Abstract: | Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska delves into histories of Inuit musical life in Alaska to amplify the broader significance of sound as integral to self-determination and sovereignty. The book offers radical and relational ways of listening to Inuit music across a range of genres-from hip hop to Christian hymnody and drumsongs to funk and R&B - to register how a density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking from a vast archive of presence sounds out radical and relational entanglements between structures of Indigeneity and colonialism. The research aims to dismantle stereotypical understandings of "Eskimos," "Indians," and "Natives" by addressing the following questions: What exactly is "Native" about Native music? What does it mean to sound (or not sound) Native? Who decides? And how can in-depth analyses of Native music that center Indigeneity reframe larger debates of race, power, and representation in twenty-first century American music historiography? Instead of proposing singular truths or facts, this book invites readers to consider the existence of multiple simultaneous truths, a density of truths, all of which are culturally constructed, performed, and in some cases politicized and policed. A sound relations approach endeavors to advance a more Indigenized music studies and a more sounded Indigenous studies that works to move beyond colonial questions of containment - "who counts as Indigenous" and "who decides" - and measurement - "how much Indigenous is this person/performance" - and toward an aesthetics of self-determination and resurgent world-making. |
