She has won multiple awards for her book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States.
Simpson's thesis explores the "[w]ays in which residence, location, movement and political discourses distill into a mobile and collective 'identity' for the Mohawk of Kahnawake and other Iroquois peoples across the borders on their reserves and the states that surround them.
[5] She continues her association with the Center as one of two core Indigenous faculty members (since 2021 with Michael Witgen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe).
[7] Simpson's dissertation formed the basis of her first book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, published in 2014 by Duke University Press and launched in Kahnawá:ke in July of that year.
[9] The American political theorist Kennan Ferguson writes that unlike resistance, refusal for Simpson "interrupts the smooth operation of power, denying presumed authority and remaking ignored narratives.
[15] Ngāti Pūkenga Professor Brendan Hokowhitu praised the book's portrayal of "the complexities of Indigenous life" with "neither the security of romanticization nor the comfort of the scholarly pulpit".
[13] Arizona State University Professor David Martínez (Akimel O'odham/Hia Ced O'odham/Mexican) wrote that Mohawk Interruptus "will assert its place in the Haudenosaunee canon, which will compel subsequent scholars to take a closer look at how Indigenous communities in general struggle to maintain their political integrity under the pressure of a variety of colonially created borders and the laws that enforce them over the sovereign rights of others.
[17][18] In her study of former Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence's 2012-2013 hunger strike and the 2014 murder of Inuk woman Loretta Saunders, Simpson argues that Indigenous women "have been deemed killable, rapeable, expendable" by settler colonial societies.