67AUDRA SIMPSONOn Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial CitizenshipANTHROPOLOGICAL NEEDTo speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known. In different moments, anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised.1 This modern interlocutionary role was not self-ascribed by anthropologists, nor was it without a serious material and ideational context; it accorded with the imperatives of Empire and in this, specific technologies of rule that sought to obtain space and resources, to define and know the difference that it constructed in those spaces and to then govern those within.2 Knowing and representing the “voices” within those places required more than military might, it required the methods and modalities of knowing, in particular: categorisation, ethnological comparison, linguistic translation and ethnography.These techniques of knowing were predicated upon a profound need, as the distributions in power and possibility that made Empire also made for the heuristic and documentary requirements of a metropolitan and administrative readership, hence the required accounts of the difference that “culture” stood in for in these “new” places.3 These accounts were required for governance, but also so that those in the metropole might know themselves in a manner that accorded to the global processes underway. Like “race” in other contexts, “culture” was (and still is in some quarters) the conceptual and necessarily essentialised space that stood in for complicated bodily and exchange-based relationships that enabled and marked colonial situations in Empire: warfare, commerce, sex, trade, missionisation. “Culture” described the difference that was found in these places and marked the ontological end-game of each exchange: a difference that had been contained into neat, ethnically-defined territorial spaces that now needed to be made sense of, to be ordered, ranked, to be governed, to be possessed.4 This is a form of politics that is more than representational, as this was a governmental and disciplinary possession of bodies and territories, and in this were included existent forms of philosophy, history and social life that Empire sought to speak of and speak for.ARtIClESimpson – Ethnographic Refusal – Junctures, 9, Dec 200768In this article I will argue that the techniques of representation and analysis that avail themselves to us when the processes sketched out above have been accounted for make for a form of representation that may move away from “difference” and attendant containment as a unit of analysis. I am interested in the way that cultural analysis may look when difference is not the unit of analysis, when culture is disaggregated into narratives rather than wholes, when proximity to the territory that one is engaging in is as immediate as the self, and what this then does to questions of “voice.” I will argue that in such a context of anthropological accounting – an accounting I started to do above but will do more robustly below – “voice” is coupled with sovereignty that is evident at the level of interlocution, at the level of method and at the level of textualisation. Within Indigenous contexts, contexts that are never properly “post-colonial,” the sovereignty of the people we speak of, when speaking for themselves, interrupt anthropological portraits of timelessness, procedure and function that dominate representations of their past and, sometimes, their present. As an anthropologist I always found such portraits of Indigenous peoples to be strange in light of the deeply resistant, self-governing and relentlessly critical people that I belong to and work with. When I started to do my work on a topic that simply matters to the Mohawks of Kahnawake – the question of who we are, and who we shall be for the future – I found that anthropological histories on the Iroquois5 and analytics used for cultural analysis were exceedingly ritualistic and procedural, and so much so that they privileged particular communities and peoples in ways that stressed harmony and timelessness even where there was utter opposition to and struggle against the state. Again, this is more than a representational problem, or a superficially representational problem. The people that I work with and belong to do care deeply about ceremony and tradition, but hinged those concerns to nationhood, citizenship, rights, justice, proper ways of being in the world, the best way to be in relation to one another, political recognition, invigorating the Mohawk language – they did not talk about the usual anthropological fare that dominated the prodigious amount of research upon them. They clearly had and have critiques of state power, hegemony, history and even one another that made them appear anomalous against the literature written upon them. And so it was that I asked questions about the questions that mattered to us and had to write in certain ways, as these matterings sometimes were more our business than others, but clearly had import for much larger questions, questions concerning just forms of dominion, or sovereignty or citizenship. I want to reflect upon the dissonance between the representations that were produced by writing away from and to dominant forms of knowing and commitment to what people say (imperfectly glossed here as “voice”). I do so in order to ask what the form of knowledge might look like when such histories as the one sketched out above are accounted for in disciplinary form and analysis. And further to that, I consider what analysis will look like, or sound like, when the goals and aspirations of those we talk to inform the methods and the shape of our theorising and analysis.PARTICULAR WAYS OF KNOWINGUnlike anthropologies of the past, accounting for Empire and colonialism and doing so in the context of “settler societies” (code for proximal-to, or once “Indigenous”) is now becoming more acceptable. This is owing to political currents, critiques and philosophical trends outside of and Simpson – Ethnographic Refusal – Junctures, 9, Dec 200769within anthropology that have embedded the discipline within the history of colonialism, have highlighted ethics and form, and pluralised the