Hungry Listening, Ethnographic Redress

In 1929, folklorist Marius Barbeau writes about the significant collection of Indigenous songs represented in the Canadian Museum of History: “about three thousand of these are filed away at the museum.” Though efforts have been made by many museums in Canada to respond to Indigenous calls for the return and repatriation of Indigenous belongings, similar initiatives have yet to occur for songs that remain incarcerated in museum archives. This talk proposed Indigenous-defined methods of ethnographic redress that challenge settler colonial forms of “hungry listening”. 

Dylan Robinson is a Stó:lō artist and scholar, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His current research focuses on Indigenous art in public spaces across North America, and his publications include the collections Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016) and Opera Indigene (Routledge, 2011).

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