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The aurality of pipeline politics and listening for nacreous clouds: voicing Indigenous ecological knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2020

Kate Galloway
Kate Galloway*
Affiliation:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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Abstract

Tanya Tagaq's work is political, often tackling themes of environmentalism and Indigenous rights. The Inuk throat singer uses live performance and audiovisual media to engage themes of climate change and give voice to environmental violence. Her work diversifies the discourse of environmentalism to include the voices and environmental trauma experienced by marginalised peoples, specifically North American Indigenous-centred sounds and perspectives. Songs such as ‘Fracking’ from Animism (2014) and ‘Nacreous’ from Retribution (2016) are simultaneously expressions of ecological protest and healing, as Tagaq listens with urgency and uses embodied musical practice to explore the aurality of pipeline politics and other forms of ecological imbalance and harm. I analyse how Tagaq's work, both her songs and their accompanying music videos and multimedia, gravitates towards the ecological, considering what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the non-human world – plants, animals, water, natural resources – sound like.

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Articles
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Popular Music , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 121 - 144
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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