Singing With Nanook of the North: On Tanya Tagaq, Feeling Entangled, and Colonial Archives of Indigeneity

Singing With Nanook of the North: On Tanya Tagaq, Feeling Entangled, and Colonial Archives of Indigeneity Olivia Michiko Gagnon (bio) WAYS OF OPENING New York City, 2016: I remember tanya tagaq walking out onto the darkened stage, her diminutive frame resplendent in a ball gown, her feet bare. Walking up to the microphone, she speaks in a soft and breathy—almost off-voice—voice, pitched high. Conversational, almost chatty, her banter feels off the cuff. She talks about what U.S. filmmaker and explorer robert j. flaherty’s 1922 ethnographic film Nanook of the North missed: cultural notions of humor that come from the harshness of living on the land, the ways that the Inuit have had to make their own forms of joy, illegible to settler eyes. She describes flaherty’s film in relation to what she calls “its bastard other,” referring to the 2015 Of The North, in which French-Canadian director dominic gagnon used tagaq’s music, without her permission, to score his racist collage of [End Page 45] video clips culled from websites like YouTube as well as from porn sites. It was what Inuk filmmaker alethea arnaquq-baril described as a representation of the Inuit as “[v]iolent, wandering drunks that neglect their children and don’t care for the lives of animals . . . a cheap move to totally play up a negative stereotype of a marginalized people for [his] own artistic gain.”1 Montréal, 2017: When I see Tagaq perform her newest album Retribution the following year, her introduction feels familiar. Again, her voice is soft, its tone casual. And there she is once more, this time draped in layer upon layer of magnificent red tulle. Speaking about the importance of the seal hunt to Inuit communities and the racism that has led to criticism of this practice, she begins in a beautiful pair of sealskin shoes, eventually kicking them off to sing. Her dress was made for her, she tells us, by an Indigenous fashion designer friend—red to commemorate Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women—and then, drawing our attention to the row of glittering gems that adorns the dress’s neckline, she tells us about her matrilineal line, geologically expressed and embroidered along the garment’s heart-shaped hem. What are we to make of these two ways of opening a performance? Tonally similar, both feel intimate, as if Tagaq were speaking directly to each audience member. Her words lack the presentational weight that sometimes accompanies such moments, side-stepping the anxiety found in the program bills of so many performances, that nervous impulse of didacticism that tries to shape a good-enough thematic and political container for the audience’s experience to cohere within. Tagaq’s invitation is something different: a mapping that drops clues about how to listen (and look) by constellating a sociopolitical geography of the North, one that moors and moves underneath her sonics and our listening (and looking). As part of the New York City audience of Tanya Tagaq in Concert with Nanook of the North—a musical performance in which she sings with and over Flaherty’s film, and the focus of this essay—I felt disoriented by her introduction. It was only later that I understood the aural and visual prism that she was trying to open up. Everything I saw and heard—in both cities—came to me through her opening words, subtly bending my experience of listening and looking into (political) shape. I also take Tagaq’s introductions as a methodological invitation to construct a historical weave that you, the reader, must pass through in ways that will not aggressively overshape your reading, but instead inflect your listening to my [End Page 46] listening of her performance. What follows is thus an echo of her practice, an invitation to think through and with the historical densities that accrue around her work and are inseparable from it. One of the challenges of this writing is the one taken up by the performance itself: how to be in and think across many times and places at once. For Tagaq—an Inuk throat singer, vocalist, musician, writer, and artist from Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktutiak...

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