Videographic, Musical, and Linguistic Partnerships for Decolonization: Engaging with Place-Based Articulations of Indigenous Identity and Wâhkôhtowin

Abstract

N’we Jinan, a group of young Indigenous artists who run a mobile production studio and an integrative arts studio, travel to different Indigenous communities, where they support youth in writing and recording music that involves the local community. N’we Jinan employs social media to articulate and protect Indigeneity through the sharing of Indigenous music videos, empowering youth to resist continued colonization. These videos serve to create a sense of connection in Indigenous communities in Turtle Island (Canada) as well as offer a means by which non-Indigenous listeners can learn about contemporary Indigenous cultures. Viewed in conjunction with Nunavut’s Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and the Northwest Territories’ Dene Kede and Inuuqatigiit, which provide a framework of traditional knowledge, values, and skills specific to Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic, the texts implicitly invite non-Indigenous listeners’ engagement in social justice activism as settler allies. The texts invite listening to and viewing the empowering songwriting and recording practices through the lens of social justice and wâhkôhtowin or kinship relations, which involves walking together (Indigenous and settler) in a good way and engaging with Bourdieu’s influential framework of cultural capital. The themes explored in the songs include cultural identity, language, and self-acceptance. The empowering songs of N’we Jinan are place-based articulations of identity that resist coloniality and serve as calls to action, creating embodied videographic, musical, and linguistic partnerships that serve as important articulations of Indigenous identity and which promote the decolonization of reading and listening practices and, by extension, education.