Inuit female singer-songwriters in Canada use truth-telling and narratives to offer settler listeners insight into Inuit perspectives on social issues affecting Inuit. A sensitive issue that Elisapie Isaac, Kelly Fraser and Susan Aglukark engage in their songs and social commentary is the suicide crisis of Inuit. Addressing Inuit suicide, its prevalence and the community's response to it, these musicians unsettle listeners and challenge settlers to engage with and better understand difficult issues during this period of state-sanctioned reconciliation between Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada. This article explores the ethics of listening and responsibility that listening holds for settler audiences.
Despite huge devastation of land in southeastern Nigeria, music scholarship in that region is yet to engage environmental crisis. This paper explicates environment through the concepts and practices of mbem, an indigenous musical style of the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria. Employing ethnomusicological and ecomusicological approaches, I argue that respect, cooperation and reciprocity, principles of Igbo Indigenous Ecological knowledge system, inform Igbo environmental perspectives and constitute sustainable environmental practices. This article contributes new theoretical perspectives to contemporary global debate on environmental sustainability, spiritual ecologies, and culture by its transdisciplinary conversation between music, environment, decolonialism, spirituality, and society in Igbo community.
The Igbo of Nigeria, a patriarchal ethnic nation, promotes gender binaries cultivated through cultural and social ideologies and contexts. Existing studies reveal how distinctions between the male and female sexes are deliberately entrenched, promoted and fairly accepted within the society through binary gender identities in all human endeavours. Paradoxically, however, the same culture seems to accept a form of oddity and subversive indigenous music, dance and costume culture presented as Adamma masquerade. This paper, by means of ethnographic, descriptive analysis and culture-owner interactions, interrogates the oxymoronic or self-contradictory notions on gender identities expressed through Adamma music and dance genre.
