Sustainability and Indigenous Aesthetics: Musical Resilience in Sámi and Indigenous Canadian Theatre

Abstract

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).