A (Colonial) History of Collecting, or “Indians on [and off] the Shelf”

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The collecting and (mis)appropriation of the Indigenous musics of North America began during the earliest years of European/Indigenous encounter. The first known transcriptions of Indigenous music from North America were completed in either 1606 or 1607 by French lawyer and author Marc Lescarbot (c. 1570–1641).Footnote ⁶ Born in Vervins, France, Lescarbot travelled to Acadia in May 1606 at the invitation of Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt to chronicle the trip. Lescarbot remained in Acadia for thirteen months, during which time he notated three songs sung by Mi’kmaq leader, Membertou. These songs, described as songs “in praise of the devil,” were published in 1609 in his book Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (Lescarbot Reference Lescarbot and Grant1914:105–106). Although he used solfege with no rhythmic notation, this was sufficient for Gabriel Sagard-Théodat to publish, in 1636, a four-part arrangement of one of the Mi’kmaq melodies. Ethnomusicologist Victoria Lindsay Levine describes this arrangement as a composition intended for the “domestic entertainment” of Europeans (Reference Levine2002:xxi). The collecting and (mis)appropriation of Indigenous musics of what is now known as North America had begun.

Lescarbot’s description of the songs was clearly ill-informed and racist, expressing his assumptions about the Indigenous other rather than detailing the function or meaning of the songs to the Mi’kmaq people. As problematic as this is, the more fundamental issue is that collecting by missionaries, so-called explorers, and scholars (broadly defined), supported the larger colonial project in at least two ways. First, just as settler-colonisers took land from Indigenous peoples and claimed it for themselves, songs were used by European (and later American and Canadian) composers as a kind of natural resource (see Robinson Reference Robinson2020:154–162). This, of course, is evident in Sagard-Théodat’s use of Lescarbot’s transcription. Second, descriptions of music (such as Lescarbot’s) were calls to action and mission statements. As Levine notes,

The practice of music collecting was, then, part of a larger process of gathering information to fuel and justify colonial and missionary efforts—to prove the righteousness of colonisation.

By the late nineteenth century, the collecting of Indigenous musics was picking up pace, invigorated by increased cultural nationalism in the United States and Canada.Footnote ⁷ In 1880, American-born, German-educated music scholar Theodore Baker (1851–1934) transcribed thirty-two Seneca songs during “a stay of some weeks in America” (Reference Baker and Buckley1976:65). During his stay, he also collected twenty-two additional songs of various nations while visiting the School for Indian Youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These songs became the foundation for his dissertation, which he completed in German through the University of Leipzig in 1882 with the title Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the Music of North American Indians). Baker’s dissertation is considered “the first serious work on American Indian music” (Hitchcock Reference Hitchcock2001). Along with Alice Fletcher’s (and Omaha/Ponca anthropologist Francis La Flesche’s) collecting a decade later, Baker’s dissertation made Indigenous songs readily available to composers, fuelling the American “Indianist” movement (Browner Reference Browner1997:265).Footnote ⁸ As Choctaw ethnomusicologist Tara Browner points out, the “Indianist” composers “reach back to Baker and Fletcher, if not directly, then in spirit” (ibid.). Baker’s dissertation also legitimised his biased, racist views—openly expressed in his dissertation—on Indigenous musics, giving them an academic stamp of approval.

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Transcriptions of Indigenous songs by collectors like Baker were almost certainly poor representations of Indigenous musics. In attempting to “pin” the music onto a Western staff (Robinson Reference Robinson2020:149), the transcriber would have made decisions about rhythm and pitch based on the constraints of the notation system. And of course, transcribers’ biased listening and blatant racism became part of the transcriptions. As Lakota scholar Philip Deloria writes,

The musical interactions between the collector and the ‘subject’ were, furthermore, often relatively short-lived; and the transcriber would have often notated the songs after one listening. Although Baker, like Fletcher, indicated that the songs he collected were “very carefully transcribed” (Reference Baker and Buckley1976:65), such a statement is disingenuous: Baker could not have accurately represented the songs of diverse Indigenous nations after such a short period in the field, while using the limited tool of Western notation and his untrained, biased ears (i.e., untrained in the Indigenous traditions that he was transcribing).

Invented in 1877 but not readily used until the end of the nineteenth century, the phonograph circumvented some of these problems, allowing researchers to collect song data with seeming scientific objectivity (Brady Reference Brady1999:86). As psychologist Benjamin Gilman wrote after transcribing the music on Jesse Walter Fewkes’s Zuni wax cylinder recordings from 1890,

Although not all ethnographers expressed this kind of enthusiasm (Brady Reference Brady1999:86), the phonograph came to be widely used, accelerating and enlivening music collecting. As anthropologist Marius Barbeau wrote, an ethnologist with experience and a phonograph could collect in a single day “forty or fifty songs or ballads,” a number that otherwise would have required a month (Barbeau Reference Barbeau1919:195). Collectors who did not have musical transcription skills could, furthermore, bring recordings back to a lab-like setting for transcription by people trained in Western notation, increasing capacity for musicological work.Footnote ¹⁰ And so, recording technology made it easier to amass and pin down songs, amplifying the zoological impulse for collecting (Robinson Reference Robinson2020:149). Like early transcriptions, the value of recordings to settler collectors lay in what could be taken from them—how they facilitated the extraction of musicological data.

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Although the collecting described thus far was completed before ethnomusicology emerged as a distinct discipline, the impact of transcriptions, early recording, and archiving on ethnomusicology cannot be denied. As Robert Stevenson notes in reference to a music collection made in the early nineteenth century by Franciscan Fray Felipe, “No other Spaniard working so far north leaves a comparable bequest to the ethnomusicologist” (Reference Stevenson1973a:13). While collections like Felipe’s are then part of our academic lineage, music recordings are what allowed ethnomusicology to separate from other disciplines. As Jaap Kunst argued, “[e]thnomusicology could never have grown into an independent science if the gramophone had not been invented. Only then was it possible to record the musical expressions of foreign peoples objectively” (Reference Kunst1959:12). Though he became more critical of archives in his later work, Bruno Nettl similarly drew attention to the importance of recordings and archiving in the development of ethnomusicology, noting that archiving “has led to the development of a special area of knowledge and skill within ethnomusicology” and that the archive is for ethnomusicologists what the library is for other disciplines (Reference Nettl1964:17). Tens of thousands of transcriptions and field recordings of Indigenous musics—some made by the academic ancestors of ethnomusicologists, others made by ethnomusicologists—are now available in archives, stored, processed, classified, and catalogued (Nettl Reference Nettl1964:17). An ethnomusicologist’s library. These “Indians on (and off) the shelf” (Dorris Reference Dorris and Martin1987:99) are the foundation of ethnomusicology as a distinct discipline.

Métis Music On and Off the Shelf

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While the above discussion addresses the broad, historical contours of music collecting in North America, the autopsy of collecting will not be complete until we understand the breadth of collecting practices, including localised collecting activities; only then will we fully understand its pervasiveness. Since beginning to work with Métis music in archives three years ago, I have been struck by the sheer number of tunes on the shelves, and how few of these archival items are accessible to the communities from which they came. The large number of recordings is surprising in part because (settler) interest in Métis music did not bloom until the second half of the twentieth century—perhaps a reflection of earlier researchers’ biases towards Métis music, which emerged from syncretism. Prior to the 1950s, only a few Métis music-related items were placed in archives. During the second half of the century, however, numerous ethnographers, amateur and professional, collected Métis fiddle tunes and songs, working for (government-funded) museums, universities, and music conservatories. These collectors include:

• • Marius Barbeau (1916 and 1946)

• • Father Gamache (1948)

• • Richard Johnston (1957)

• • Henry Lane (1960s)

• • Barbara Cass-Beggs (1964)

• • Henri Letourneau (1960–1980s)

• • James Howard (1968)

• • Ted Brasser (1969–1970)

• • Roy Gibbons (1970s)

• • Nicholas Vrooman (1980s)

• • Anne Lederman (1980s)

Most of the recordings made by these collectors—at least 1000 individual songs/tunes—are now available at the Canadian Museum of History (Gatineau), the Centre du Patrimoine (St. Boniface), and the Institute for Regional Studies and University Archives (Fargo). Additional items are available in archives across the United States and Canada (including a Métis-created archive, which I will discuss later), and at least one item (a fiddle) is housed at the University of Aberdeen. Most have limited metadata, and some digitised recordings remain difficult to find.

Like other Indigenous musics, Métis music has been recirculated in classical compositions. The first instance of adapting Métis music for a settler context took place in 1929, when Thomas Johnstone and Frederic Genthon’s versions of the “Red River Jig” were adapted for violin and piano, and then used by Melba Smith as the basis for a composition titled “Tapatoe.”Footnote ¹² Smith’s short composition was promoted as “The National Canadian Tap Dance” (M. Smith Reference Smith1929). Then, in 1945, Australian composer Arthur Benjamin (who was living in Vancouver) orchestrated the “Red River Jig” from a version taught to him by Métis fiddler, Bob Goulet. In 1975, South African/Canadian composer Malcolm Forsyth composed “Three Métis Songs from Saskatchewan” for the vocalist Maureen Forrester; this composition adapted songs recorded in 1968 by Barbara Cass-Beggs. The following year, Forsyth reworked his composition for full orchestra. In 1982, Jim Hiscott composed “Spirit Reel” (based on a Métis reel) for button accordion and violin, and in 1985, he adapted the “Red River Jig” for violin, button accordion, piano, and drums. The most recent adaptation of Métis music is “Red River Fantasy,” a piano quartet based on the “Red River Jig” composed in 2018 by Andrew Downing and commissioned as part of Ensemble Made in Canada’s Mosaïque Project, which features commissioned compositions inspired by each Canadian province and territory. None of these composers were/are Métis, nor have their compositions been used in a process of on-going, long-term engagement with Métis communities.

This focused look at the collecting, archiving, and recirculation of Métis music gives localised salience to a more general history of collecting Indigenous musics of North America and provides one avenue to better understand the pervasiveness of government- and university-funded collecting. Though it was of little interest to scholars until mid-century, Métis music has come to take up substantial space on and off the archival shelf. The collectors noted above (and those who recirculated Métis music) likely had good intentions and indeed created collections that are now deemed important to at least some Métis (as I will touch on later). Yet highlighting the extensiveness of Métis music collections makes it clear that the collection and recirculation of Indigenous musics was (and is) an insidious (settler) way of looking at the world: it was (and is) a mode of encounter between settlers and Indigenous peoples informed by an absence of attention to on-going, long-term relationality. This is also the case for the examples of recirculation noted above. In other words, the practices of research, collecting, and recirculation were founded on extracting knowledge without a core sense of obligation to provide access—or for lack of a better term, value—to the communities whose musics were extracted. This history is one that many ethnomusicologists, with our twenty-first century lens, judge (rightfully so) as unethical—indeed blatantly wrong—just as I judged Barbeau’s recordings of Indigenous musics as appropriation and colonisation in my earlier meditation.

A (Ethical) Colonial Collection, for Research Purposes Only

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By the mid-1960s, ethnomusicologists were beginning to acknowledge the problematic aspects of collecting. Debates around the ethics of ownership and power relations were a key factor in this shift. As ethnomusicologist Janet Topp Fargion writes,

At the same time, ethnomusicology experienced an anthropological turn. As a discipline that was only a couple of decades old, it began to distinguish itself from its precursor, comparative musicology, by moving away from armchair musicology (as comparative musicology all too often was) to ethnography—and indeed extended periods in the field. As Fargion writes, recordings “lost their significance for anybody but the recordist as the discipline turned to an exploration of music in context and accepted that the ‘living organism of folk music’, that is, the performance, is not captured fully in a recording” (Reference Fargion2009:78). While recordings continued to be made, and remain a critical tool for ethnomusicologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and others researching music cultures to this day, they were increasingly made for the recordist’s research purposes only and were not relinquished to archives (Fargion Reference Fargion2009:81, 84).

In my own practice, I record for targeted purposes, such as to capture the atmosphere and energy of a performance—recording to help me remember how my senses were engaged by the music, dance, and setting. When I listen to and watch the recording that I described above, I remember the feeling of the moment, the vibrations from the music and feet and crowd through my body, but I do not adequately hear and see the energy in this video, or at least not in the physical, embodied, and fully sensed way of a live performance. The recording serves as a tool for me to recall the moment, but it is not the same; you had to be there. Beyond helping me recall the sensations of a moment, making recordings as part of my foundational fieldwork practice has limited value in the contexts that I work. To begin with, my own recording equipment is chosen as much for ease of portability and use as it is for quality of sound, which means that my recordings will never be as good quality as those made by the musicians or sound engineers recording their albums, or by professional videographers hired to record the events. These recordings are often available for purchase or are on YouTube or Facebook. Furthermore, given that Indigenous people have so often been (mis)represented by (white) outsiders, using our consultants’ own recordings as the basis for our analyses makes a great deal of sense. And so, I often do not record (though I have nonetheless amassed a rather large collection of recordings); have never considered placing the recordings that I have made into an archiving institution; and rarely make my recordings public.

Yet when Kathy Moran shared the song I wrote about at the very start of this article, she gave me permission to include the recording on my publicly accessible blog, which serves to document Métis cultural events for a general readership and to promote the “pemmican trail” of Métis festivals. Moran gave me permission because, to her, keeping the song alive was more important than the possibility of misappropriation. The idea of keeping the song alive ties my practice to the very reason early collectors recorded—to save musics that they believed were about to disappear—perhaps like the song Moran sang, which to my knowledge is not available in any archive and is not sung at the events that I have attended (though it is certainly possible that it is sung in more private settings). This is where I hit a crossroads: recognising the unethical history of music collecting and (mis)appropriation, I want to keep my field collection to myself, an ethical (colonial) collection (or at least that is my intent); but Moran wanted the song to be shared. I was not sure what to do with her permission. Digitised recordings can be transferred from person to person and across the world in seconds, facilitating misuse; and that was something for which I did not want to be responsible. For this reason, I only used a ten second clip, and have otherwise kept my recording of this beautiful, MichifFootnote ¹³ song to myself. But did I take away Moran’s agency by keeping the recording to myself? Is the result any different than placing a recording in an archive (that now lays a claim to it as the archive’s property) that is largely inaccessible to the communities from which the song came? Perhaps worse? Is my personal collection—for my research purposes only—any more ethical than those made by my fore-mothers-fathers?

An Act of Humility Towards Our Fore-mothers-fathers

***Ethnomusicologists have grappled with—and continue to grapple with—recording/collecting practices. Yet we have not yet radically addressed the discipline’s foundational problem. As ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger pointed out (more than three decades ago no less),

Seeger further notes that “…it may be that we will be best remembered for our recordings rather than our laboured theories” (ibid.). This reality has been set by historical precedent: the theoretical positions of our music collector-scholar ancestors are now rarely admired by either contemporary music scholars, or the peoples whose musics were used to argue these positions; yet the belongings that these same researchers collected are still often thought to be important (Seeger Reference Seeger1986:266). Frankly, I expect that, in fifty years, the song Kathy Moran shared with me will be more important to Métis than my articles that draw on my work with Métis music (although it is those articles, and not my field recordings, that will be judged most important to my tenure application).

In my threefold exclamations of “how could they” iterated above, I proclaim judgement on my academic ancestors, while gesturing towards the (Eurocentric, Christian) worldviews and structures that continue to determine our/my scholarly frames. How has our arrogance about what “they” (our fore-mothers-fathers) did, kept us from seeing what we still do, sometimes more subtly, but with little difference in process (going to communities and taking) or result (amassing the knowledge of so-called Others in our personal or institutional archives and in academic libraries and databases)? Whether or not we are still filling archives with wax cylinders, tapes, mp3s, or other forms of media, ethnomusicologists continue to amass collections in the form of recordings, articles, and other data that do not return, or are not seen as useful, to the communities from which they draw their content (see Gaudry Reference Gaudry2011 for a Métis critique of this approach to research; also see Norman and Kalt Reference Norman and Kalt2015:5). How is gathering Indigenous knowledge for an academic community that does not hold itself accountable to Indigenous peoples any different from the practices engaged in by the collectors who worked throughout the twentieth century for archival institutions? It may be time for an act of humility towards our settler fore-mothers-fathers who showed us the wrong way, but from whom we did not learn.

Settler-scholar fore-mothers-fathers are not, however, the only fore-parents to consider. In addition to a few Indigenous scholars who have recorded and/or transcribed Indigenous musics (including Frances La Flesche, Richard C. Adams, Charlotte Heth, and Marcia Herndon), many Indigenous people agreed to be recorded—the collections I have been working with include numerous musicians—and their agency should be acknowledged. Though it is now often impossible to fully understand why they agreed to be recorded, their (implied) consent needs to be understood within the context of extreme restrictions imposed on Indigenous cultures, which in Canada (until 1951) included fines and imprisonment—as well as theft of cultural belongings—for those caught organising or taking part in cultural practices. Drawing on the work of collector, Ida Halpern, philosopher Elizabeth Coleman and anthropologist Rosemary Coombe address the intersection between these punitive colonial laws and the agency and intentions of the performers:

Coleman and Coombe thus suggest that both the musician’s and their intended audience’s rights need to be respected. Halpern was “given a message” meant for a specific audience: the singers’ descendants. This audience has “a right to possess the music as recorded […and] a right to receive the message or speech act that these recordings contained” (Reference Coleman, Coombe, MacArailt, Young and Brunk2012:202). Archives (and the academic descendants of the original collectors) therefore have the duty to ensure that these messages reach “the generation that seeks to fulfill its obligations as conveyed in these recordings” (ibid.:203). It may be time for an act of humility towards our Indigenous fore-mothers-fathers who knew to whom they were speaking and shared with us a methodology of resistance.

Re(p)(m)atriating (Intangible) Cultural Heritage

***If, in an act of humility, we acknowledge that collecting—extraction—remains foundational to ethnomusicology and that we have not fulfilled our inherited obligations, it becomes clear that we need to reconsider the very foundation of what we do as scholars. In the second half of this meditation, I turn towards re(p)(m)atriation as a possible way to reorient our work. I suggest that rematriation might be understood both as an act that returns belongings to those for whom they were intended (just as collecting takes belongings) and as a research orientation (just as collecting is a way of engaging in research). As a research orientation, I argue that rematriation might be a way for us to re-foundationalise our reasons for researching and how we engage with communities. Rematriation as a research orientation asks us to critically address past encounters and calls us to make paramount how our work promotes knowledge creation at the community level, including revitalisation and resurgence of musical practices. The argument here overlaps (importantly) with approaches to ethical engagement with Indigenous communities as articulated by Indigenous researchers (see, e.g., the work of Ball and Janyst Reference Ball and Janyst2008, Battiste Reference Battiste, Denzin and Giardina2007, Battiste and Youngblood Reference Battiste and Henderson2000, Castellano Reference Castellano2004, Chilisa Reference Chilisa2012, and de Crespigny et al. Reference de Crespigny, Emden, Kowanko and Murray2004, among others). This final section is not a guide to re(p)(m)atriation but rather a provocation to consider what rematriation could look like in our own, everyday practices.

The concept of repatriation was originally used to refer to the return of bodies and ceremonial belongings that were taken from colonised communities and placed into archives (including university research centres and labs), usually far from their site of origin. In this original sense, repatriation was/is a way for communities to bring ancestors and material belongings back into their care, honouring them through traditional protocols of burial, safe-keeping, or re-integration into community life (see, e.g., Mihesuah Reference Mihesuah2000, and Thornton Reference Thornton, Fforde, Hubert and Turnbull2002). More recently, community members and researchers have begun to attend to repatriation in a wide variety of contexts, including increasing attention to the return of music belongings—something that can be attested to by the thirty-eight articles in Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Wood’s anthology, The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation (Reference Gunderson, Lancefield and Woods2019). Digital repatriation has also become a growing practice, albeit a sometimes contentious one that addresses the issue of access, but not control (Bell, Christen, and Turin Reference Bell, Christen and Turin2013:196–197; see also Gray Reference Gray2015:71–72, Fforde, Hubert, and Turnbull Reference Fforde, Hubert and Turnbull2002, and Greenfield Reference Greenfield2007). Within the context of music, repatriation (in its relatively narrow sense) includes returning recordings, sheet music or transcriptions/notations, instruments, and field notes and other written descriptions; alternately, these belongings might be returned as digitised copies.

Returning Indigenous musical belongings is a substantial undertaking. Even one song or group of songs can require considerable work prior to repatriation; and there are thousands of Indigenous songs in archives. As Ts’msyen/Mikisew Cree anthropologist Robin Gray notes, songs may be inaccurately titled and might have insufficient or incorrect metadata; furthermore, there is often a lack of cultural context, including information on where the song is from and to whom it belongs (Reference Gray2015:86–87, 90, 97–98, 115). Through community-engaged work, ethnomusicologists are filling in these gaps so that the collections are better understood—their location and value knowable to communities. Ethnomusicologists are also investigating paths for the return of belongings. The intervention to complete the trajectory from home, to archive, to home is essential because, to at least some communities, these recordings are “the gifts of past singers to family via researchers” (Treloyn, Martin, and Charles Reference Treloyn, Martin and Charles2016:99). Following Norman and Kalt, this work, importantly, should not be about academics “provid[ing] specific recommendations or one-size-fits-all solutions” (Reference Norman and Kalt2015:viii). Instead, it should aim to “identify resources, knowledge, information, and options for [communities] to consider in their own decision-making processes” (ibid., emphasis in original). Both the work of improving metadata and work towards the return of belongings are an important part of redress for the harms caused by collection-oriented research.***

***In her reflection on working with archived music-related items, Métis undergraduate student Amy Lambert reflected on the importance of archival documents for Métis and for her personally. Drawn from her final project report, these words call us to slow down and consider the meaning archived music has for many who have faced restrictive colonial policies and dispossession. Troy Bannerman, a Métis undergraduate student who also worked closely with archival documents, similarly described their importance:

Both Lambert and Bannerman speak to the value of archives in processes of recovery, and address why access (at the very least) to these archives is essential.

Emerging at the juncture between the possibilities of archives and the acknowledged harms of the collection-oriented research that has filled archives, many Indigenous nations have created their own archives. There are now hundreds of tribal libraries and archives, offering all of the services expected from non-tribal institutions, but doing so in a way that takes Indigenous protocols into account (Roy, Bhasin, and Arriaga Reference Roy, Bhasin and Arriaga2011:vii). The most significant Métis-created and -run archive was built through the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research (GDI). The GDI was founded in 1980 with a foundational vision linking education, economic development, and cultural renewal (Bird-Wilson Reference Bird-Wilson2011:29). Among its many educational and cultural activities, it runs an archive that was built through Métis-led research and that has, since 2003, provided open online access to much of the research data (including audiovisual recordings). The GDI’s research and archiving activities highlight the importance of archives to at least some Métis and, considering the online component, suggests that access for community members is a central component of ethical archiving in a Métis context. This archive, with its research by and for Métis people can be understood, as Gunderson, Lancefield, and Woods note, as supporting “community self-determination, the preservation of cultural heritage, and both the revival of older traditions and the creation of new ones” (Reference Gunderson, Lancefield and Woods2019:xlvi).

Beyond the Archive: Rematriation as a Research Orientation

Addressing gaps in metadata, returning belongings, and supporting Indigenous-run archives (when a nation chooses to engage in archival-type work) is essential. Yet the varied and complex projects engaged in by ethnomusicologists and others working within the area of contemporary music re(p)(m)atriation demonstrates that re(p)(m)atriation can move well-beyond the confines of archives, and well beyond what Gunderson, Lancefield, and Woods refer to as “the historically transactional nature of returning archives” (Reference Gunderson, Lancefield and Woods2019:xliv). As they note,

Robin Gray’s work repatriating Ts’msyen music offers one example of moving beyond transactional approaches. As she reveals, her repatriation work was “breathing life” into the collected music; and as her research partnerFootnote ¹⁵ Wii Haughtkm Skiik suggested, it was also “breathing life back into [Ts’msyen] people” (Gray Reference Gray2015:118, emphasis in original). Continuing, she shares a “poetic dialogue” between Wii Haughtkm Skiik and another research partner, Sagipaayk, writing:

This dialogue addresses the importance of access and ownership of musical belongings, and the need for resurgence, that is, the flourishment of the practice within a contemporary context (see Simpson Reference Simpson2011:16–20). Music re(p)(m)atriation, then, includes practices and projects that support Indigenous (musical) resurgence.

Ethnomusicologists Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Andrew Weintraub present an additional way to think about music re(p)(m)atriation. Addressing the repatriation of Klaus Wachsmann’s recordings to Uganda, they note that “what is being presented to these communities of origin is not the music per se, but the medium or vehicle to reproduce those sounds that occurred in a particular time and place” (Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub Reference Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub2012:208). As artifacts of a moment, these recordings encoded a cultural encounter and provide an opportunity to address that encounter. Re(p)(m)atriation can, then, be “a form of cultural critique: a critical and reflexive discourse about the social relations of power in cultural representations, and a model for dissembling and potentially undoing those relations” (ibid.:209). To demonstrate, they provide a detailed analysis of the encounters that resulted in Wachsmann’s recordings, situating them as representations within a field of power. While musicians/communities see the value in Wachsmann’s recordings, they are a product of his theories and methods. As Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub remind us, “what is recorded (the production of knowledge) is always contingent on the conditions of its recording (how, where, why, and for whom)” (Reference Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Weintraub2012:224, emphasis in original). Re(p)(m)atriation, then, includes practices and projects that critically analyse the global and local power currents that allowed/allow for the amassing of data from communities constructed as “Other.”***

***Following the work of the diverse scholars discussed thus far, re(p)(m)atriation has at least three trajectories in a network of interconnected projects and practices. These are the physical/digital return of belongings (and the attendant legal and ethical issues of access, ownership, and control); attention to and support for processes of reanimation and resurgence; and analyses and critiques of moments of encounter. Building on and moving beyond these trajectories, I ask that we consider the following: what would ethnomusicology look like if rematriation, instead of collecting, was foundational to our practice? In posing this question, I am not suggesting that all ethnomusicologists need to be involved in bounded re(p)(m)atriation projects aimed at returning specific data sets, just as not all ethnomusicologists past or present collected recordings for settler archives (broadly defined) as part of their practice. Rather, as I addressed earlier, collecting is a research orientation. Collecting in this sense is not just about recording songs. Rather it is a way of thinking about what, how, and why we engage in the world as researchers; it is a research mode centred on amassing belongings and knowledge primarily for our own benefit and the benefit of (settler) academic communities. Rematriation as a research orientation and foundation for our practice as ethnomusicologists might, then, be a way to fundamentally shift what, how, and why we do what we do as researchers.

In developing this idea, I draw on the work of Unangax̂ scholar, Eve Tuck, and her co-author Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, who assert that, “Rematriation involves rethinking the aims of research…so that Indigenous communities and other over-researched but invisibilized communities can reject narratives and theories that have been used against us, and re-story knowledge and research to forward our own sovereignty and wellbeing” (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández2013:85). Continuing, they note that,

In her earlier, foundational article on rematriation as methodology, Tuck outlines a series of “alternative aims” that this approach embodies. These aims include “remembrance of the true purpose of knowledge” for the specific communities with which we work; addressing/working with the diversity of ideas within a community; “engaging in the flow of knowledge in community” and creating pathways for knowledge-sharing across generations; using the community’s language while contributing “new language to new and recovered ideas” (which might also be directly applied to musicking); ensuring that research respects a community’s understanding of “relationships between human knowledge and/within the cosmos”; and “deepen[ing] considerations of place, beyond context or backdrop” (Tuck Reference Tuck2011:36).

Applying these ideas to ethnomusicology and music studies more broadly, I propose that rematriation might be understood as a mode of research that emerges in direct response to the legacy and ongoing practice of collection-oriented research within ethnomusicology, its sister disciplines, and their academic ancestors; it is a research mode that acknowledges the deeply embedded practice of extraction on which our discipline was built (for which we have an inherited obligation to address), and under which it still functions (for which we are personally responsible for acknowledging and changing through the years of hard work it will require). Beyond using collection-oriented research as an opportunity to “dissemble and undo,” rematriation is a mode of research that centres community understandings of musical knowledge; that prioritises the flourishment of the music cultures with which we work, as well as more broadly the flow of musical knowledge within communities (rather than the academy); and that recognises and respects the (community-determined) limits of welcome—that is, what aspects can be written about and how musics can be recirculated (see also Robinson Reference Robinson2020:25). Projects aimed at returning belongings to their communities of origin will (and should) continue; but what I propose here is that rematriation as a research orientation can move beyond individual, bounded projects, and be integrated into our everyday research practices.

From Collecting to Rematriation

In this article, I traced the practice of collecting and archiving sound recordings by researcher-collectors in what is now known as North America, while meditating on my own relationship to ethnomusicology, field recording, and Métis music research. Although we now (rightfully) consider salvage-oriented practices unethical, collecting is a research orientation that remains deeply embedded in our practice, even as ethnomusicology has moved away from filling archives’ shelves with captured musics. In slowly thinking through these issues and making them personal, I aimed to put sustained pressure on music researchers to heed ongoing calls to radically reorient the foundations of our discipline.Footnote ¹⁶ As a possible way forward, I suggested that twenty-first century ethnomusicology might turn towards rematriation, placing it at the centre of our discipline as our guiding research orientation. By adopting rematriation as a mode of research, we can place sustained attention on disciplinary redress, loosening the grip of collection-oriented practices to create a new ethnomusicology. In closing, I offer the following provocation: what would your research look like if its foundational orientation was rematriation?