BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Date iCal//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.2// METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Toronto BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20251102T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20250309T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RDATE:20260308T020000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:calendar.3839.events_uoft_date.0@www.religion.utoronto.ca CREATED:20250813T142316Z DESCRIPTION:\nWhen and Where: \nFriday, September 19, 2025 2:00 pm to 4:0 0 pm \n William Doo Auditorium \n New College \n 45 Willcocks Street, Tor onto M5S 1C7 \n\nSpeakers \nAudra Simpson (Columbia University) \n\nDescri ption: \nHow has trauma has come to operate as a claim in the making of on eself? How is this element of one’s familial past been operationalized by now exposed “ethnic frauds” or so-called “pretendians”?  What is the narra tional and experiential raw material that constitutes a self that must be and therefore is settled and in this, defined definitively as a Native pe rson? Emerging as a near sociological fact, the snippets and narratives o f 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 govern ance systems while claiming, obliquely, gesturally, to accord to them. What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rat her, demand of a new start point and constitution of selfhood? This paper examines the invocation as trauma in the biographical accounts of well-kn own frauds to analyze both the content of their story of self-making but a lso the its imbrications with race and gender as features of a settler col onial society that no longer only claims lands, but also claims selves, and historical experiences as their own.Audra Simpson is Professor of Anth ropology at Columbia University. She researches and writes about Indigenou s and settler society, politics and history. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke Uni versity Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studi es Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association, th e 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 A tlantic Quarterly, Postcolonial Studies, Theory & Event, Cultural Anthr opology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems, Wicazo Sa Review and A\nual Reviews in Anthropology. She was a Distinguis hed 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 i n 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 t he award to do so. She is a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk. \n\nSponsors \nDepartment o f Anthropology, Department for the Study of Religion, Centre for Indigen ous Studies,Women & Gender Studies Institute \n45 Willcocks Street, Toro nto M5S 1C7 \n\nCategories \n Seminar \n\nAudiences \n GeneralU of T Commu nityGraduate StudentsUndergraduate Students DTSTART;TZID=America/Toronto:20250919T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Toronto:20250919T160000 LAST-MODIFIED:20250918T120857Z LOCATION:45 Willcocks Street, Toronto M5S 1C7 SUMMARY:Occupying Selves or How to be an Indian via Unciteable Pain URL;TYPE=URI:https://www.religion.utoronto.ca/events/occupying-selves-or-ho w-be-indian-unciteable-pain END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR