Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America begins with a prologue from Inupiaq musician and scholar Heidi Aklaseq Senungetuk wherein she welcomes readers to learn about as well as with her and to make alliances with Indigenous peoples. She juxtaposes her musical worlds to purposefully highlight their wholeness to her experiences, even though many might divide them into separate categories, genres, styles, etc. Her gentle coaxing to readers to open their eyes and ears to the experiences of Indigenous perspectives that bridge many contemporary genres is a theme throughout the work, one taken up again in the more official introduction by Victoria Lindsay Levine. Here, however, she offers a more direct critique of indigeneity and modernity as concepts that have been couched problematically in opposition. Instead, Levine asserts that this volume’s “twin goals are to focus the ethnomusicology of American Indians/First Nations toward new perspectives on Indigenous modernity and to model decolonized approaches to the study of Indigenous musical cultures” (2). Levine then introduces four themes running through the case studies that make up the volume: “innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange”; references the many genres under study; and then notes the “interdisciplinary methodologies” taken up by the contributors (2).

The volume, indeed, offers a wide array of case studies, and while diverse in approaches and genres, the work that unites many is Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places (2004). Starting his account in the late 1800s and with a focus on Indigenous performers across a variety of genres, Deloria sought to understand the ways that Native peoples grappled with modernity and asserted some sort of agency while negotiating the constraints of settler expectations. As Levine describes, while Deloria portrays this agency as basically diminished by the middle of the twentieth century, many chapters within Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America instead suggest that Indigenous performers “are using music to advance Indigenous sovereignty, resurgence, and intergenerational healing in instrumental ways” (3). The rest of her introduction then summarizes aspects of each chapter to provide the organizing connections between them.

The second chapter, by David Samuels (“The Oldest Songs They Remember: Frances Densmore, Mountain Chief, and Ethnomusicology’s Ideologies of Modernity”) as well as the final two chapters, by Beverly Diamond (“Purposefully Reflecting on Tradition and Modernity”) and Trevor Reed (“Pu’Itaaqatsit aw Tuuqayta/Listening to our Modern Lives”) are the most reflexive on the topics of indigeneity and modernity in relation to musical performances and the documentation of such performances, mainly through an ethnomusicological lens. Samuels focuses on what the early turn of the twentieth-century period has come to symbolize for contemporary ethnomusicologists, while Diamond uses her own long career as a basis for her reflections on the ever-present concept of tradition in ethnomusicology as well as on modernity. Reed references his own challenges in bridging varying Hopi perspectives in the process of repatriating ceremonial Hopi songs as he reflects on much of the volume as a whole, proposing additional avenues for research while also highlighting the challenges that future scholars have as they continue to engage with decolonizing approaches.

The remaining ten chapters (chapters 3 through 12) delve into case studies of various genres of performance. From Mi’kmaw funeral practices (Gordon Smith) to Indigenous activism conveyed through the Indigenous women’s singing group Asani (Anna Hoefnagels); from round dances at Idle No More protests (Elyse Carter Vosen) to hip hop performances (Christina Leza, T. Christopher Alpin); from powwow practice and the institutions that support and contain them in two different regions (John-Carlos Perea, Byron Dueck) to the audio-accompaniments produced for a reality TV show set in Indigenous Alaska (Jessica Bissett Perea); and finally, from Indigenous classical music composers (Dawn Ierihó:kwats Avery) to mixed-media performance artists (Dylan Robinson)—the breadth of case studies does not disappoint. Nonetheless, readers will find many overlapping issues to contemplate across the chapters, and the outer chapters especially provide an effective framing across the many specific cases and for rethinking ethnomusicology’s relationship to Indigenous peoples more generally. As a whole, Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America definitively succeeds in its goals of recognizing multiple Indigenous modernities while emphasizing Indigenous perspectives through purposefully decolonizing approaches.

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[Review length: 699 words • Review posted on December 16, 2022]