UC Davis

This dissertation is a curated work of critical Indigenous sound and music theory. From a music and sound studies perspective, it is known-felt as a mixtape. Working with and through Performance Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Environmental Humanities, the analyses herein model theoretically and methodologically “promiscuous” lines of inquiry as a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches in Indigenous Studies. Primarily centering kwinaył/Coast Salish Indigeneity and knowledge systems, I argue that the Indigenous onto-epistemological world is replete with musicality; the sound and music we make carries transformative, transtemporal, relationship-building and worldmaking potentialities that exceed their objectified/materialist context. A corollary of this line of inquiry reveals the ways that the objectification of music has been used as a mechanism of settler colonialism through the presumed superiority of eurological ways of knowing/doing music and the containment/measurement of Indigenous auralities. This interrogation is one part of a broader methodology that centers Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered ways of listening. As a work of ethnography, the sites of sound knowledge that encompass this dissertation include the academy, the Annual Tribal Canoe Journey, the Internet, the material-relational dimensions of guitar playing and cedar basket weaving and my experiences as a guitarist, canoe paddler, global Indigenous radio DJ, and kwinaył słəgwəlmıš (Quinault person, Indian, Tribal member) from Taholah on the Mouth of the Quinault River. My findings demonstrate how sound and music give breath to the ways that our knowledges are collected, developed and disseminated, the sacred ways of being/knowing/doing that animate our place- and water-based relationships, our claim to art-making in the midst of a cyberspace that imagines a creativity without humans, and the loving relationships we have with our materials, our kin, our more-than-human relatives.