UC Davis

In 1926, my family’s ancestor, Ellen Grant, née Brazille, recorded approximately 70 Konomihu-Shasta songs. These recordings, housed at the Library of Congress with copies at Cal Poly Humboldt and UCLA, feature a number of genres, including girls’ puberty, doctors’, and war dance songs, among others. This dissertation is born of my family’s ongoing music reMatriation project in which we are reclaiming and community archiving these and other family materials. Specifically, several major themes emerged during the early grassroots of this project: tradition, diaspora, enrollment politics, and the sacred. Conducting a feminist analysis of rhetoric and ideologies surrounding these themes, I make arguments which respond to how these topics have manifested during the project from my standpoint as a Karuk person: 1) The label “tradition” can function to restrict what it can mean to be Karuk, 2) Every Karuk is necessarily from the Karuk Tribe, and so where someone “grew up” neither negates nor inherently reifies their Karukness, 3) I propose a change to the Karuk Tribe enrollment ordinance which presently creates a second class of Karuk citizens, and 4) I argue that academia needs to be more receptive to Indigenous paradigms, including of what constitutes “evidence”, supported by the fact that the dead can sing.