Sound Relations

<em>Sound Relations</em> delves into histories of Inuit musical life in Alaska to register the significance of sound as integral to self-determination and sovereignty. Offering radical and relational ways of listening to Inuit performances across a range of genres--from hip hop to Christian hymnody and<br>traditional drumsongs to funk and R&B --author Jessica Bissett Perea registers how a density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking from a vast archive of presence sounds out entanglements between structures of Indigeneity and colonialism. This work dismantles stereotypical understandings<br>of Eskimos Indians and Natives by addressing the following questions: What exactly is Native about Native music? What does it mean to sound (or not sound) Native? Who decides? And how can in-depth analyses of Native music that center Indigeneity reframe larger debates of race power and<br>representation in twenty-first century American music historiography? Instead of proposing singular truths or facts this book invites readers to consider the existence of multiple simultaneous truths a density of truths all of which are culturally constructed performed and in some cases<br>politicized and policed. Native ways of doing music history engage processes of sound worlding that envision otherwise beyond nation-state notions of containment and glorifications of Alaska as solely an extraction site for U.S. settler capitalism and instead amplifies possibilities for more just<br>and equitable futures.<br>