Indigenous language and naming as analytics

To understand what sensate sovereignty wants requires attending to Indigenous language and decolonial forms of writing. Within a North American academic industrial complex, readers must remain vigilant to the ways in which our work relies on the English language to translate and communicate dense and complex ways of being, knowing, and doing for thousands of Indigenous languages, and thus worldviews. Indeed, Robinson's theorization of ‘Hungry Listening’ deftly illustrates how incommensurable terms of engagement shape and inform understandings of sensate sovereignty as encounters between perceptual logics, particularly as they are contained within and between the European-American worldviews expressed in the English language and xwélmexw (Stó:lō) worldviews expressed in the Halq'eméylem language.

‘Hungry Listening’ is rooted in and routed through two concepts. First, Hungry stems from shxwelítemelh (adj. for settler or white person's methods/things; lit. ‘starving person’), a xwélmexw name for and description of xwelítem (‘white settler’) states of being that emerge from xwélmexw histories about their experiences of ‘starving people’, the grossly underprepared xwelítem who arrived in large numbers across the northwest region during the mid-nineteenth century gold rush. Second, Listening, xwélalà:m (lit. ‘listening’), describes ‘a xwélmexw-specific sensory orientation’ (2) related to practices of xwlálám (‘to witness and listen’) (71), an aural ‘practice of gathering that takes place in non-goal-oriented ways’ where ‘the work of listening is not predicated on use-value or the drive to accumulate knowledge’ (71–2). Taken together, Robinson explains how shxwelítemelh xwélalà:m (‘hungry listening’) is a state of appropriative consumption or state of starving desire, where ‘to be starving is to be overcome with hunger in such a way that one loses the sense of relationality and reflexivity in the drive to satisfy that hunger. Hungry listening consumes without awareness of how the consumption acts in relationship with those people, the lands, the waters who provide sustenance’ (53). In naming a predicament experienced by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples alike, especially those of us trained in music studies (performance, composition, research, education, and more), Robinson reminds readers that this uncomfortable juxtaposition of perceptual orientations is irreducible to race: that ‘hungry listening’ cannot and should not simply be glossed as ‘listening through whiteness’ (3).

Robinson advances his own intent to reveal normative and unmarked ways of doing historiography (e.g., terms of engagement, language, and structures of writing) through acts of ‘writing redress’ (11). His discussions of inclusionary music demonstrate how Indigenous songs, and in some cases Indigenous performers, are overwhelmingly desired and framed as resources to be appropriated, mined, or extracted, and often with the purpose of sounding musical nationalisms in the service of settler colonial nation-states. Although naming extractivism is a start towards disciplinary redress, Robinson calls for readers to reorient ‘the normative places, flows, and relationships’ in which we share knowledges and experiences of music and sound (15). Some of the most distinctive aspects of Robinson's demonstrations of sensate sovereignty throughout the book involve his use of poetics, emotion, polemics, and provocations, a heightened and felt affectiveness that he acknowledges is more familiar to critical race and gender studies scholars and largely unheard of in music criticism. He draws on the ‘discursive resonance of writing affect’, an affective clarity which includes strategic uses of evoking repulsion, alienation, resentment, and anger (16–17).

Robinson's foregrounding of event scores and discussions of intersubjective encounters (subject–subject–space) function as forms of what he explains as sovereign writing that emphasizes ‘rhythm[s] at odds with standardized art-critical modes of writing, and its disruption of syntax and Western structures of argument and ordering of thought’ and through ‘oratorical and performative claim[s] to documenting Indigenous history’ (67). While some readers may dismiss Robinson's critical affective writing strategies as ‘bad writing’ or as a ‘weird artist-thing’ (68) – or worse, as only issues that Indigenous Peoples need to grapple with – such dismissals prove the effectiveness of agonistic and performative writing as a means to unsettle academia as usual, strategies and forms that can be taken up by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers alike. These moments of discomfort function as ‘written, aesthetic or sensory blockades’ or perceptual impasses, which ‘sends perception off in other directions and slows hungry listening's ravenous appetite in service of increased self-reflection toward one's listening habits, privilege, and biases’ (72–3). If readers feel moments of anger, resentment, disgust, or disbelief, they might closely examine, sit with, and be open to the origins of those feelings, perhaps as a dissonance within one's own system of understanding.

Robinson's resonant theories and frameworks of Indigenous desire and resurgence do not begin in refusal to colonial logics – both in terms of language and writing practices – but ‘instead through Indigenous logics’ (65). A sensate sovereignty that uplifts Indigenous Peoples’ ways of being, knowing, and doing wants to be guided by Indigenous priorities and on Indigenous Peoples’ terms.

Critical listening positionality as reorientation

To counter Hungry Listening, or colonial forms of starvation and desire, readers must come away knowing–feeling their responsibility to continually ask ‘who am I in relation to music/sound and space’? In Music and Sound Studies research contexts, these antecedents give rise to consequent questions including (but not limited to): Who is asking, and who can ask? What is being asked, and what can be known? How is the asking taking place, and how can asking be done? Thus to understand what sensate sovereignty requires begins with reorienting one's positionality to better encapsulate a density of relations with human and more-than-human subjectivities.

Robinson's theorizing of ‘critical listening positionality’ and its demand that we start from and explicitly recognize our own positionalities is one of his most important interventions. He posits that critical listening positionality engages self-reflexive and haptic processes that question ‘how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and cultural background intersect and influence the way we are able to hear sound, music, and the world around us’ (10) and ‘frame the moment of contact between listening body and listened-to sound’ (11). While the practice of relating one's positionality may seem familiar to readers from Indigenous, Black, and Peoples of Colour (IBPOC) communities in general, and from Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) more specifically, I regularly experience the reality of how this practice is taken for granted in my predominantly non-IBPOC populated classroom and campus spaces, as well as across professional society gatherings and publications. As Robinson notes, his work responds to a significantly larger conversation borne from controversies across music studies (18–21); the #AMSSOWHITE debate being perhaps most familiar to readers here. In this specific context, Hungry Listening is a welcome intervention that centres an otherwise missing component of emerging equity and inclusion work across the professional music societies: the presence of Indigenous Peoples, logics (epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies), and projects, such as Robinson's advocacy for critical listening positionality and sensate sovereignty.

Regarding positionality, while Robinson gestures towards his own throughout the book – as a xwélmexw, xwelítem, swíyeqe was te má:l (‘a Stó:lō, settler, cis-gendered man and father’) raised outside of what is now called Vancouver, British Columbia ‘at a distance from my mother's family in Skwah’ (3) – he strategically pivots to and from his own centre to operationalize discourses of Indigeneity that more fully situate his work in relation to the broad range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and intellectuals with whom he and his book are engaged. For example, in Chapter 1, Robinson reflects on how we can better understand forms of attentiveness and action as assertions of Indigenous sovereignty through a detailed explanation of his own processes as a guest living and working on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe lands – currently known as Kingston, Ontario and occupied by Queens University – as an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts. He explains how critical listening positionality emerges from intersections of knowing–feeling, or between forms of attentiveness. As one who lives and works as a guest on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe lands, Robinson offers an example of ‘guest listening’ (53), which features two intersecting Indigenous forms of attentiveness: his own (xwélmexw) from home (S'ohl temexw) with Kanien'kehá:ka (‘Mohawk’) Elders in Kingston, Ontario. At university gatherings, Robinson listens between the Mohawk ‘Thanksgiving Address’ or ‘the words that come before all else’ – which welcomes guests to their territory and acknowledges all human and more-than-human beings – and his own understanding of xwélalà:m (‘witness attentiveness’) – stemming from the responsibility of witnesses in longhouse work who are asked to document knowledges and histories shared in both intellectual and affective forms. Yet this ‘both/and’ formulation comes with an attendant caveat that ‘critical listening positionality thus understands that in entering Indigenous sound territories as guests, those who are not members of the Indigenous community … may always be unable to hear these specific assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, which is not to be understood as a lack that needs to be remedied but merely an incommensurability that needs to be recognized’ (52–3). To unsettle our forms of attention and attentiveness requires a refusal of settler fixity and an uplifting of the mobility, flexibility, and range of Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing.

From an awareness of and engagement with one's critical listening positionality (CLP) as one of many, as one CLP always already in motion and in relation to a density of CLPs, Robinson reminds readers that there are no easy ‘apps’ or ‘filters’ for taking action on one's CLP, for what he calls listening otherwise. Rather, to decolonize perception and listening will require different strategies for different Peoples; it requires listeners to unlearn and question what the act of listening is, and to instead listen otherwise to what listening could be.Footnote ² Robinson appeals for developing new forms of ‘listening-in-relation’(51), an act that occurs between listener and listened-to, as well as ‘layered listening’ (58) that entails ‘processes of oscillation’ (60–1) to hear and sense the varied strata of our individual positionalities. The work of listening otherwise may also require ‘written, aesthetic or sensory blockades’ (72) or perceptual impasses, such as the ‘writing Indigenous space’ section (27–36) for Indigenous readers only. At its core, Hungry Listening demands readers go several steps further, beyond theoretical contemplation of one's CLP to commit to following through and acting on our responsibilities and accountabilities to Indigenous Peoples.

Robinson explains settler colonial listening positionality as normative and unmarked ‘state[s] of perception’ rooted in privileged ‘structures of certainty’ (10), both of which enact forms of epistemic violence against ‘other’ perceptions and structures that do not fit. Ultimately, Chapter 1 begins by contextualizing colonial imperatives (particularly in what is now known as Canada) to civilize, settle, and ‘fix’ attention and perception in ways that hindered Indigenous Peoples’ mobility, range, and flexibility (also derided as savage, wild, restless, and unruly).

Rather than dwell on prescriptions of who is (or is not) a settler, which is a conversation outside the scope of this book, Robinson moves to considerations of ‘how settler listeners might learn to identify aspects of – and then improvise with – their listening positionality’ (62). In terms of how non-Indigenous Peoples might or ought to operationalize speaking about one's positionality, simply recognizing one's positionality as a ‘settler’ is a useful starting point. Yet Robinson points readers to Sara Ahmed's critique of ‘non-performative’ utterances (39) to remind readers how positionalities such as ‘settler’ and ‘Indigenous’ are not labels one can claim to mark ways of being (identities), but instead involve one's simultaneous attention to ways of knowing (logics) and, more importantly, ways of doing (practices) or one's responsibility for taking substantive action. Furthermore, Robinson reminds readers to avoid imprecise ‘static constructs’ and opt for articulating the more nuanced particularities of one's positionality, for example, by discussing the specific orientations of intersectional queer, immigrant, refugee, and diasporic settler subjects (39).

Given the numerous historic and ongoing devastations perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples by former government-run and church-operated residential schools, I want to intentionally slow the pace of this review here to mark this moment in history, or the time of this writing, where the remains of our relative's bodies are literally being unearthed in unmarked graves on sites of former residential schools across North America, and in the best case scenario community members are finding ways to bring these relatives home for proper cultural burials.Footnote ³ We all need to sit with Robinson's discussion of how colonial containments and surveillances also occupied the sound worlds of Indigenous Peoples – ‘wholesale replacement of listening to voices and song of beloved siblings and kin with hymnody, English language, and bells’ (40). Robinson's work here and in his co-edited volume, Arts of Engagement (2016), demands attention to ‘formations of listening guided by settler and Indigenous positionality’, including ‘practices shaped through processes of state subjectification (official multiculturalism) and “educational reform” (missionization, residential schools, university music programs)’ (37).Footnote ⁴ In this way, what sensate sovereignty requires are reclamations of Indigenous Peoples’ humanity in the face of centuries of dehumanization. In this way, Hungry Listening offers sensate examples of Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's dual explanation of ‘enduring Indigeneity’. First, Robinson's work demonstrates how sensate structures of Indigeneity endure despite our assumed absence – Indigenous Peoples and songs resist and persist despite attempts to disappear our bodies and knowledges. Second, Robinson's work demonstrates how music and sound studies, which are overwhelmingly structured by settler colonial logics, endures Indigeneity – forms of endurance that require grappling with decisions to enact meaningful and structural changes.Footnote ⁵ As intellectuals engaging with this book, readers could consider how music and sound studies can more purposefully and intentionally make space for anti-colonial theories, methods, and projects – a dual proposition of both/and, not either/or, that does not attempt to integrate or ‘fit’ Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centred ways of doing sensate studies into EuroAmerican structures. Music and sound studies must instead cede disciplinary grounds for IBPOC logics and structures to stand on equal terrain, a rehumanizing project that respects the incommensurability of a dense array of structures that are irreducible and impossible to collapse into or elide over one another.

Sensate sovereignty as densities of action

Rather than understanding listening as passive and solely ear-centred, Robinson demands that practices of listening be put to use through actions and accountabilities against reconciliation and inclusionary politics. To understand what sensate sovereignty does requires refusing easy definitions of music composition, performance, research, and arts presenting practices as producing ‘object[s] for aesthetic contemplation’ (8). While Robinson writes primarily with and for the particular structures of Indigeneity and settler colonialism as they operate in what is currently known as Canada, and between First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples and non-Indigenous Canadian composers, it is important to reiterate here how many Indigenous Peoples globally understand song and music as law, rights, and responsibilities; as medicine and sustenance; and as genealogical and historical documentation. If such a density of subjectivity feels radical and unsettling, it is because as Robinson shares – and as any Indigenous, Black, or Person of Colour who has been trained in (or rather, survived the disciplining of) music studies will tell you – music studies frameworks centre singular ways of being, knowing, and doing that belie its prioritizing of Eurocentrism and Eurologics that in turn produces its own form of ethnomusicology (in that the ethno is always expected to be a European subjectivity).Footnote ⁶ That music studies exists un-prefixed serves to obscure the ways in which it is always already aligned with or directed at European-American subjectivities. Despite our presumed absence, Robinson and I are preceded by two generations of Native American women and men who earned doctoral degrees in music, including: the first generation of Marcia Herndon (Cherokee), David Draper (Choctaw), and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee), who earned their PhDs in the 1970s; followed by a second generation comprising Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman (Kanaka Maoli), Tara Browner (Choctaw), Maria Sháa Tláa Williams (Tlingit), and Kalena Silva (Kanaka Maoli), who earned their PhDs in the 1990s. As two of eight third generation Native American music scholars with earned music research PhDs, and whose Peoples, logics, and projects have been historically excluded in the field of musicology, Robinson and I know–feel the importance of working together and apart on projects and initiatives that uplift Indigenous communities as well as a rising fourth generation of Indigenous-identified music and sounds studies scholars. To be sure, we have also encountered many challenges, as Robinson notes, spaces of Indigenous gathering are not always pleasant and can ‘often result in alienation from agonistic debate or lateral violence’ (173). Yet we continue to persist and identify opportunities to do work that has the potential to bring about meaningful and lasting forms of presence in the field.

For Robinson, sensate sovereignty exists as a dense both/and formulation, in that it can be operationalized in agonistic and welcoming ways and never fully disarticulated from settler colonialism or Indigeneity. Following Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard's ‘blockades’ (23–4) and Métis artist David Garneau's concept of ‘irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality’ (235–9), Hungry Listening describes where several ‘irreconcilable spaces spatialize sovereignty’ in ways that hold the potential to ‘enervate extractivist desire and divert hungry listening’ (236), including (but not limited to):

• • Jordan Wilson's curatorial intervention in xwlálàm, síwél, which subverted objectifications of Indigenous belongings (chapter 1, 68–72);

• • Keane Tait, Michael Dangeli, and Mique'l Dangeli's ‘temporary longhouse’ as ethnographic redress (chapter 4, 162–6);

• • ‘Event Score for Responsibility: “qimmit katajjaq / sqwélqwel tl’ sqwmá:y”’, the decolonial event score for Louie's Take the Dog Sled (following chapter 4, 191–9);

• • ‘Writing Indigenous Space’, the section designated for Indigenous eyes only, where settler readers are asked stop reading (following the Introduction, 27–36);

• • a perceptual impasse as performed by allied artist Jin-me Yoon (conclusion, 254–8).

Regarding forms of sensate sovereignty that extend welcome, the very framing of Robinson's book practices Cree/German/Polish artist Cheryl L'Hirondelle's ‘radical inclusivity’, which she explains stems from Cree worldviews, specifically the term kiyânaw (‘all of us together’) (237) that invites participation from human and more-than-human kin, particularly those with whom we share space. To more fully contextualize the density of meanings that accompany the English language word sovereignty in critical Indigenous Studies contexts – the primary academic space in which I work – I bring Hungry Listening and its articulations of sensate sovereignty into conversation with an ever expanding body of works that recognize the agential and generative subjectivities of Indigenous creative and performing arts, including (but not limited to) Jo-Ann Archibald's ‘Storywork’, Linda Tuhiwai Smith's ‘Indigenous Peoples Projects’, and Gerald Vizenor's ‘survivance’.Footnote ⁷ As forms of sovereignty, Indigenous creative and performing arts articulate self-determined ways of being, knowing, and doing in relationship with or independent of settler nation-states. Any confusions surrounding what sovereignty could be also reveals the preceding limitations of communicating in the English language. Many Indigenous languages do not have a discrete word for ‘music’, nor do they have a discrete word for ‘sovereignty’. There is a significant abyss between Indigenous values of responsibility, reciprocity, and relationality and colonial ideas of ownership, property, and objectivity.

As a form of practising radical inclusivity, Robinson makes a compelling argument for writing about musical intersubjectivity via an intersectional lens (103–5), which resonates throughout his framing of Hungry Listening, which ‘does not exclusively prioritize Indigenous theory and methodology’ (23) and instead draws on scholarship by settler, Black, Peoples of Colour, and TQ2S he identifies as relevant to decolonization. Moreover, Robinson cedes a not insignificant portion of his concluding chapter to an iterative and improvised conversation between two non-Indigenous ethnomusicologists: Ellen Waterman, who identifies as a white settler Canadian; and Deborah Wong, who identifies as a third-generation Chinese American. Robinson does so to emphasize the importance of creating spaces where non-Indigenous can ‘work things out among themselves’ instead of calling on only Indigenous Peoples to perform (and/or to witness) the labour of decolonial thinking and action. He notes ‘to decolonize perception in general, and listening in particular, requires different strategies for settler and Indigenous listeners’ (72). For Robinson, it is not Indigenous Peoples’ imperative to always freely give answers, but to encourage non-Indigenous Peoples to sit with and contemplate their own structures of knowing–feeling and find entry points for one's own individual or communal practices of layered positionality.

It is my hope that non-Indigenous readers takeaway the understanding that the work of doing sensate sovereignty and of following through on our responsibilities and accountabilities to Indigenous Peoples is not labour that should or could be taken up solely by Indigenous Peoples – it is going to take all of us working together and doing a dense array of projects to bring about transformative changes. In the far north, it is often said that ‘it takes a village’ (or two or more!) to accomplish large tasks, and a healthy village ecosystem lives and works together in radical forms of relationality, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. To dismantle settler colonialism will take a density of Peoples engaged in a dense array of work to bring transformative and lasting change into being.

Chin'an Gheli. Ch'adach’ q'u yagheli ghinla tsadi.