<i>Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska</i>, by Jessica Bissett Perea

In Sound Relations, Jessica Bissett Perea makes a persuasive and compelling case for “a more Indigenized sound studies” (p. 6) within American music historiographies. These historiographies remain stubbornly Eurocentric in their treatment of Indigenous Peoples and communities as legitimate only to the extent that they conform to colonial notions of an “authentic” past, negating the continuity of vibrant and dynamic forms of Indigenous expression in the present. Joining Native scholars from a multitude of disciplines, Bissett Perea is unequivocal in her call for a paradigmatic shift from “dehumanizing and objectifying research” to “projects with, by, and for Indigenous Peoples” (p. 31).Utilizing an extensive archive of recordings ranging from the 1950s to the present, Bissett Perea approaches Inuit music histories as “genealogies of practice” (p. 9) that span multiple musical genres and repertoires, from drum songs to hip-hop and from Indigenized hymn singing to funk. Eschewing musical and cultural compartmentalization, her approach is fundamentally relational, inviting readers to critically engage with the intersections of music, Indigeneity, and colonialism in the Americas through “a density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking” (p. 6). Invoking the “Sound of Eskimo” (p. 37), a corollary to Philip Deloria’s “Sound of Indian,”1 Bissett Perea masterfully teases out the persistent colonial fantasies that have dominated the public perception of and academic discourse on all manner of Indigenous expression across Indigenous communities the world over. Utilizing Robert J. Flaherty’s “ethnographic documentary” Nanook of the North (1922), Bissett Perea’s opening salvo illuminates how the film and its musical score were instrumental in solidifying homogenizing stereotypes of Inuit communities as “long ago and far away” (p. 91). Beginning with the film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), one of the first nondocumentary films to include accurate Inuit musicking, Nanook’s hold on settler perceptions of Native Alaskan communities began to wane. A number of Inuit and Iñupiaq filmmakers would follow, further disrupting the colonial gaze through films that center Inuit lifeways and displace sonic stereotypes by featuring contemporary musical genres, which have become powerful vehicles for Inuit expression.As Bissett Perea points out, through colonial “containment and measurement,” Indigenous legitimacy has been decided over these past centuries by settlers with a vested interest in erasing Indigenous presence and silencing Indigenous voices. Her central questions of “Who is Native American, who gets to decide?” (p. 81) get to the core of the systematic, post-contact displacement of Indigenous Peoples. While this displacement applies to Indigenous lands usurped by the federal government and extractive industries, it also includes the displacement of Indigenous identities, which in the eyes and ears of settler society belong (conveniently) to an illusory pre-contact past. By focusing on Inuit identities expressed in gospel, country, and folk recordings, Bissett Perea fleshes out forms of “audible Indigeneity” that remain hidden, “even from the stories Alaska Native Peoples tell ourselves about ourselves” (p. 89). This last statement sums up the complex and insidious nature of dominant settler narratives, with tendrils that slip in unnoticed and twine around the most intimate of Indigenous spaces—including the mind. Despite these intentionally restrictive narratives, Native Alaskan identities, both individual and collective, have continued to find fertile ground for expression.A prime example is the discography of the Shavings Family Band (Cup’ik), which Bissett Perea explores with Yup’ik musicians John Angaiak and Joe Paul to illustrate how contemporary forms of audible Indigeneity “amplify actual Inuit lived experiences” that represent “enduring structures of Indigeneity over the impermanence of settler colonial structures” (p. 91), as well as a “density of modern Indigeneity in Alaska” (p. 109). Indeed, living, breathing Indigenous Peoples and their communities have never been static. Long before European contact, they absorbed and reflected the human and other-than-human world around them. Whether using turntables, guitars, or seal-hide drums, structures of Indigeneity among Inuit communities and their Indigenous relatives around the world not only endure, they resound and re-sound.While making her case for a density of Indigeneity within recorded archives, Bissett Perea acknowledges that the range of Inuit expression contained therein represents multiple intersectionalities that lead to more questions, a necessary by-product of “tell[ing] a more complicated, more fully enumerated story than Alaska Native Peoples are typically afforded” (p. 142). A key part of that story is the resurgence of Inuit expression through songs, stories, and dances that Bissett Perea refers to as “traditioning,” a process by which deep-seated forms of Indigenous praxis are reanimated, representing another form of Indigenous modernity enacted with Indigenous agency and on Indigenous terms.To further elucidate this concept, Bissett Perea traces the remarkable story of the Yupiit resurgence anthem “Tarvarnauramken,” a contemporary song with roots in a sacred prayer or masked dance known as “tarvaryaraq.” Beginning in 1996 as a community-based Yupiit museum exhibit that saw fifty Yupiit masks returned to their home territory, a widely toured exhibition became a catalyst for the reawakening and performance of stories and songs that had become dormant in southwestern Alaskan villages. “Tarvarnauramken” was sung by Yup’ik men and women at every opening and closing of the exhibit, representing a “new” tradition derived from long-held cultural practices associated with ceremonies and the Yupiaq philosophy and worldview known as “Yuuyaraq.” From there, “Tarvarnauramken” found its way to the concert stage, where the Yupiit group Pamyua sang an a cappella, R&B, and gospel-infused version that cemented the song’s status as a “de facto Yupiaq anthem” (p. 153). Since then it has manifested in multiple contexts, including the performances of Nunamta, one of the first professional Yupiit dance groups. Along with the many Yup’ik individuals and groups who have since recorded and performed “Tarvarnauramken,” Nunamta and Pamyua perhaps best represent the song’s utility in transcending the restrictive and static notions of authenticity peddled by a long line of non-Native intellectual interlopers bent on keeping Native Alaskan Peoples relegated to an immovable past.In her conclusion, Bissett Perea suggests ways of bringing musically centered academic disciplines into the twenty-first century with regard to Indigenous musics, proposing “a series of new relational and radical methodologies, methods, and analytics” that amount to “a sonic Indigenous vernacular” (p. 243). With an emphasis on Indigenous resurgence and self-determination, these methodologies move past the tired, deficit-oriented tropes to the actual, lived experience of Indigenous musicians and culture-bearers. While these methodologies are inherently Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered, they do not preclude a non-Indigenous researcher from working in collaboration with Indigenous individuals and communities. What they do require, however, is an unsettling of modes of academic knowledge production, away from on and about to with, by, and for Indigenous Peoples, taking into account the myriad interrelations that constitute musical lives and prioritizing theories that are contextual and culturally informed, rather than imposed from the outside looking in. I would encourage all those interested in pursuing a more honest, comprehensive, and decolonized musicology to start with Sounding Relations. It’s a brilliant and dependable guide.

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