“Where Are You From?” Asian Americans on Indigenous Lands

I am writing from the traditional homelands of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe just north of Redding, California. It's past 11 p.m. after a long hot day, and Winnemem Wintu Tribal members and supporters are still chatting in small groups close to rows of long tables illuminated by strings of lights on a nearby fence. We are gathered in service of salmon.Winnemem Wintu oral histories recount salmon giving their voice to Winnemem ancestors in exchange for the Winnemem's promise always to speak for them. The relationship between Winnemem Wintu and Chinook salmon, or nur in the Winnemem Wintu language, extends past voice. “Whatever happens to the salmon happens to us,” says Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk. Currently there are no adult winter-run Chinook salmon in the McCloud River, and there are fewer than a hundred and twenty Winnemem Wintu Tribal members. It was the completion of the Shasta Dam in 1945 that drowned Winnemem Wintu homes, cemeteries, ancestral villages, and other sacred sites. Similarly, it was the Shasta Dam that made it impossible for winter-run Chinook salmon to travel all the way upstream to their spawning grounds.Winnemem Wintu are now bringing the salmon back. Since 2016, Chief Caleen Sisk, aided by Tribal members and other Indigenous and non-Indigenous women organizers, has been organizing Run4Salmon, a prayerful journey undertaken by foot, bicycle, horse, and boat that traces the salmon's historic and future route from the headwaters of the Winnemem Waywaket (McCloud River) all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This journey is itself a way of bringing the salmon back. We—a heterogeneous “we,” those of us on Run4Salmon—are preparing the way, the route for the salmon to come back. At Run4Salmon the understanding is that we lay down prayers with each step that we take, with each dip of our paddles into the water. Everything that we do on Run4Salmon, including preparing food, taking down camp, singing, telling stories, and possibly even writing, is in service of the prayer for the salmon to return.And the salmon are coming back. Five days ago, as part of a ceremony at the Winnemem village Wayel Xopormos, 20,000 fertilized salmon eggs were put into incubation tanks on the McCloud River. In the words of journalist Marc Dadigan, this “was the result of a collaboration between the Winnemem Tribe and state and federal agencies, spurred by fears that a third consecutive year of climate change-enhanced drought could lead to another mass killing of winter-run salmon eggs and infants in the hot water of the Sacramento River [into which the McCloud River feeds].” This was a significant event: this was the first time that winter-run Chinook salmon eggs had been in the McCloud River since the Shasta Dam was built. When they hatch, the salmon will swim out of the incubation tanks. When they are bigger and ready to move downstream, they will be transported to the other side of the dam so that they can swim down the Sacramento River to the Pacific Ocean.1Two days later, following the salmon's route, we took turns kayaking on the Shasta reservoir over the flooded Winnemem villages and sacred sites. As I was working on this piece hunched over my laptop on a top bunk in the houseboat following the kayakers, Dr. Dennie, a Winnemem Wintu elder and family physician, came up to me to chat. We talked about imposter syndrome in our respective fields, about not being Brown enough or White enough, and about what I was writing. “You keep talking about place,” he said, “Maybe you're meant to be here because of these salmon eggs going in the McCloud River. We sing these songs to show the salmon where they are supposed to go.” Chief Caleen had said something similar at the ceremony two days before, “We are asking the river to receive these eggs, and putting down prayers in the old way so they have a fighting chance. We're praying that these fish will remember how to swim in the glacial waters they haven't experienced (for 80 years).”2“Yes, write about this every chance you get! People need to know,” Chief Caleen's son, Michael Preston, encourages me as he passes by the strings of lights and the long tables and takes a seat on a metal chair beside me. So, as I write on Winnemem homelands, I want to offer in service of the salmon not only this introduction, but the following reflection on Asian Americans on Indigenous lands. I offer it also in service of the work that we do as scholars of American music that we might (re)orient to place in the best possible way we can. Here are my thoughts in progress, meant to be read as my thinking in a particular moment, with the understanding that this thinking will change, with the invitation that you might join me.Last summer, I updated my School of Music faculty biography to begin thus: “A settler of South Asian descent, I was born and raised in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) on Treaty 6 territory.” This introduction of myself is, I suspect, at once too transparent and too opaque for many who stumble across it: why announce one's ancestry up front? Why this confusing language around place?Indeed, for a long time I resisted identifying my background explicitly, though it was not a secret and though some can identify “Nadia” as an Arabic first name and “Chana” as a Punjabi last name. Like many people of color or “visible minorities,” as the Canadian government calls us, I had learned a tactic: answer the often-hostile “where are you from?” question with, simply, “Edmonton.” In other words, I would refuse to explain my brownness to questioners—often White questioners, often in Western art music contexts—and instead insist on my belonging by naming Edmonton, Alberta, as my birthplace. I wanted recognition. Emphasizing that I had come from here and not elsewhere was my way of pushing for that recognition. I was just as Canadian as my hazel-eyed childhood best friend whose parents immigrated from Ireland around the same time as mine immigrated from England. I had every much a “right” to sing Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs, Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, and even Schubert lieder as the Euro-Canadians around me.Absent from my context of striving was, of course, an understanding of Edmonton both as a place with long histories that stretch back before the trading post Fort Edmonton was established in the late eighteenth century, and as a place inhabited by people who are connected with those long histories. Over the past twelve years, I have been trying to feel and think about where I am from, where I am, and where I have been—to think about place—without centering the settler state or aspiring to be accepted in White spaces. For me, as a non-White settler, the two go hand in hand.The place where I grew up is the traditional territory of Cree, Métis, Dene, Stoney, Saulteaux, and Niitsitapi peoples. To acknowledge this is also to acknowledge a deep unmastery at odds with the expertise I am expected to embody as a scholar. To put it bluntly, I cannot elaborate the histories (or presents!) of Cree, Métis, Dene, Stoney, Saulteaux, and Niitsitapi peoples in amiskwaciwâskahikan. And I am not sure that is the point. I do, however, think that for those of us who do not know, it does something to stay in the not-knowing and in the reorientation together, especially in the domain of American music scholarship. And I do know that, as Zoe Todd and A.M. Kanngieser remind us, “Place, a nonhuman being is sentient and active” and that “one place cannot stand in for another, as each place is formed through ongoing reciprocal relations.”3 Even just in naming communities with deep “ongoing reciprocal relations” to the place where I was born, I feel a river within me changing its course.4 Even in my comparatively shallow knowledge, I can ask: what are my relations to amiskwaciwâskahikan as we shape each other? What are my relations to amiskwaciwâskahikan as it is shaped by Cree, Métis, Dene, Stoney, Saulteaux, and Niitsitapi peoples? What are my responsibilities as someone who was born and raised here?In this expanded context, my relationships to White settlers and whiteness are also no longer at the center, but rather a smaller strand in a larger ecology of relationships. In this expanded context, I can see another version of the “where are you from” question. It is a generous “tell me of yourself.” In this expanded context, to reveal my family's migration histories, as I have learned to do from Indigenous scholars and interlocutors, is to situate myself in relation to the particular Indigenous lands I came to live on. To answer the “where are you from” question, especially unprompted, as in a faculty biography, also risks “legibility” in many contexts: a School of Music, for example. But, in other contexts like here at Run4Salmon where we first introduced ourselves foregrounding our ancestry, it is easily legible. In other words, what is often read by dominant settler publics as an entrée into a colorful immigration story consumed as an amuse-bouche for voracious imaginations can become something else entirely. It can become part of naming the responsibilities I have to people and land.Ultimately, I understand those responsibilities to include following Indigenous leadership to return “Indigenous lands to Indigenous hands,” as is happening in the Bay Area via the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.5 But I am still learning how to fulfill these responsibilities where I am. I have moved so much in my adult life, and my family has been in motion since the late eighteen hundreds.I now live in Madison, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Teejop, the ancestral territory of the Ho-Chunk Nation. Teejop means “four lakes” in the Ho-Chunk language, and I have been living and writing some parts of this piece in between two of these lakes, Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. Following an 1832 treaty, the Wisconsin and U.S. governments kept trying to force Ho-Chunk out of their homelands. But all of the stories I hear keep emphasizing that Ho-Chunk people kept returning and returning to this place. A place where manoomin or wild rice used to grow in the lakes. Where earthworks, many of them burial mounds made thousands of years ago, marked and still mark this as a place of great significance. Ho-Chunk returned again and again, even as they knew that the risk was high, and the act could (and often did) cost them their lives. As Aaron Bird Bear, the director of tribal relations at UW–Madison, says, they loved the land so much that they kept returning. They are still here today. This is the story that I keep holding. But I am also aware, especially here on the Winnemem Wintu homelands as I follow the leadership of Chief Caleen Sisk, that I do not have relationships with Ho-Chunk people.When I stand on the banks of Lake Mendota, imagining the languages that this lake has heard, the things that this lake has seen, I bring my ancestors’ and my histories with me. I bring also the practices formed through the many places—Gujarat, Punjab, Dar es Salaam, London, Edmonton, Vancouver, Chicago, Berkeley—that my ancestors and I passed through. My histories, personal and ancestral, are part of my emerging relations. Through me, they have something to do with here, too.These histories and a desire to think with others who have similar histories are what get me to Asian American Studies. There is a tension between “Asian American” and “Asian American Studies,” and a further tension that the category “Asian American” holds within itself. Kandice Chuh advocates for “strategic anti-essentialism” being the “common ethos underwriting the coherency of the field,”6 while Deborah Wong invites us to think of “Asian American” as a “pan-ethnic gesture. . . that is a coalitional grouping, not an erasure of history or difference.”7 These tensions and the commitment to incommensurability that undergirds them are particularly exciting to me when I think about the “American” part of “Asian American.” As I name “America,” I understand via Lisa Lowe that “it is necessary to conceive settler colonialism, slavery, indenture, imperial war, and trade together, as braided parts of a world process.”8 Within that world process, even as I've artificially bracketed off everything except settler colonialism, I want to hold “Asian American”—be it a form of critique, an identity category, a coalition, a strategic essentialism—as a precious, spacious, porous, relational category committed to a deep interrogation of its commitments to so-called America.There is a passage in Shadows in the Field, an edited volume about ethnomusicological fieldwork, where Deborah Wong talks about her responses to watching taiko and then cautions the reader, “If you are not Asian American and perhaps have had a similar response to seeing taiko performed, your response doesn't contradict or negate mine. It's not impossible that your subjectivity and mine have points of overlap, but our responses are not, and can't be, equivalent.”9 I hesitate to claim Asian Americanness in the way that I think Wong means, but I did feel a certain joy reading this! I think that the same lack of equivalency or commensurability is true when it comes to our imbrications with settler colonialism and our relationships to Indigenous lands and peoples.The work of being here well, for us, Asian Americans, is particular. Many of us bring knowledges of other places, relations with movement, relations with travel. I was talking with a Chinese Canadian friend who spoke about how she feels that someone invited her “here” (Canada) as an immigrant and that she can't shake the feeling that her being here is conditional, that she owes something. Though she was talking about the settler state, the language that she was using was so strikingly close to the language of being a guest or being on someone else's territory: Indigenous territory. To be very clear: centering a settler state and centering Indigenous land and leadership are very different. But, to us, as people who have never been centered here, this might feel similar until we practice otherwise. There is a complex and double move, and it may take centering in our own spaces and communities to be able to hold this kind of double move well. I want to practice together, and with all of you reading who may not be Asian American, to come into good relations with this place, perhaps more amiswaciwâskahikan, Teejop, or even Turtle Island than America. It is from this place that we can begin again (and again) to think about American music.July 15, 2022

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