Sports have been a major American cultural arena for displaying Native American stereotypes. Central to debates about Native mascotry, the so-called Washington “R**skins” maintained the racial slur and logo for almost a century. Native scholars, activists, and Tribal leaders have fervently called for a change in the name for decades. In particular, protests have been important in sounding dissent against Native stereotypes in the home football team of Washington, D.C. My paper provides a close listening to three key sonic moments of Native performers and powwow singers at Washington football games: 1) the 2017 protest led by D.C.-based Northern Drum group, the UpTown Boyz, at the Washington team’s home stadium; 2) the 2020 celebration by UpTown Boyz at the R.F.K Memorial Stadium when the team changed its name; and 3) the 1977 “unexpected” (Deloria 2004) half-time show by an all-Native marching band directed by Louis Ballard (Quapaw/Cherokee). Based on fieldwork and historical research, I show how these performances sonically assert Indigeneity in settler colonial spaces designed to erase it. Deriving from Mapuche sound scholar Luis Carcamo-Huechante’s (2025) concept of “interference,” I argue that these sonic acts of interference disrupted the settler colonial soundscape of the Washington team. This paper contributes to interdisciplinary dialogues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies by demonstrating how Native performers strategically and sonically disrupt stereotypes in the American cultural realm of sports. This paper also suggests that music and sound scholars should closely examine sports as sonic sites that (re)produce settler colonialism.

Over the past twenty years, a sense of the gothic has emerged in the popular music of Aotearoa, especially in music associated with genres such as alt-country, Americana, and indie-folk. Gothic sensibilities come through in the sounds of the music, the visuals, and the marketing, such as NZ indie label Flying Nun Records’ advertising of Erny Belle’s (Ngāpuhi) 2022 debut album, Venus Is Home, as “a showcase of gothic Pacific storytelling.” The use of the voice also adds a specific uncanny quality to the music, where the vocality is often mismatched with the lyrical darkness, such as Erny Belle calmly crooning about poisoned fish and nuclear annihilation or Marlon Williams crooning about passing away alone in the ocean. In this paper, I explore this sense of the musical gothic in recent albums by a range of musicians and argue that this music challenges dominant narratives of Aotearoa and the wider Pacific as paradise. References to environmental decay, ancestral disconnect, economic hardship, and senses of dislocation and loss mix with emotions of love and longing in much of this music. This discussion highlights the ongoing effects of colonialism and displacement and positions popular music as a vital form of expression in our Indigenous context. Through long-term research in Aotearoa, including discussions with musicians and other music industry contributors, attendance at local performances, as well as historical research in local archives, I explore new ways of understanding Pacific popular music through an Indigenous gothic lens.

Facing the crisis of the “closing of the frontier” in the American West in 1890, historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner, imbued with the conviction of Manifest Destiny, suggested that the nation look to Alaska as the “new” frontier. Widely regarded as the “Last Frontier” since the Klondike Gold Rush of the late-nineteenth century, serialized dime novels, paintings, and popular sheet music fashioned in the Tin Pan Alley style during the early-twentieth century have perpetuated the frontier myth of Alaska. In this paper, I explore how popular sheet music about Alaska published in the early-twentieth century has gendered, exoticized, and marginalized Indigenous populations in Alaska as part of the frontier myth of Alaska. Using two case studies, “My Gal’s an Esquimau” (1904) and “Oogie Oogie Wa Wa” (1922), I argue that composers employ seemingly “innocent” songwriting strategies that depict Alaskan Natives as primitive, hypersexualized objects. Through close examination of the music, lyrics, and visual content of illustrated covers, I highlight the layered and often troubling musical imaginaries of Alaskan Natives by the nation during the early-twentieth century.Drawing from theories of decolonial practices of listening, particularly engaging with Dylan Robinson’s concept of “hungry listening” (2020), I situate these two songs, along with early-twentieth century popular sheet music about Alaska, within broader discussions of American imperialism, Indigeneity, and listening positionalities. Ultimately, this paper invites reflection on how studying sonic histories of the American frontier can reveal underlying tensions about “American-ness” and notions of citizenship.

This presentation looks at the ways in which what I call “Sound Back” brings sonic stewardship to Native communities. My intervention lies in combining Trevor Reed’s sonic sovereignty with the Land Back movement, arguing that Sound Back is a growing movement of sonic stewardship. Sound Back encompasses taking up space through Native record labels that assert sovereignty and self-governance, demanding spatial justice by remapping settler geographies and containments, and remixing/looping recordings that are captives in settler archives. Next, sharing fieldwork from my time in Nuuk, Greenland, I present Inuit owned labels as a model for sound stewardship within the larger movement of new labels being founded in the last five years such as Land Back Records. I then look to my time at the Santa Fe Indian Market as a way to remap settler containments, and my experience in N.Y.C. with Quechua language music as a similar way to resound settler geographies. Finally, I present a conversation I had with Kiowa and Apache trombone player Quinn Carson which interrogates the ways in which he samples and uses citational practices to engage with archival recordings of his ancestors.