Unsettling Settler Colonial Sonic Spaces
Chair(s): Maxwell Hiroshi Yamane (University of Oklahoma,)
Discussant(s): Beverley Diamond (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Inspiring a contemporary crosspollination of anticolonial theory and praxis, Haunani-Kay Trask (Kānaka Maoli) (2004) and Patrick Wolfe (2006) advocated for a now widely recognized conceptual shift, framing colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a singular event. Settler colonialism transforms space by replacing Indigenous inhabitants with settlers and colonizers. In the realm of music and sound, Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah) (2020) expands this understanding by introducing space as a component in the tripartite intersubjectivity between listener, sound, and space. Building on Robinson’s model, this panel examines how settler colonial soundscapes sustain and reinforce settler colonial regimes. We intentionally disrupt the normalization of settler colonial agendas—genocide, dispossession, and erasure—by interrogating the role of acoustics, sound, music, and silence in constructing settler colonial sonic spaces. Conversely, we highlight the ways in which Indigenous performers unsettle these sonic spaces in ways that are decolonial. The first panelist analyzes how the silence of sonic modes of Indigeneity in the soundscapes at the Idaho State History Museum contribute to Indigenous erasure. The second panelist provides a close listening of Indigenous sonic protocols enacted at federal government events, including the Pentagon and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The third presentation opens space to listen for pop music production as process rather than product in order hear the intergenerational relationships musicians bring forward, as well as to respect the bodily sovereignty of Indigenous artists and their family histories. This panel contributes to ongoing discourses of sound and decolonization in ethnomusicology and sound studies.
Presentations in the Session
Sonic Erasure in Idaho: The Land and Its People
Kimberly Marshall
University of Oklahoma
In 2015, the Idaho State History Museum re-opened after eighteen months of remodeling, to reveal a new set of permanent exhibits to teach Idahoans and visitors alike about the history of this state using the most contemporary technological and ethical museum practices. At the opening ceremony, tribal representatives complemented the re-design. Largely thanks to the best-practice integration of feedback early and often from a Native Advisory Committee, the story of the “Five Tribes of Idaho” was now integrated throughout the exhibition of Idaho’s history, rather than relegated only to the opening gallery. Museum experiences, however, are multi-sensorial, and the exhibition space in this state-of-the-art history museum is loud. Thunder crashes over the opening mountainscape, the sound of a wildfire rages though Northern Idaho, outdoorsmen talk about guiding rafts through the “River of No Return” wilderness, and a 1950’s style reel-to-reel narration tells the adventurous story of parachuting beavers air-dropped into central Idaho wilderness. Through dozens of hours of participant observation as a museum volunteer, I experienced both repeating loops and guest-activated sounds: environmental, narrative, and musical. And I found that while Native American stories are depicted throughout the museum, their voices, music, and narratives are notably absent, except in the opening gallery “Origins.” In this paper, I argue that despite efforts to correct the representational mistakes of the past, the new exhibitions of the Idaho State History Museum continue to perpetuate Native erasure by sonic means, suggesting a potential incommensurability.
Sounding Indigenous Resurgence in Nacotchtank: Unsettling Settler Colonial Sonic Spaces in the U.S. Capital
Maxwell Yamane
University of Oklahoma
Nacotchtank is the Piscataway place name for what is now commonly known as Washington, DC. DC sits on the homeland of the Piscataway and is the heart of the American settler colonial nation-state that promotes the occupation of Indigenous lands and spaces. Indigenous Peoples have and continue to unsettle settler colonial spaces through various means, including through music and sound. This paper examines the strategies in which Indigenous performers reclaim space and soundscapes in the federal government. My paper provides a close listening of powwow performers at a Native American Heritage Month Celebration on November 20, 2024, held in the Pentagon, as well as Indigenous performers at public federal conferences in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the pandemic. As both an allied participant and observer, I argue that Indigenous performers engage in acts of resurgence through sound and music in ways that amplify Indigenous cultural practices and protocols, rectify narratives, and assert Indigenous sovereignties. I describe how these musical and sonic acts of resurgence amplify Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies enacted by Arikara, Hidatsa, Kānaka Maoli, Kiowa, Mandan, and Omaha performers to collectively reclaim sonic space. Given the scant literature on Indigenous musical and sonic practices in the nation’s capital, this paper provides an interdisciplinary contribution to ethnomusicology, Native American and Indigenous studies, as well as DC studies. This paper suggests that music and sound scholars should closely examine sonic space in the federal government as a critical component in unraveling the normalization of settler colonialism.
Sonic Sovereignty and the Tactile Body: Contemporary Indigenous Storytelling
Liz Przybylski1, Tara "T-Rhyme" Campbell2
1University of California Riverside, 2Independent
This presentation asks what happens when, in the words of two-spirit Chumash/Esselen scholar Deborah Miranda, the “Body is the Archive.” When attending to the tactile body, how do listeners ethically respond to the bodily sovereignty of storytellers, and carefully hear histories of embodied experience? Connecting Miranda’s poetic responses with popular music practice, this presentation focuses on cyphers, notably Tribe Called Queenz, that cultivate participation by Indigenous women, girls, nonbinary people, and two-spirit people. Interviews with Nehiyaw/Denesuline rapper T-Rhyme, a founding member of Tribe Called Queenz, reveal how hip hop storytelling shifts when presented in spaces that foreground the experiences of Indigenous women. Because sonic sovereignty comes into being through relationships, hearing the body as archive allows for a shift in listening posture in which audiences focus on hip hop as a sound practice enacted together. In T-Rhyme’s recent music, that “together” involves traces of others through sampling as well as directly through in-person collaborative creative work. I argue that many of T-Rhyme’s songs, notably “Pressure” and “Revitalize,” carry forward the legacies of people who are never physically on stage but whose voices, music, and stories shape the sound and message of her music. This echoes through the work of other cypher participants, and beyond: by drawing on the legacies of musical and familial ancestors and contemporaries, hip hop artists craft messages about becoming resilient together. In this presentation, we will listen for multiple and conflicting legacies of colonialism and resilience as they echo through contemporary Indigenous hip hop music.
Discussion
Beverley Diamond
Memorial University of Newfoundland
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