All the Eagles and the Ravens in the House Say Yeah: (Ab)original Hip-Hop, Heritage, and Love

Abstract

This paper explores how hip-hop artists mobilize sound and style to manage loss, build new futures, and create resilient communities. Embracing an "untraditional" medium, young people contest settler violence and hegemonies of shame by expressing unique, politicized possibilities of being Indigenous, or what I am calling (ab)originality: a style of being first, fresh, and foremost. Heritage is an act of reverent rebellion: an individual honors continuity, but defies the trappings of tradition, which shackle Indigeneity to the geography and the customs of the past. Through love and creativity, artists claim visibility, voice, and everywhere.

Radical Traversals

“…Culturally we can see how this set of sounds ruptures notions of Native peoples as subjects of the past and erased from modern time (Amsterdam, 2013).…”

“…To contextualize my analysis, I will introduce the key methods and theoretical literature on Indigenous art fugitivity, current scholarship working at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, Black diaspora studies, and sound studies to give an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches. Many Indigenous and Native American scholars point out the importance of creativity and art production for actualizing decolonial knowledge that is always already present (Robinson, 2019;Recollet, 2016;Amsterdam, 2013). Just as challenging colonial power and troubleshooting social problems does not belong to any one discipline, Indigenous theorizations and critiques are not localized to one configuration.…”

The Settler Complex: An Introduction

“…As Amsterdam quotes MC Red Cloud, "You know no matter where you're at, whether you're in Los Angeles or whether you're in freaking Saskatoon, a train will run through your town covered in graffiti and that' s hip hop." 59 Part participation, part observation (you can't write like this without being part of hip-hop), Amsterdam's chapter deftly repudiates the Scylla that hip-hop that isn't Black can only be derivative, while simultaneously brushing off the Charybdis of an arthritically frozen concept of Native tradition (itself a symptom of Edenic thinking). Amsterdam adapts Derrida to proclaim that taking on heritage is an act of reverent rebellion: an individual honors elements of a past, but defies the limitations of "tradition" by claiming hip-hop as an expression of Native heritage, defying categorization as resistance or accommodation, allowing an individual the utility and mobility of choice, strategy, and play.…”