Healing through Geography: A Spatial-Learning Analysis and Praxis

Learning takes place in and across settings. In this conceptual piece, a spatial-learning praxis is presented to understand geographic trauma to invoke healing from trauma through. I begin by providing a context of the links between oppression and trauma. I then highlight how it persists for learners and the consequences trauma has for students of color. I then build off of critical pedagogy, learning theory, Black feminism, Black geographies, and Indigenous studies to describe a form of learning and transformation that is dedicated to elements of healing centered learning. I briefly review these conceptual foundations as a preface to introducing a framework of healing centered learning and its components grounded in four anchors including (in no particular order): (a) learning and identity (b) geography (c) and oppression and trauma. Understanding geo-onto-epistemologies allows for mechanisms for learning to move past resilience and into healing, sustaining change over time. I conclude with learning and the applications to heal identities through the design of learning environments and spatial analysis.

Supporting Indigenous Education From a Distance

As COVID-19 swept the globe, it transformed the way people access information. This has been both challenging and metamorphic for libraries worldwide, particularly those serving indigenous people. Indigenous education has been severely impacted by the pandemic. When the pandemic swept the globe and many countries went into “lockdown,” users were not allowed to visit the physical facilities of libraries and the collections become inaccessible. This chapter is a case study about the adjustment of collection strategies to serve the needs of students in an indigenous studies program during the pandemic. This chapter aims to capture the challenges encountered at a regional-focused collection, the impacts to an indigenous studies program, the adjusting collection strategies to meet the needs of the program, and key lessons learned. The selected case is a regional-focused collection in a research library on Guam.

The issue is moot: Decolonizing art/artifact

This article seeks to step back from the long-standing debate between art and artifact—aesthetics and science-- understood as terms that reference central concerns of the quintessentially modern Western disciplines of art history and anthropology. In their landmark edited volume The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers explored the growing convergences exhibited by the concerns and methods of practitioners of the two disciplines, both in the academy and the museum. By training our attention on contemporary artworlds—understood as systems-- they illuminated the exchanges of aesthetic and conceptual ideas and forms that have brought Western and non-Western arts into shared discursive and real spaces. Yet in the quarter century since the book’s publication there has been a noticeable retreat from attempts by the proponents of visual studies and an expanded visual anthropology to actualize disciplinary convergences. The boundaries that separate art and anthropology have not been dissolved. Art historians and anthropologists continue to ask different questions and to support different regimes of value. From the author’s vantage point in a settler society currently directing considerable energies to institutional projects of decolonization the old debates have rapidly been receding as a new ‘third term’ – Indigenous Studies-- intrudes itself on the well trodden terrain. Not (yet) definable as a discipline but, rather, maintaining itself as an orientation, Indigenous Studies nevertheless renders the earlier disciplinary debates moot. Place, rather than time-based, collective rather than individual, holistic rather than either disciplinary or interdisciplinary, Indigenous Studies formulations exert decolonizing pressures on institutions that are rapidly mounting. Using Anishinaabeg: Art and Power, a show in 2017 at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), as a case study, this article shows how an exhibition moved representation away from the art/artifact dichotomy as well as from contested strategies of ‘inclusion’ and pro forma recognitions of ‘Indigenous ontology’ toward a genuine paradigm shift.

'Introduction'

The aim and scope of the Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies (JACANZS) is to publish articles in various disciplines (history, politics, literature, law, anthropology, and Indigenous studies) on one or more of the following countries: Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand, with a core focus on articles that are comparative in their geographic remit, for example Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, or Australia and Canada. The creation of the journal responds to a lack of journals that collectively publish across the fields of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand studies from multi and interdisciplinary perspectives. It also followed the creation of the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Studies Network (ACNZSN) to reflect the work and membership of the network.

Introduction

This book argues that Native ways of doing music history requires relational and radical ways of listening to and for the density of Indigeneity. To advance a more Indigenized sound studies and a more sounded Indigenous studies asks researchers to prioritize analytics of density and audibility, and to hear performances of Indigeneity intimately intertwined articulations of Peoples (ways of being), places/spaces (ways of knowing), and projects (ways of doing). When Indigeneity is understood as more than simply the “condition of being Indigenous,” it becomes possible to emphasize structures of Indigeneity and to operationalize Indigenous logics, or what one might call Indigelogics. Indigelogical ways of doing music history are some of many ongoing projects seeking to unsettle and decolonize dominant narratives, and reframe larger debates of race, Indigeneity, power, and representation in twenty-first-century American music historiography. Sound Relations offers Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered terms of engagement as pathways to resurgent world-making and more equitable futures for all human and more-than-human kin.

Sound Relations

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.

Conclusion

The conclusion is general and theoretical in scope and outlines the book’s primary methodological contribution, which is that an Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered ways of doing music history refuses dehumanizing and objectifying research on or about Indigenous Peoples by demanding that researchers reorient themselves toward more equitable and resurgent world-making projects with, by, and for Indigenous Peoples. First, research with Indigenous Peoples must engage dense constellations of relationalities in ways that keep us receptive and responsible to our human and more-than-human kin. Second, research by Indigenous Peoples circulates radical methods and ways of knowing that are deeply rooted in and routed through networks of places and spaces. And thirdly, research for Indigenous Peoples centers Indigelogics or analytics for ways of doing that advance more equitable and resurgent world-making projects. To do music studies with, by, and for Indigenous Peoples requires performative juxtapositions—a bringing together and keeping apart—of the priorities and processes of two broad research areas—music and sound studies and Native American and Indigenous studies. Asking Indigeneity questions of the former reveals a significant number of densification projects required to unsettle dominant modes of Eurocentric and Eurological knowledge production in academic research. And listening to and for more acoustically tuned structures in the latter help advance new systems and metrics beyond those offered by heteropatriarchal and white supremacist colonial nation-states.

Knowledge versus Education in the Margins: An Indigenous and Feminist Critique of Education

This article highlights the perceptions and expectations of knowledge that many people, including educators and policy makers, take for granted. Our focus of understanding is Indigenous studies and gender studies. Our aim is to show how modern education undermines these fields of studies. We use an autoethnographic method, reflecting more than 75 years as pupils/students and more than 90 years as educators. We have carefully chosen narratives of exposure to knowledge outside the educational system, as well as narratives of limitations posed upon us by the educational system. This narrative approach makes it possible for us to investigate and discuss our grief about areas of knowledge that society cries for, but the educational system continuously finds ways to resist. Our conclusion is that crucial knowledge is located outside the educational system, where individuals, groups, and communities cherish, protect, and guard knowledge that the educational system marginalises or excludes. As this knowledge is fundamental for life, our message is that the educational system needs to re-evaluate its strategies to stay relevant.