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 Indigenous self-determination and resurgence movements. The book offers relational and radical ways of listening to a vast archive of Inuit presence 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 invites readers to listen more critically to and for intersections of music, Indigeneity, and colonialism in the Americas. The research aims to dismantle stereotypical understandings of “Eskimos,” “Indians,” and “Natives” by considering how Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered analyses of Native musicking can reframe larger debates of race, Indigeneity, power, and representation in twenty-first-century American music historiography. Instead of proposing singular truths or facts, this book asks 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 advances a more Indigenized sound studies and a more sounded Indigenous studies that works to move beyond colonial questions of containment—“who counts as Native” and “who decides”—and colonial questions of measurement—“what exactly is ‘Native’ about Native music”—and toward an aesthetics of self-determination and resurgent world-making.
