Performing Indigeneity

An air of mystery surrounds a collection of sixteen missionary music books from around 1600. These "Huehuetenango manuscripts," copied for tiny communities in a remote and mountainous region of Guatemala, contain polyphonic music in the European tradition-but the villages in question never had missionaries in regular residence. The musical tradition that these choirbooks facilitated must therefore have been heavily supported by Indigenous practitioners. Often judged from a European perspective, the books have been deemed banal on the basis of their repertory. And yet I argue that the evidence of the manuscripts, along with historical chronicles and missionary correspondence, points to a vibrant, localized, and possibly syncretic practice. 


Using two villancicos-a genre of multi-voice music popular in the Hispanic world around 1600-as case studies, I adopt a heterogeneous analytical approach that attends to the notated music, scribal hands, and genre while also drawing on missionary chronicles and studies of the region by historical geographers. I explore how music supported the goals and expectations of the Spanish missionaries working in these rural reaches of New Spain's Guatemala region. In the process, I investigate the cracks through which the story of the music's Indigenous contributors emerges. This multi-faceted approach builds on the work of Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, who has demonstrated how rebuilding soundscapes from sources other than musical scores can help give voice to non-normative or non-hegemonic music practices, and on a study by Leonardo Waisman that uses music manuscripts as a basis for uncovering colonial culture-building ideologies. 


Adopting this approach allows us to consider these villancicos as more than simple or banal examples of the genre, and as more than mere vehicles for disseminating "Spanish-ness." Instead, these works can be shown to respond to their local environments through a process of ongoing cultural negotiation. These findings invite us to place Indigenous contributors alongside their urban European counterparts as equal creators and participants in what must have been a dynamic-and distinctive-musical tradition. 

This paper explores the performance of indigeneity in the Canary Islands through adaptations of autochthonous sound ecology in contemporary popular music. Named after an interlocutor's composition, I explore the performative and sampled use of precolonial and modern lithophones hewn from the archipelago's volcanic rock to voice indigenous perspectives that continue to be silenced, while highlighting the importance of archeoastronomy and Afrofuturism in establishing both historical precedents and creative inspiration for present-day Canarian indigeneity. The primary case study involves musical settings of precolonial Guanche inscriptions-first published by Leonardo Torriani in 1590. For example, in 2011 Rogelio Botanz, an influential popular musician originally from the Basque Country, invited Amazigh vocalist Khalid Izri of the Rif region, to perform with Botanz's group Puntos Suspensivos at the Teatro Leal in La Laguna, Tenerife. The composition on which they collaborated was "Aica Maragá," Botanz's musical setting of one of the pre-colonial inscriptions dating from the era of Spanish conquest; the inscription calls for emergent alliances among the archipelago's indigenous groups to confront and resist colonization. These alliances and the collaboration between Botanz and Izri are two instantiations of _ínsulo-amazig_ identity, just one of the many conceptions of indigenous _canariedad_. In the performance of "Aica Maragá," this diversity is enacted through a plurality of musical sounds and languages: pre-colonial Canarian, Tamazight, and Spanish are intermixed with traditional Afro/Canarian and Amazigh musics and contemporary Canarian jazz-rock fusion in a dynamic performance that transcends historical time and musical genre in an effort to break out of historiographical canons that have relegated the Afro/Canarian, Basque, and _rifeño_ cultures to the margins of the region's past and present. Additional examples highlight the diversity of historical, ideological, and musical perspectives that seek to recover Canarian indigeneity from its status as prehistorical myth through reference to local ecology, histories of scientific inquiry, and indigenous language.

In 1671, the Catholic Wendat (Huron) Congregation of Our Lady in Quebec gathered to celebrate the Christmas season. As they paraded with a waxen form of the baby Jesus, the Wendat sang songs of the Nativity in their own tongue. Jesuit missionaries describing the scene emphasized the Catholic piety of the Wendat congregants, referencing the way that French Catholics from surrounding communities were moved by the devout Wendat singing. Taking their cue from contemporary Jesuit claims, historians have long presumed that such scenes articulated a Wendat submission to Catholic social norms, political structures, and cosmological understandings. This simplistic reliance on Jesuit propaganda has rendered the Wendat experience in this context mute. 
The colonial archive has, of course, been troubled as a source of Indigenous experience; we have been left to assume that the only perspective that we may glean from colonial sources will be European. My way out of this impasse comes from a previously unexplored late 17th century manuscript of Catholic Wendat devotional songs, the "Cantiques Hurons." By unpacking the layers of practice inscribed in this colonial musical source, I will reveal that the Wendat Christmas worshipers were continuing to practice a matriarchal musical politics rooted in Wendat spiritual relationships. In fleshing out the connections between musical practices inscribed in the "Cantiques Hurons" and material histories, such as wampum belts, this paper will demonstrate how Wendat communities maintained their existing relationships to land, language, and power through matriarchal practices centered on music making and alliance building. Conceiving of mother Mary as an active, birthing, nurturing, and guiding being, Wendat matriarchs sang in communion as they constructed wampum belts for their distant French allies. 
While recent postcolonial musicology has demonstrated how colonial peripheries actually defined European identities, these studies have remained centered on European actors. My research seeks to push the methodological envelop by unearthing Indigenous voices in the archive. This paper will thus forward a methodology for attuning to the Indigenous participation in the production and life of colonial musical archives such as the "Cantiques Hurons."