“The history of Canadian classical composition is a colonial history. Since Confederation, composers have resourced the songs, stories, and cultural wealth of Indigenous Peoples as part of an expansive nationalist impulse to define an authentic Canadian music” (from the background section o the IAC Terms of Reference). From 1885-1950, the Potlach Ban made it illegal for Indigenous communities to perform songs and hold ceremony. Shortly after this, composers were encouraged to look for a “so called authentic Canadian sound”. Fostered by the government, people were pushed to do assimilation and theft of the material. There was misappropriation, but there was also annihilation of language and culture.The Canadian Music Centre was founded in 1959. It was established in the context of violent state policies targeting Indigenous communities including the Potlatch ban, the 60s scoop, and residential schools. These policies were not part of some dark chapter that has ended and is in the past, as injustice and violence against Indigenous people are ongoing: missing and murdered Indigenous women, the (disproportionate) incarceration of Indigenous people, the defunding of Indigenous-led education curriculum, and many more well documented forms of systemic violence.The CMC is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization in its governing structure and activities. The Accountability for Change Council was established in 2020 to support these goals. For more information about the CMC’s work for change, please visit Accountability for Change.
This seems to me to signal a political struggle between the First Nations and the Government of Canada with the government trying to provide symbolic relief of indigenous concerns without actually decolonizing Canada. What would that actually involve? Given that the history of French and British colonization of the Canadian part of North America is not actually going to be undone in any real way, the only thing left is symbolic gestures, of which the Indigenous Advisory Council project is one.
But back to my musical identity. I am descended, not from "settlers" exactly, but from lower-class English people forcibly deported to Canada in the mid-18th century for poaching. Yes, not all the criminals went to Australia. My family were poor prairie farmers and slowly moved westward until my branch ended up on Vancouver Island, as far west as you can go. I was the first member of my family to attend university. There I encountered the full force of the history of Western civilization in terms of art, music, philosophy and literature. In addition to my courses in music history and theory I also took German, linguistics and English. But I read extensively as well: Dante, The Divine Comedy and Copleston, History of Philosophy were high points. I also listened to a prodigious amount of music as for the first time I had access to a real listening library. I may have listened to some indigenous music, but it was drowned in a sea of music from Western Europe going back a thousand years as well as music from Japan, Indonesia, India, Africa and other places.
Looking back, the music of my actual ancestors, the jigs and reels that my mother played on the fiddle, were among the least influential on my musical development. My musical identity was constructed out of things that influenced me, music that I liked, in other words. Ravi Shankar and Javanese gamelan music were at least if not more important than English music. This process has continued throughout my life. Discovering the music of Stravinsky and Steve Reich were big milestones as well. Every musician in a sense, chooses their ancestors and influences. If you fall in love with the music of an obscure Saxon organist (Bach) there is not much you can do about it. Similarly, if I had fallen in love with the music of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, there would not be much I could do about that either and its influence would inevitably appear in my compositions.
This is why this whole project, and especially the underlying assumptions, just seems completely wrong-headed to me. It is a kind of symbolic genuflection and hence fake.
4 comments:
I'm not sure I'd say the issue is that the action is "fake". The Canadian arts patronage systems are different enough from what we have in the US that I suspect there's little overlap. There are 500 federally recognized tribes at least in the US and each of them handles things differently. The tribes do not necessarily like or get along with each other for that matter. There's not much of a pan-Indianist movement (my dad once told me there was never the equivalent of an MLK, Booker T, Frederick Douglass or the like for American Indians).
If Canada has more centralized funding and oversight for the arts then perhaps that oversight entails what an author at Tablet once called sumptuary codes. Whereas in the past sumptuary codes meant prohibiting that commoners wear purple sumptuary regulation efforts may be happening on the production and distribution side, i.e. cultural appropriation concerns in young adult literature a friend of mine has vented quite a bit of frustration about. Since you've mentioned your lower-class background, Bryan, and my background hasn't really been well-to-do myself, it may be teh sumptuary regulative element that rankles because boards and committees and institutions that declare things are prohibited can still have an aristocratic top-down function despite the social justice considerations. I'm not even entirely antipathetic to the realities of Native Americans being screwed over and having their musics and rituals banned being offset by giving them more input and opportunity for feedback but ... I know of some Native American authors who have pointed out that so few tribes in the US have First Amendments in their governing charters we can't drop our guard within creative communities as to whether or not tribal governments won't bring down the hammer. This was something that was pointed out back in 2019 in LARB that I mentioned a while back at WtH.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-dangers-of-the-appropriation-critique/
Good points. I don't know much about the situation with the tribes in the US. One practice that I find particularly hypocritical, and hence fake, in Canada (don't know how much it is done in the US) is the more and more common giving homage to the tribe who originally lived on the land where a university or conference is now situated. The "we acknowledge the hereditary right of the such-and-such tribe to the land we are on..." That is mere words, of course and there is no suggestion that the land will actually be given back.
lands are definitely not being given back but sometimes other things can be done. The UW here in WA state has made a point of adding Salish to the language department. Keeping the languages available to be learned rather than suppressing their use as was done in the past is something I would think liberals and conservatives could agree on. For that matter discovering what's now known as the Cascadian subduction zone happened because anthropologists canvased all Native American folk traditions about seismic catastrophes, something that could not have happened had the, ahem, progressives in the US of a century ago succeeded in their eugenicist interests in "saving the man by killing the Indian". Very few who have mastery of the Salish language are even alive now from what I understand but better late than never. I hear from some of my Native relatives that tribes have been working with fish and wildlife to regulate fishing and hunting seasons to preclude the species exterminations that happened on the East Coast. It's known that native salmon populations were fished to oblivion on the East Coast (part of why I detest Atlantic salmon because I grew up having literally native West Coast salmon enough that the farmed stuff bugs me). Native tribal leadership and government working together can have a lot of positive outcomes in other realms of life but it may be that in the arts they're going to stay a bit fraught. I think conservatives (i.e. fellow conservatives) should bear in mind that this is so recent a development that there's no point in shrieking too much over a process that has only kicked off in the last fifty years at best. The Edmund Burke conservative approach would seem to be that this kind of collaboration was overdue and we shouldn't be shocked if there are, so to speak, teething issues for this baby of a custom.
I do think, though, that the aristocratic element of prohibiting production rather than consumption should be kept in mind. If the shoe were on the other foot and the advisory committee were, say, all contemporary GOP Republicans ... . But I saw Ethan's observation about the advisory post hoc nature of the statements in the other thread. I think the first instinct artists should have is to have some concern but not flip out but then I live in the US and I'm reading local coverage on how people are concerned that the arts scenes in Seattle post-covid are still as yet a shadow of what they were.
Yes, for sure, preservation of Salish and other indigenous languages, consultation regarding environmental issues and the other things you mention should not be an issue. People of various political stripes can agree on that. Of course, these days, few seem to be looking for things we can agree on, but rather the opposite: things that can be used to cause political controversy.
Post a Comment