Making music = making kin: music as a metaphor for culture

Abstract

Differences between Indigenous and settler colonial cultures, viewed through the lens of music, suggest the necessity of examining, reevaluating, and transforming settler culture. Adopting music as a metaphor for culture, rhythm, embodied in the booming of the drum, signifies the relationality--kinship--inherent in vitalistic Indigenous cultures. Alternatively, harmony characterizes settler culture--fractured by disharmonic tones of anthropocentric European- American intellectual norms promoting exceptionalism, individualism, and exploitative capitalism. Disharmony exhibited in settler song lyrics is counter to processes involved in making and listening to music which, like other aesthetic practices, is fundamentally relational. Dissonance in a culture, as in music, results in unsettlement: an unbalanced state not conducive to the health and well-being of individuals, nor to a people or to the planet. Responses to alleviate cognitive dissonance in an individual and in a culture include avoidance, rationalization, or adjusting beliefs and behaviors. Making kin--being in relationship with all of creation--is the central tenet of Indigenous culture and offers an alternative to the toxicity of a dissonant world. American culture's attachment to its music suggests relationality exists in the culture, even if just latently, and offers safe territory on which to challenge entrenched conventions. American settler colonial society is at a crossroads: we can persist in believing settler colonial mythology and ignore the unsettled landscape; we can continue to justify beliefs with a false narrative based on a flawed intellectual legacy; or we can begin the challenging process of transforming our perception and understanding of the world, recognizing the interrelated nature of the universe and embracing the implications of what is essentially a paradigm shift.