The Aboriginal Turn: Analysing Tagaq’s Animism and the Changing Relationships between Canada and its Aboriginal Populations

In recent years, a movement called Idle No More was launched to end such mistreatment of Canadian Aboriginal people.  In their “Manifesto”, they demand that the previous treaties be upheld and that they receive appropriate funding for housing (Idle No More 2014).  Furthermore, Daitsman and O’Brien have argued that, “Idle No More has successfully encouraged sharing of information about sovereignty and environmental protection and galvanized people to stand up for themselves and the land” (Daitsman and O’Brien 2013).  This is also reflected in contemporary music by Aboriginal musicians such as the group A Tribe Called Red (ATCR) and soloist Tanya Tagaq.  Animism, an album by Tagaq, protests previous actions against First Nations and Inuit communities, who have lost aspects of their identities and large swaths of land due to government control and appropriation.  This is supported by Robert Everett-Green from the Globe and Mail, who reviewed Tagaq’s album when it was first released in May 2014:

She hopes to make [the strong political aspect of her music] a bit more obvious with Animism, which is both a hymn to the spirit in all living things and a manifestation of the indigenous activism that gave rise to the Idle No More movement (Everett-Green 2014).

He also points out that Tagaq’s family was one of the many relocated in the 1950s from Quebec to Resolute Bay. He also discusses Tagaq’s time in residential school, where she separated her from the experience of throat-singing until adulthood (Everett-Green 2014). 

The Idle No More movement has received attention from large media companies such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and CTV Television Network, as well as public support from politicians and community leaders, and others, which is indicative of changing concerns amongst the Canadian population.  This is supported by recent advances in popularity by Aboriginal artists including A Tribe Called Red (ATCR) and Tanya Tagaq, who have secured Juno Awards and the Polaris Prize, respectively over popular white artists (Kinos-Goodin 2014) (Newman 2014).  In part because of Idle No More and the attention it has received, I believe we are witnessing a changing relationship between the Canadian government and the Aboriginal communities within its borders.  For example, the current Canadian government has begun installing new water treatment plants, a project that I took part in advocating last year, since the movement’s inception in 2012.^[1]  Furthermore, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has apologized for the boarding schools that Aboriginal children were forced to attend, where they were often physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused (Government of Canada 2010).  

As mentioned above, this transformation in Canadian/Aboriginal affairs is also reflected in contemporary music by Aboriginal musicians.  For instance, Everett-Green argues Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq brings many aspects of Inuit culture to listeners and challenges a variety of Canadian beliefs (Everett-Green 2014).  This can be seen in her most recent album Animism where she questions our separation from nature and our acceptance of extracting oil through use of pressurized steam, known as hydraulic fracturing, colloquially shortened to “fracking”.  Her most recent album, Animism, also won the Polaris prize, an award for Canadian musicians bestowed upon a musical artist by a large number of journalists and media critics.  This is important because it thrust issues relevant to her into the national spotlight and meant an increased awareness of Inuit spirituality and culture. The messages conveyed by Tagaq’s Animism are indicative of the changing relationship between the Canadian government and Aboriginal people, because the music requires listeners not only to hear her opinions, but to hear them through the utilisation of a medium that is culturally relevant to her community – throat singing.  By using throat singing she challenges our previously-colonial government and amplifies the voice of many by expressing her opinions on her own terms.  This is also apparent in “Fracking,” a piece that questions a contentious topic among Canadians, particularly in Aboriginal communities.  I will explore the conditions created by legislation such as the Indian Act, which lead to a loss of spirituality and voice for many Aboriginals on both individual and community scales.  Subsequently, I will explore pertinent aspects of Tagaq’s Animism, including how it restores the voices of Inuit communities and how that is reflective of the goals of the Idle No More movement.  Finally, I will conclude with an analysis of the song “Fracking” in order to support my arguments.

The Idle No More website claims the intent of the original treaties between Aboriginal communities and the British Crown was to share the land now known as Canada, while retaining the rights of Aboriginals to access to land and water, among other things (Manifesto 2014).  The website also points to the Canadian government’s use of resources and the resulting pollution poured into local rivers and lakes. Furthermore, the authors argue that the government requires permission to allow construction on Aboriginal lands and that the people of those lands are entitled to compensation.  These measures along with those mentioned above, Idle No More points out, are what the group seeks to change (Ibid). 

Amanda Morris writes, “Idle No More exposes the problems with the legal and political relationship between First Nations and the Canadian government…” which includes but is not limited to exclusion, assimilationism, and discrimination, all of which are acts that may alter one’s identity  (Morris 2012, 247).  For the Inuit, a people whose spiritual beliefs are comprised of reverence for the spirits of animals and the Earth, our western practices of exploiting the resources of our surrounding environment in excess and assimilating or discriminating against those who do not creates a dichotomy of “high” and “low”, or “us” and “them”.  This divide is exposed in Richard Middleton’s essay on “Western Belongings…” in which he defines “high” music as intellectual and bourgeois while “low” music is often exotic, invokes folk sensibilities, and is unreflective (Middleton 2000, 59-63).  He also points to the assimilation of musical aspects from folk or a popular genre, by analysing simplicity and the folk in Mozart’s Magic Flute (Papageno) and blackness in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (Ibid, 69).  Although Middleton points to folk and “blackness” as traits often attributed to the “low” musical category, he does not speak of “nativeness”, nor of Aboriginal music. 

One type of Aboriginal music in Canada is Inuit throat-singing.  Beverley Diamond explains that throat-singing occurs as a competitive game between two women:

Two women face each other at close proximity, often grasping the forearms of their partner and rocking with the rhythm of the game[…]They perform a series of short motifs in a tight canon: one woman imitates her partner one “beat” (or about a half a second) later. The motifs include both breathy (unvoiced) and throaty (voiced) sounds, audible rhythmicized intakes of breath, pitched and non-pitched sounds. After a short while, the lead singer changes the pattern and her partner must follow. […] In some areas the games are competitive to see who can continue the longest. […] Most often the games imitate the soundscape of northern life: a puppy, polishing sled runners, the river, the wind, a mosquito” (Diamond 2008, 50-52).

She also points to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, a semiotician from l’Université de Montréal, who describes the lyrical topoi as follows “…meaningless syllables and archaic words, names of ancestors or of old people, animal names, toponyms [names of places], words designating something present at the time of the performance, animal cries, natural noises, and tunes borrowed from petting songs, drum-dance songs, or from religious hymns” (Diamond 2008, 49).  The ‘throaty’ voices, archaic words, names, animal cries, and natural noises are all present in Tagaq’s work.  This is most easily exemplified in the songs, “Howl” and “Uja,” which refers to a portion of seal skin (Inuktitut Computing: The Iqaluit Project 2012).  Moreover, “Tulugak”, meaning raven, presents corvid calls throughout, while “Umingmak” (Ellesmere Island) is used as a short motif within a canon comprising of vocals, percussion, and electronic dance music (EDM).  One might notice how Tagaq’s themes consist of animals present in the arctic, as well as an island within the territory of Nunavut.  As the album title suggests, each topic represents something of spiritual importance within her culture, including the animals that surrounded her and the island on which she lived.

Throat-Singing’s Challenge to Contemporary Canada

Inuit throat-singing would generally be categorized as “low” music when using the descriptions provided by Richard Middleton. This form of singing invokes the “exotic” as it derives from a non-European culture and uses neither non-European instruments, nor techniques. Likewise throat-singing invokes folk sensibilities as it is traditionally performed as a game rather than art. As such, it is seemingly unreflective.  Lastly, throat-singing also comes from a native people who have in the past been considered ‘savage’ by European colonists. However Tagaq uses throat-singing in order to voice her opinions and the opinions of many others who have previously been disenfranchised through our government and our cultural biases. Moreover, it is hyperreflective due to its topoi, which focus mainly on culture and spirituality.  Lastly, using a form of expression from her own culture and expressing herself on her own terms, Tagaq challenges our perceived image of ‘savage’ low-music and our patriarchal attempts to tame its people, as seen through the Indian Act and residential schools.  If we therefore accept the “high” and “low” dichotomy of musics, Tagaq invalidates it by using “folk” and the “exotic” in as non-European music in order to create an intellectual and reflective music.

Personifying/Amplifying the Earth

Tagaq’s throat singing and her evocation of the spirits significant to Inuit animist beliefs return certain aspects of power to a traditionally marginalized population.  One of the more contentious issues within many communities is the act of fracking, a subject on which Tagaq has spoken quite a bit.  In an interview with Sarah Rogers, Tagaq says the following: 

Basically, I wanted a song to be unlistenable, so ugly and disgusting, so I imagined my whole body was the Earth and that someone was doing fracking on me … I wanted to sonically shove that in people’s faces (Tagaq 2014).

The above quotation raises a number of questions.  Firstly, what is fracking and what does it sound like? What might it sound like if it was done to someone? Lastly, how does Tagaq recreate this sound? Hydraulic fracturing, as I explained above, is the process of extracting oil from rock using pressurized steam. I would imagine such a process would including the droning of machinery such as drills and boring machines, the sound of water breaking rocks, and the dense, busy sounds that result. 

Fracking also creates wastewater that may include dissolved metals and naturally occurring radioactive materials, according to the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Furthermore, it draws large amounts of water, has the potential to pollute underground sources of drinking water through spillage, and burns diesel causing further CO2 emissions (Natural Gas Extraction – Hydraulic Fracturing 2014).  It is thus unsurprising that this process causes concern amongst individuals whose land has previously been expropriated for government use: fracking may not only pollute the water, but also the air and those living nearby.  Tagaq has therefore created sounds that I believe are representative of this pollution. Indeed, as I will argue below, the Earth is moaning, crying, and surrounded by sounds of droning contrabasses and col lengo tratto violin bows creating chilling, foreboding resonances through extended techniques.

Regarding what committing the act of fracking to an individual may sound like, it would obviously include a great deal of pain and one can therefore assume it would involve moaning, screaming, and crying. This is what Tagaq presents her listeners in “Fracking”: an individual or spirit in great pain, suffering at the hands of what sounds reminiscent of machinery. The work begins with a wordless moaning by Tagaq, interrupted only by intermittent gasps for air. Tagaq is joined by a droning double bass at thirty-three seconds, which remains on B1 (the B below the bass clef) for a large duration of the piece. The other members of the string section enter at 1:08 col legno tratto – meaning the bow is drawn across the strings using the wooden side as opposed to the side with horse hair – until the first violin enters, playing a tremolo countermelody twenty seconds later. Tagaq’s singing is reminiscent of crying and gasping throughout the work until 2:10 when she begins to sound in a more guttural fashion similar to a growl. At the same time, the strings increase in rhythmic and tonal intensity until they suddenly withdraw, except for a select few who continue their droning notes. It is also important to note that at no time do the strings create a unified rhythm and that the chords created throughout the work are tone clusters.

Similar to Olivier Messaien’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps – “Louange à l’Éternité de Jesus”, much of the accompaniment does not provide a pulse indicative of continuous time. This evasion of time is an effect created through recurrent alterations within the accompaniment in regards to rhythm length, especially in the continuo drones played by the double bass. As time is an invention of humanity, other natural beings do not necessarily require it – perhaps with the exception of day and night, or when they should awake and when they should sleep. The meaning behind this sense of timelessness is two-fold: firstly, it represents the natural. For the Earth, a celestial body over 4.5 billion years by our count, time has very little meaning. Secondly, we may view the piece’s absence of time as a waking from sleep. Indeed, one interpretation of the work might find it is an account of the earth waking up after its importance was forgotten, post European contact. This is reflective of Idle No More’s ‘awakening’ of Aboriginal rights movements, which have remained quite silent for a long time.