“Occupying Selves” or “How to be an Indian via Unciteable Pain”

RSVP Here. Reception to follow lecture.

How has trauma has come to operate as a claim in the making of self? How is this element of a familial past been operationalized by the recent and ongoing revelations of “ethnic frauds” or so-called “pretendians”? What are the narrational and experiential raw materials that constitute the definitively Native self? Emerging as a near sociological fact, the snippets and narratives of now-revealed fakes tend to a claim of trauma rather than relation. These claims fly in the face of Native modes of relationship to family, to land and to political orders, and undermine Indigenous systems of descent and governance while claiming, obliquely, gesturally, to accord to them. What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy– or rather to the apparent demand for a new departure point for and constitution of selfhood? This talk examines the invocation of trauma in the biographical accounts of well-known frauds to analyze both the content of these stories of self-making and its imbrications with race and gender. These are operations of a settler colonial society that no longer only claims lands, but also claims selves, and historical experiences, as its own.

Audra Simpson (Columbia University) is a political anthropologist whose work is focused on contextualizing the force and consequences of governance through time, space and bodies. Her research and writing is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and crosses the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics. Her recent research is a genealogy of affective governance and extraction across the US and Canada.

Her book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014, DUP) won the Sharon Stephens Prize (AES), the “Best first Book Award” (NAISA) as well as the Lora Romero Award (ASA) in addition to honorable mentions. It was a Choice Academic Title for 2014. In 2010, she won the School of General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” In 2020 she won the The Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching from the Academic Awards Committee of the Columbia College Student Council.