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Histories of colonial cultural erasure, unsuccessful decolonisation or postcolonialism and rapid modernisation are typically seen as the challenges to sustaining Indigenous traditional musics (Harrison, in press). The Indigenous peoples of Canada have experienced colonial assimilationist policies of government and church, including residential schools that took children away from their families and forbade song, dance and language. These policies resulted in musics and even entire cultures being erased. Although there have been recent improvements in Scandinavia, similar kinds of discrimination happened where the traditional Sámi vocal form, joik (in pan-Sámi juoiggas) was long (and in some cases, still is) regarded as sinful, and Sámi children were forbidden to use their mother tongues at school (for example, from about 1850 to 1980 during Norway’s Fornorskning or Norwegianisation policy). In recent years, the Indigenous musics of Canada and the Nordic countries, among others, have reflected, articulated and interpellated sociocultural interrelations and politics (Diamond 2002; Diamond et al. 2018; Harrison 2009; Hilder 2012, 2015; Moisala 2007; Ramnarine 2009, 2017), and Indigenous artists have taken action on politicised issues through a range of contemporary and flourishing artistic expressions (Robinson and Martin 2016).
In socio-economically depressed urban areas, many musical programmes and projects are offered to the poor for free by community organizations, non-governmental and governmental organizations, and arts businesses, with funding from corporations, private foundations, churches, donations, governments, and concert tickets. In poor urban areas in Canada and other nation states with decaying systems of social welfare, or in non-welfare states, music making, music classes, music therapy, and musical performances including theatre, dance, and multimedia are activities within a larger series of services and goods offered by the organizations and institutions, and directed towards the well-being and survival of the poor. There are also musical rehearsals and performances that pay the poor. Such music projects’ day-to-day functionings, which are still in the early stages of being documented (Araújo 2008; Harrison 2008; Tan 2008), variously address the social deprivations that have come to define poverty, such as lack of health, livelihood sustainability, or social inclusion.
In urban contexts internationally, organizations, administrators, culture workers, artists and academics put vast effort into facilitating music and other arts in attempt to alleviate “poverty.” Poverty, according to recent definitions, refers to a broad array of social deprivations. These include deprivations of entitlements, which are widely understood as rights, and deprivations of human development, of which capability development is an example. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic field research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, this book asks: Which kinds of capabilities are developed via music initiatives in the Downtown Eastside, and, particularly, what is their relationship with human rights? Are specific human rights promoted, strengthened, threatened, violated, and respected in music-making by urban poor?
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