Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America

Revisioning Indigenous musicology

Winner of the 2020 Ruth A. Solie Award for Edited Collections from the American Musicological Society (AMS), which honors each year a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit published during the previous year in any language and in any country and edited by a scholar or scholars.

Winner of the 2020 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), which honors each year a book collection of ethnomusicological essays of exceptional merit edited by a scholar or scholars. In addition, co-editor Dylan Robinson received SEM's Helen Roberts Prize for his chapter contributed to Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America, "Speaking to Water, Singing to Stone: Peter Morin, Rebecca Belmore, and the Ontologies of Indigenous Modernity."

Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America is a collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States. The contributors explore the intersections between music, modernity, and Indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip-hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music. The essays coalesce around four main themes: innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange. Closely related topics include cosmopolitanism, hybridity, alliance studies, code-switching, and ontologies of sound. Featuring the work of both established and emerging scholars, the collection demonstrates the centrality of music in communicating the complex, diverse lived experience of Indigenous North Americans in the twenty-first century and brings ethnomusicology into dialogue with critical Indigenous studies.