(Indigenous) Hip Hop Culture in Western and Northern Canada
For some people, Canada’s new burgeoning Indigenous Hip-Hop scene represents the globalization (read Americanization) of Canada’s Indigenous youth. For others, it represents a culture of sublimation because it gives Canadian Indigenous youth a means to share their current lived experiences and to convey that which is often left unsaid within public discourse.
Drawing on the work of Tony Mitchell (2001) and his suggestion that we must resist “the prevailing colonialist view that global hip-hop is an exotic and derivative outgrowth of an African-American owned idiom subject to assessment in terms of American norms and standards” and Emma LaRoque’s (2007) claim that it is wrong to hold young people hostage to their past, this research argues for the disruptive possibilities of the Indigenous Hip Hop scene across the Canadian prairies.
Copyright Rae Holstbaum
Research Questions:
* How does hip-hop on the prairies contribute to or break free from conventional concepts of community, identity, and consciousness in Canada?
* How does the development of collective community projects such as the Prairie Roots Hip-Hop Project or the creation of a hip-hop crew at Usher Collegiate High School resist “the prevailing colonialist view that global hip-hop is an exotic and derivative outgrowth of an African-American owned idiom subject to assessment in terms of American norms and standards” (Mitchell 2001)?
* How do these stories, these cultures move beyond mimicry?
* Why is hip-hop an important site from which to take up the relationship between space and anxiety and its relevance to an indigenous and historically white settle society?
* Does hip-hop culture play an integral role in narrating colonialism on the prairies or in the north? Or multicultural ideologies found in larger urban centers like Toronto, Vancouver, or Winnipeg?
* What happens to narratives of colonialism when they are (re)told through a contemporary oral practice and mediated by the discourses associated with hip-hop culture on a global scale?
* How are Canadian Indigenous hip-hop artists and their audiences able to narrate experience and to communicate across difference?
* Does hip-hop hold the potential to disrupt how we imagine colonialism that perhaps will take us on a detour around us/them binaries?
* How does Indigenous Hip-Hop complicate the spirit of a liberal pluralist society such as Canada?
* How does Hip-Hop challenge contemporary Canada to think about ‘Indian’ politics in the now and the future rather than think of colonialism as only relevant to the past?
* In what ways does hip-hop contribute to the struggle for decolonization in Saskatchewan and Canada?
