Listening to Indigenous Knowledge of the Land in Two Contemporary Sound Art Installations

This essay addresses the silences and soundings of Rebecca Belmore's (Anishinaabe) and Julie Nagam's (Anishinaabe/Métis/German/Syrian) sound art, which reflects their environmentalism and profound commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing, making, and listening. Working at the intersection of sound art and politics, the two perform sonic interventions into settler colonial spaces—the National Parks system and the gallery, respectively. Belmore's Wave Sound (2017) and Nagam's Our future is in the land: If we listen to it (2017) illustrate how their sound art gravitates toward the ecological and considers what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the nonhuman world—plants, animals, resources—sound like. Belmore and Nagam introduce marginalized perspectives and voices to address the problematic authority of whiteness that conspicuously dominates the discourse on music, sound, and environment—a relatively homogenous and exclusionary artistic, technological, and scientific discussion.