M3 P2: Customs and Duty: Indigenous Hip Hop and the US–Canada Border (Pryzbliski)

This  article, published for the Journal of Borderland Studies, compares songs from two Indigenous rappers; Drezus, from Canada and Waln, from the United States. Pryzbliski main goal in this article was to show how Hip Hop generally uses Place as a main catalyst for ideas, and this is just as true for Indigenous rappers. She makes three general points regarding Indigenous Hip Hop and Place:

1. Many Indigenous rappers connect to their land, whether urban community or reservation.
2. There is a specific authenticity that these rappers garner from defining themselves as coming from a specific place.
3. There are intergenerational connections in the music that is specific to each community, whether urban or reservation.

Furthermore, Pryzblinski goes on to demonstrate how these two rappers use their platform to discuss political ideas. As both songs highlighted were written in 2012/2013, there is a large section of the article that focuses on Idle No More.\

From this article I have come up with several ideas for my final project: I will look more in depth into this idea of Place as being central to Indigenous Hip Hop. I will look for connections that can be made between American, Canadian and Australian Indigenous Hip Hop, and I will also look into the urban vs. reservation Hip Hop. I think that this is a starting point to look into some larger ideas.

Przybylski, Liz. “Customs and Duty: Indigenous Hip Hop and the US–Canada Border.” Journal of Borderlands Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2017, pp. 487–506., doi:10.1080/08865655.2016.1222880.