Citing and echoing a 2014 United Nations Special Report on Cultural Rights, the first volume of the TRC final report calls for “symbolic reparation and public recognition” of the “unofficial ways” that victims and survivors of the Indian Residential Schools in Canada may have “commemorated their experience,” in forms and styles “that may run counter to state-sanctioned versions of national history” (289). The commissioners note “the critical role that artists play” in fostering “survivor-driven, community-based initiatives [that reveal] the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and revitalizing Indigenous memory practices” (290). I want to draw our attention, as a class, very briefly to the music of Tanya Tagaq as one possible practice of that revitalization.

In the notes to her 2014 Polaris-prize winning album Animism, Tanya Tagaq dedicates her work to missing and murdered indigenous women.This dedication is much more than acknowledgement or symbolic gesture: the formal and material practice of her vocal music is closely and thoroughly enmeshed in a particular, empowering version of female—and feminist—indigeneity. Her performances and recordings respond, in part, to the calls to action in the TRC report both for creative reparation—what Tanya Tagaq might call retribution—and for “investigation,” if that’s the right word, “Into missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls” (325). The TRC report often returns, both in its framing language and in its reproduction of the testimony of survivors and their families, to the question of voice, of listening to, and hearing, “the voice of the land” as a number of interlocutors put it (7). Tanya Tagaq’s vocals draw on Inuit throat-singing as well as punk and heavy-metal voice tactics to create a hybridized music, merging acoustic folk, electronica and improvisatory experimentalism to defy both semantic sense-making (lyrics in either English or Inuktitut surge only sporadically to the surface) and recognizable idiom. Her performances unsettle not only listeners but also the formal constraints of song itself. If the voices of witnesses tend, in the TRC report, to be boxed in by an official-sounding iterative framework, Tanya Tagaq’s voice tends both to shatter those discursive boxes (I’m tempted to say “deconstruct” to hearken back to Julian McDougall’s language) and to co-creatively remake dynamic, porous, and fluid structures as they unfold in the moment of their performance.

Improvisation, as George Lipsitz reminds us, “emerges from insubordinate spaces and creates emancipatory temporalities” (Heble and Caines 10). Tanya Tagaq, if we accept this reading of her unruly and highly embodied singing, engages in an aesthetics of decolonization. She opens up auditory and performative spaces that refuse to be coopted by state-sanctioned authority because they are illegible to that authority and because, as work founded on deliberate contingency, they are constitutively insubordinate and emancipatory. From this angle, they enact not only creative refusal but also a supportive—I would go so far as to say rapturous—enmeshment in nascent community. Tanya Tagaq has recently worn red evening gowns at her concerts: her costume represents the garb of a high-falutin gala attendee, of a woman of privilege, and—through its colour—the blood of victims of violence; it also suggests a kind of celebratory disjunction (is this really the appropriate dress for this occasion?) that points to the difficult misfit between indigenous cultures and elitist settler cultures; some of the gowns have seal fur, beadwork and other emblematically Inuit textiles sewn into them. As one instance of a deconstructive punctum, a point of unraveling, Tagaq’s red gowns signal a complex and tense intersection between women’s bodies and indigenous bodies. It’s not enough, for example, to assert that Tagaq is recuperating the marginalized cries of victimized women (which her disturbingly lyrical version of Nirvana’s “Rape Me” enacts), but that recuperation also needs to be thought in conjunction with troubling associations of indigeneity with the animal and the autochthonous—the ululating land: how can women be invited to testify against the double bind of racial and sexual violence, and be heard? Tanya Tagaq, I’m starting to assert, is revitalizing potential spaces for such testimony, to do those voices justice.

Some Works Cited

Lipsitz, George. “Listening to the Lambs.” The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts. New York: Routledge, 2015. 9-16. Print.

Sinclair, Justice Murray, Chief Wilton Littlechild and Dr. Marie Wilson, et al. Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future Toronto: Lorimer, 2015. Print.