2024-2025 Catalog

MUSC 288 Decolonizing/Indigenizing Popular Music in the Americas

In this course, we will examine how Indigenous musicians perform popular music idioms in ways that critique settler colonial systems and practices (decolonization) while centering Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the contemporary world (Indigenization). Specifically, we will discuss the work of Indigenous musicians who circulate and transform such genres as hip hop, country, folk, EDM, pop, trap, rock n’ roll, as well as traditional Indigenous musical idioms. Beginning with an overview of pre-conquest musical practices, we will engaging with recent academic literature on decoloniality and Indigenous movements in the Americas in order to contextualizing these musicians’s critiques of the continued impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous life in songs that call attention to such issues as land degradation and seizure, resource extraction, missing and murdered Indigenous women, police violence, and inequality in housing and education. We will also consider the important work of language and cultural revitalization enacted in this repertoire that above all asserts the sovereignty of Indigenous communities in the Americas.

Core Requirements Met

  • Fine Arts
  • Regional Focus