Incorporating Inheritance and Complementarity

This chapter highlights the poetics and politics of Indigenous People’s dense inheritances around the turn of the twenty-first century and how these genealogies can be translated as complementary through sound. It focuses on the musical output of the Anchorage-based “tribal funk” band Pamyua, and how their distinctive sounds engage lived intersections between Blackness and Indigeneity. The author outlines how their business acumen challenges racialized gatekeeping mechanisms of the music industrial complex endemic to “blood quantum” and “one-drop” ideologies, a colonial pairing of what one might call “sound quantum” with earlier discussions of “audible Indigeneity.” The author offers an analysis and musicographic model that seeks to better represent the priorities and processes of Pamyua’s relational and radical soundwork, through which multiple densities are navigated and transformed. Pamyua’s work expands the ways in which we hear Yupiit masks and drumsongs as always already modern, both in Yukological and Eurological understandings of the phrase.