‘People have courage!’: Protest Music and Indigenous Movements

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, a series of Indigenous protest movements have emerged across North America in response to contemporaneous settler-colonial violence, including the #NoDAPL movement and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. These movements are responses to political, societal, environmental, and philosophical incongruities with governments and their non-Indigenous citizenry. Music has been at the heart of these political causes, social protests, and cultural movements. Plains-style powwow vocal music, which emerged as the dominant intertribal performative style in the 20th century, has played a crucial role in contemporary protests as mechanisms for articulating messages of resistance through symbolic embodiments and as intertribal expressions of solidarity directed primarily towards Indigenous people for cultural and spiritual uplift. This style also has a long-standing tradition in Indigenous cultures and has been employed in relation to historic external and internal protest/movements. This paper seeks to understand how Plains-style music articulates messages of protest through the use of semiotics and how music has been employed in protest environments. We will draw upon historic and recent examples to demonstrate the long-standing tradition of Indigenous Plains-style protest music.