Songs of the New World and the Breath of the Planet at the Orbis Spike, 1610: Toward a Decolonial Musicology of the Anthropocene Free

This article considers musicological consequences of a recent proposal advanced by some climate and Earth systems researchers to date the beginning of the “Anthropocene” to the period immediately following European colonial contact with Indigenous Americans in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.¹ “The Anthropocene” refers to a new geological epoch—one in which the Earth has left behind the stability and normativity of the preceding Holocene epoch as a result of the actions and attitudes of some humans and “is currently operating in a no-analogue state,” as climate scientists Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen put it.² Around the year 1610, a conspicuous planetary low point of atmospheric CO₂ can be observed in Antarctic ice core samples. Researchers refer to this 1610 “carbon dioxide minima” as the “Orbis Spike,” and some have argued that it is the earliest viable formal signal in the planet’s geological record to mark the start of the Anthropocene.³ While researchers now prefer a mid-twentieth-century date as the Anthropocene’s early boundary, and while publics and nonspecialists still commonly treat European industrialization as the Anthropocene’s de facto point of origin, the fact that the Orbis Spike has been seriously considered at all in the geological sciences community as the epoch’s year zero suggests that the moment deserves consideration.⁴

Crucially for my study, the Orbis Spike data frame coloniality—and its invention of systems of nonwhite nonpersonhood in the service of capital—as a qualitative shift that triggered a progression into the formal beginning of the Anthropocene that geologists can now recognize quantitatively in the accumulation of the past century’s climate signals. The sixteenth-century colonial invasions of Central and South America resulted in demographic devastation through war, famine, and disease pandemics propagated via colonial violence and coerced colonial labor conditions. The Orbis Spike data link this devastation to the greenhouse gas sequestration centered on 1610, in that formerly cultivated Indigenous lands regrew vegetation, which absorbs carbon dioxide, once their inhabitants were decimated.⁵ These data empirically encapsulate arguments offered by scholars like Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who contend that “without the despoiling of the Americas, Europe would never have become more than the backyard of Eurasia, the home continent of civilizations that were much richer. … No pillage of the Americas, no capitalism, no Industrial Revolution, thus perhaps no Anthropocene.”⁶ In an important recent parallel, the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally identified colonialism as a culprit in the climate crisis—a landmark recognition.⁷

In this article, I consider how the Orbis Spike proposal and its acknowledgment of the coloniality of the Anthropocene recontextualizes musics shaped by colonial contact and its lethal consequences. This reflection offers a set of parables that might inform—with the help of musical documents and histories—a conversation about the ways in which colonization, its enslavement economies, and its extractive remaking of the Americas not only laid foundations for global modernity’s trajectory but also materially witnessed human activity laying its finger on planetary balances and upsetting them abruptly for the first time, long before industrialization. My study also addresses the fact that the term “Anthropocene,” “so widespread in the academy and now even in popular culture, has been surprisingly under-defined in music studies,” as ethnomusicologist Jim Sykes observed in 2016.⁸ This statement remains broadly true, although a number of recent special journal issues devoted to the topic signal an emerging grasp of the concept in music studies.⁹ Such interdisciplinary work is needed in order to advance a crucial truth: “the Anthropocene” is not simply synonymous with “climate change,” nor does it refer to the mere fact of destructive human impacts on ecosystems.¹⁰ Indeed, framing planetary and ecocritical concern in terms of “climate change” has managed to sustain Anthropocene deniers who have by now shifted strategy, no longer denying climate change or even human-induced climate change outright. Instead, they (correctly, but obfuscatingly) point out that human populations have been altering their ecological niches and earthly climates for as long as they have been in existence, that climates are constantly changing, that global warming and cooling occur naturally, and other such denialist deflections and justifications for inaction that readers will surely have already encountered.¹¹

To combat these misunderstandings, it is imperative to be unfailingly clear about the Anthropocene as an anthropogenically induced historical tipping point caused by real changes in the workings of the Earth system. The onset of the Anthropocene also represents a fundamental change in the very meaning of the historian’s métier. It fundamentally disrupts, as Ana María Ochoa Gautier puts it, “what historically in the West have been considered the differential fields of nature and culture.”¹² No longer can it be assumed that social histories are incapable of steering natural and geological histories; nor can it be said that geology and its timescales fail to meaningfully enter history as anything more than the too slowly changing background over which “men make their own history,” as Karl Marx once wrote—even if, as he clarified, “they do not make it as they please.”¹³

Locating the on-ramp toward the Anthropocene within histories of colonial empire and its enslavement economies positions its development as a background analytical framework for music beyond familiar ecomusicological themes like the sustainability of sound recording and music making,¹⁴ or conservationist explorations of environmental pressures upon music making and soundscapes,¹⁵ or the use of musical sound in raising climate awareness.¹⁶ As political theorist Mauro José Caraccioli argues, “the larger question behind contemporary nature-society dynamics is no longer the extent to which an ecological balance can be achieved and maintained”—the time for such a question has already passed, and more ambitious diagnoses are required.¹⁷ Consequently, my approach to framing musicological responses to the climate crisis focuses neither on the environment nor on “nature” per se, but rather on how the Anthropocene locates coloniality and its aesthetic traces at the nexus between subjectivity and geological time.

In the following analysis, I first summarize findings linking the Orbis Spike to the deaths of Indigenous Americans following European contact and offer new interventions in the controversies surrounding the term “Anthropocene.” Next, I expose thematic threads and biological histories that link music, New World coloniality, and the Orbis Spike in three musical investigations that intentionally engage in dialogue with reflections on the Anthropocene and its discourses. I begin with Henry Purcell’s unfinished semi-opera about the New World, The Indian Queen (1695), showing how it implicitly signaled for its first audiences the forms of colonial violence and the widespread deaths of Mesoamerican Natives that caused the Orbis Spike. I then examine the Euro-American eighteenth-century trope of the “Indian death song,” in which Indigenous characters in song, literature, and opera proclaim in music their own demise following defeat in battle or capture. The figure of the dying Indian alludes to the persistence of lethal processes begun around the time of the Orbis Spike and modified thereafter, demanding cautious accounts of the habits of thought, ideology, and rhetoric by which nonwhiteness was emplotted in modernity and its narratives via a proximity to death. Finally, I consider some post-contact Indigenous American sonic practices—psalmody and Ghost Dance ceremonies—that refute narrative tropes linking Indigeneity with dying out, and offer alternative perspectives on the apocalyptic rhetorics of climate change.

These three case studies open up preliminary critical and methodological possibilities for ways in which musicologies of the Anthropocene might proceed in view of the realization that European colonization and enslavement were foundational culprits in the climate crisis and its demarcation of planetary history. Locating the Anthropocene’s origins in European colonial invasions in the Americas challenges musicological inquiries into the Anthropocene to be not only ecologically attentive and musicologically rigorous, but also decolonial, antiracist, and ruthlessly critical of capital’s treatment of “nature.”¹⁸ Highlighting these themes offers the possibility of resisting the powerfully homogenizing gesture within the apparent nomination of a “universal” humanity (“anthropos”) as either the culpable party or the unified victim-class in the contemporary climate crisis, lest that very sense of unprecedented crisis give rise to the belief that times of planet-wide distress render difference itself seemingly irrelevant. Nothing could be more deceptive within planetary conditions that threaten to intensify the persistence of racial and colonial asymmetry rather than eliminate it. As Kate Galloway explains, “equal attention has not been paid to the marginalized black, brown, and Indigenous youth and activist groups who have been at the forefront of grassroots climate movements. … [A] more global approach to music and the environment is desperately needed.”¹⁹ Her perspective exposes how the pressures of the Anthropocene exceed future threats for the subjects of racialized, neocolonial capitalism now living amid changing environments.²⁰

This article necessarily involves representing violences inflicted upon Indigenous Americans, and I am cognizant of the privilege that I occupy as a settler person of color in not seeing my ancestry as directly implicated in the lethality of colonialism and its immediate aftermaths. Readers should, of course, remember that Indigenous histories far exceed experiences of abjection within coloniality. This article aims to interrogate and reject the presentation of the deaths of Indigenous peoples as spectacle in the musical and sonic archive of the Americas, to decline to sanitize these archives by hearing them only according to the sentimental and inevitably lopsided ethics of cross-cultural “reconciliation,” and to write against the erasure of Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized lives and livingness in Anthropocene discourses. I am not simply proposing that it is beneficial or illuminating for musicological conversation about the Anthropocene to consider coloniality. It is conceptually nonviable for musicology’s attention to the Anthropocene to refuse to heed modernity’s settler colonial, plantational heritage and its racialized economies of dominion over terrestrial space.

An analytical triad undergirds the remainder of this article: music, coloniality, and the Anthropocene—where any two terms are supplemented by the last.²¹ The Orbis Spike data introduce Anthropocene stakes for early modern studies in musicology and raise questions about the afterlives of colonial invasion and enslavement into musicology’s emerging engagement with the Anthropocene. How we conceptualize the arrival of the Anthropocene impacts the histories, music histories, and sonic stories we construct in the face of it. Propagating the right stories is part of forming more robust practices of what I will call “ongoingness” and more efficacious practices of care and remembering on the only planet known to support life.

The mass depopulation events caused by the colonization and dispossession of Mesoamerica led to the ceasing of land cultivation and fire use, resulting in the reforestation of formerly cultivated lands whose inhabitants had been killed.²² Young trees aggressively sequester carbon dioxide, and when soils are no longer tilled because their cultivators have died, they release less carbon dioxide. Jed O. Kaplan and coauthors, drawing conclusions from two models of global land use and vegetative growth, write that “[f]rom AD 1500 to AD 1600 a decrease in anthropogenic land use in the Western Hemisphere is visible, as the Indigenous populations of the Americas succumbed to disease and war brought by European explorers and colonists.”²³ Jinho Ahn and coauthors show that an abrupt, contemporaneous planetary-scale decrease of between 7 and 10 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric CO₂ is evident at the beginning of the seventeenth century within high-resolution Antarctic ice samples.²⁴ Studies by Richard J. Nevle and various coauthors further demonstrate that ordinary variations in weather, volcanic activity, solar irradiance, and so on can account for only about 1.3 ppm—or between around 13 and around 20 percent—of this sudden decline in carbon dioxide.²⁵ Modeling by Alexander Koch and coauthors argues that the decline in global CO₂ is best explained by a combination of human and terrestrial factors: the ordinary activities of the carbon cycle, but also the cessation of fire use plus the greenhouse gas sequestering processes of reforestation following disease-, warfare-, famine-, enslavement-, and mobility-induced Indigenous population collapses in the wake of European invasion.²⁶

The geological evidence preserved in Antarctic ice shows a low point of carbon dioxide around the year 1610. This carbon dioxide minima—a likely empirical proxy for just how many deaths were incurred at the onset of the colonization of the Americas—is what Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin refer to as the “Orbis Spike.” They argue that it is the earliest empirically valid marker for the Anthropocene’s start date.²⁷ The rapid decrease in planetary greenhouse gases that resulted in the Orbis Spike may even have contributed to a period of global cooling from 1594 to 1677, and the carbon sequestration event induced by the death toll of colonial invasions may thus have contributed to the coldest parts of temperature phenomena observed primarily in Europe, familiarly dubbed the “Little Ice Age.”²⁸ Numerous studies attest that planetary CO₂ concentrations did not fully recover to pre-colonial levels until approximately the mid-eighteenth century, and it was not until the mid-nineteenth century at the earliest that the human population of the Americas rebounded to something like pre-contact numbers, according to environmental historian Shawn William Miller.²⁹ The colonization of the Americas and its population-level and ecosystemic effects appear to have been significant enough to alter the gaseous composition—the breath and respiration—of the planet’s atmosphere.³⁰

High-resolution data synthesized by Mauro Rubino and coauthors, which have been redrawn and annotated in figure 1, show that the low point of atmospheric CO₂ at the Orbis Spike (as observed in Antarctic ice samples from a site called the Law Dome) is noteworthy within the geological history of the past two thousand years.³¹ These and related data suggest that when musical works allude to the lethality of colonization, they disclose not only a global, political event but also a planetary, biological one.

I would like to be as clear as possible that the Orbis Spike data do not invite the grotesquely Malthusian conclusion that the demographic devastation that produced the Orbis Spike was “good for the planetary climate” in that it reduced greenhouse gas concentrations. In addition to its disastrous politics, such thinking is flawed because its evaluative assessment of the Orbis Spike data emerges from smuggling in the limited vantage point of present-day emissions scenarios and present-day interpretations of atmospheric chemistry. Here, I offer a reminder that as recently as the 1970s, researchers of human-induced climate change were worried about global cooling—rather than global warming or greenhouse gases—after learning that smog had reduced the average temperature of the planet since the end of the Second World War.³² Instead, I would propose that a more efficacious and more modest takeaway from the Orbis Spike data comes from translating its instantaneous event-level significance: the Orbis Spike and the CO₂ sequestration event that it refers to mark a crossing of planetary and global histories, as the lethality of the first century of colonial invasions caused the planet itself to gasp. I regard this characterization of atmospheric chemistry in terms of planetary voice as only slightly metaphorical.

Although the Orbis Spike will likely not be declared the firm early boundary of the Anthropocene, it continues to raise important historiographical questions as to how a trajectory into the Anthropocene began—a matter distinct from that of the Anthropocene’s formal start. As Jan Zalasiewicz and the Anthropocene Working Group (a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy) acknowledge in reference to the Orbis Spike proposal, “It is clear that interchange between the Americas and the rest of the world was an event of historic significance with global consequences. It is clear also that, around this time, the world was beginning its trajectory towards its modern, largely fossil fuel-powered, state of operation.”³³ This acknowledgment is noteworthy because it shows that even the Anthropocene Working Group—who tend to believe that the early boundary date for the Anthropocene “should simply be pragmatically and dispassionately chosen” in the middle of the twentieth century—recognize in their own way that the political economy of coloniality carries explanatory and descriptive power to illuminate the broader question of the origination of the Anthropocene.

The Orbis Spike and the contentions it generates are historiographical reminders that there is far more to the Anthropocene’s origination than what the formal, “official” definition of its onset is capable of narrating to us. As Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Zalasiewicz write, “No single story can ever capture the complex whole. … [T]he Anthropocene itself is multifaceted, multiscalar, and the product of a recent coalescence of human activities. … [T]o suggest that no difference exists between the scales, methods, and questions important to geologists, social scientists, and humanists is to oversimplify the situation.”³⁴ As both geologists and historians know, time periods do not simply flick on instantaneously like light switches; rather, transitional processes precede and extend beyond the signal dates by which researchers choose pragmatically to mark the formal start of historical epochs like the Anthropocene. Broad narratives concerning the Anthropocene’s origination are necessary because, as Bina Gogineni and Kyle Nichols argue, the Anthropocene and its definitions inevitably carry prescriptive value since this epoch is the only time span that stretches into the future, carrying implications thereby for “how to adjust as we go forward.”³⁵

According to geographer Kathryn Yusoff, the 1610 Orbis Spike is an “inscription of colonialism (and race) into a monument of global environmental change.”³⁶ Arun Saldanha comments on the futurity of this inscription: “the newly systematized racism of early modernity will be legible in tree rings and ice cores thousands or millions of years into the future.”³⁷ Countering the predominant physicalism of scientific epistemologies, the Orbis Spike proposal begins to suggest that these attitudinal and ideological factors in coloniality’s political economy and racializing schemas played a crucial part in the trajectory into the Anthropocene and its geologies.³⁸ Subjectivity is thus revealed as a geological force.

The Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter asserts that “[o]nly the elaboration of a new science, beyond the limits of the natural sciences … will offer us our last chance to avoid the large-scale dilemmas that we must now confront as a species.”³⁹ Her “new science,” which she characterizes as integrating both bios and logos, includes hybridizing the understandings of scientists like the researchers of the Anthropocene Working Group with critical, discursive understandings of colonial and anti-Black narratives of modernity. For one, Wynter’s “new science” would balance a heedfulness toward generative findings in empirical science with a critical wariness with regard to the way the human values that semiotically prop up scientific discourses accrue from their rhetorical habits of speaking from the universalizing, “objective” vantage point of Western scientific method and its empiricism. Such perspectiveless orientations are “predicated on Whiteness as the color of universality,” as Yusoff argues.⁴⁰ Further, Wynter rejects out of hand the sort of technophilic scientism that informs solutionist notions of “solving” the climate issue.

Ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier similarly warns that some musical responses to Anthropocene climate crises have risked complicity with predictable territorializations of knowledge in which scientific epistemologies concerning “ecology” emerge inevitably on top without encountering resistance from the kinds of historical and critical reflectiveness that humanists are equipped to contribute. She concludes,

Regarding the “lost landscapes, altered songs, and the exoticization of nature” within the past century’s commercial and urban development, Rachel Mundy summarizes that “[t]he theory of the anthropocene, the geologic age of human impact, recognizes the extremity of these lost landscapes, but it does so by embracing the false neutrality of the postwar, postmodern, postracial human animal, in the name of the ‘anthropos.’”⁴² Mundy’s study of the role of music in articulating racialized concepts of animality and relationality to land voices a common critical position toward the name “Anthropocene.” According to this position, the Anthropocene’s appeal to a human universality occludes the fact that those who had the least to do with planetary warming are likely to continue suffering from it the most.

I do not dispute the substantive points of this skepticism toward the term “Anthropocene” and its etymology. Alternate neologisms such as the “Racial Capitalocene” offered by Françoise Vergès indisputably apply important critical pressure.⁴³ It would, however, be naive to deny that “Anthropocene” is the term of choice in public conversations concerning the question of a new geological epoch. Might skepticism about or rejection of the term backfire to result in an alienation of humanistic discourses on the climate crises from the public discourses by which the planetary situation is communicated more widely? A way of obviating such alienation might be to hold critical reflexes concerning “anthropos” in abeyance and reimagine its etymology.

The idea that “anthropos” (“ἄνθρωπος”) points in a universalizing and encompassing way to the human totality of the Anthropocene—to something like what is typically meant, at least casually, by “humankind”—is only a half truth. While “anthropos” indeed had a lexical life as a collective noun, it also functioned as a more delimited one that referred to earthly men (rather than gods) in terms of their classificatory gender designation as men. Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon records that “anthropos” was also used as a term of ironic contempt toward slaves and women, connoting an exclusion from the concept of the “anthropos.”⁴⁴ This gendered (and classed, and ethnicized) noninclusion within the purportedly universal category marks the exclusionary field of signification beneath the allegedly inclusive denotation of “anthropos.” Even the term’s use as the name for a universal humanity presupposes a socially, materially, physiologically specific portrait of who is taken to be the most universal, and whose practices and knowledges were chosen as most generalizable.

Rejecting the term “Anthropocene” for its false universality increasingly strikes me as a failure to grasp something quite crucial: that the linguistic root that it bears in its name has alluded since antiquity to a prescribed, masculinist hierarchization of the human category and to the ways in which that specificity was installed as the very portrait of the ideal, universal subject—a category out of which all but a selected, whitened few were thrown to varying degrees.⁴⁵ The term “Anthropocene,” then, accurately reflects how the idea of the “universal” subject has historically been based on the powerful who propose their own image as the face of universality. As the critical theory podcast Always Already put it, it might be more productive to conceive of the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene as pointing to Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the genre of “Man”—a term she uses to refer to the European post-1492 humanism that decided on Europe’s own image as the model for how humans should organize and understand themselves, that hungered to make the whole Earth available for profit-motivated subordination, and that defined itself as the “selected” exemplar of humanness such that all others inhabiting the lands targeted by colonial invasion became “dysselected,” notionally irrational, and fungible units of subhuman toil.⁴⁶

As the hosts of the podcast say,

At the level of its etymology, the Anthropocene is best regarded as what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls a “negative universal history,” a historiographic premise of permitting “the particular to express its resistance to its imbrication in the totality without denying being so imbricated.”⁵⁰ To connect colonial modernity to the Anthropocene in the spirit of its negative universal history, then, means to recognize that confronting coloniality’s lasting remainders is everybody’s and every discipline’s Anthropocene business, but in ways that will have to be specified, inevitably, at the level of particularity and locality.

Early modern Europeans could never have possessed contemporaneous knowledge of the Orbis Spike, nor could they have foreseen the planetary changes that researchers have today linked with the proliferation of colonial empires and their enslavement economies. However, the colonial invasions and occupations themselves became watershed events for the European imagination, and the news from the so-called New World transformed cultural activity in the so-called Old World. This cultural ecosystem of New World consciousness expresses itself amply in the music and theater of the century that witnessed the Orbis Spike. It appears, for instance, in The Indian Queen (Z. 630), the semi-opera that Henry Purcell was working on at the time of his death, based on the 1664 play of the same name by John Dryden and Robert Howard.⁵¹ Purcell’s Indian Queen was first performed in 1695 (though whether in the spring or autumn of that year is disputed).⁵² Dryden and Howard’s original text for The Indian Queen speaks to its English Restoration–era context by thematizing conflicts of succession and a royal marriage amid an Inca-Aztec dynastic feud (an obvious contrivance, as Inca and Aztec societies historically had no contact of the sort portrayed). Its story is thus situated just prior to the start of what historian Alfred Crosby calls the “Columbian Exchange,” which refers not only to the cultural/societal exchange of technologies, (hi)stories, and people across the Atlantic, but also to the natural/biological transit of microbes, flora and fauna, and ways of cohabitating with biota.⁵³

Dryden and Howard’s evidently even more popular sequel, The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1665), directly portrays the atrocities of Spanish colonization.⁵⁴ Curtis A. Price describes their Indian Queen as a mere “Rheingold” by comparison, conjecturing that it “would probably have been completely forgotten if not for its sequel.”⁵⁵ If Purcell’s revival of The Indian Queen was symptomatic of the popular success of The Indian Emperour and its colonial themes, then his last dramatic work must be viewed in light of English cultural attitudes toward the colonization of the Americas—in addition to the domestic themes that infused the early modern English stage, such as the associations made between femininity and occultism via heightened musical sound and voice, or the religious and monarchal upheavals of the English seventeenth century.⁵⁶

Within the vehemently anti-Spanish culture of that reception context, The Indian Queen’s setting would have readily activated associations not only with the New World and the colonial invasions euphemized as “discovery,” but especially with events of mass fatality in Spanish colonies. As Olivia Bloechl and others describe, the inhabitants of the New World had already featured in earlier European musical works (including a number of Stuart-era courtly masques and some of Lully’s compositions for the court of Louis XIV).⁵⁷ An English work such as The Indian Queen, however, is a particularly apposite musical example with which to begin. It allows one to trace how musics with seemingly little connection to planetary warming, climate activism, or the sonification of ecology nonetheless relate to the parameters of the biosphere and the archives of geological sedimentation. The Indian Queen links music and planetary history not through “green” themes but through thematizing the demographic devastation thought to be responsible for the Orbis Spike.

The prologue of The Indian Queen features an unnamed Aztec Boy (sung by a countertenor) who wakes a girl named Quevira (a soprano role). The remainder of their exchange both heralds the arrival of Inca forces within the diegetic world of the story and reminds its English audiences of the arrival of European colonizers:

It was in England’s political interest to weaponize knowledge of Spanish colonial violence in order to promote the legitimacy of its attempts to usurp Spanish colonies in the New World. Amanda Eubanks Winkler explains that prophetic speech by characters like Quevira and the unnamed Boy commonly carried occult meaning for English Protestant audiences. English-language sources on New World societies heavily associated Indigenous Americans with occult practices, and the Restoration-era musical stage accordingly portrayed prophetic Indigenous speakers (through devices like the countertenor’s heightened vocality) as “flawed prognosticators, representatives of an inferior order that will soon be supplanted by Christianity.”⁶⁰ Olivia Bloechl further describes how English Protestant audiences often associated Indigenous voices with the heightened music of Counter-Reformational Catholic musics, hearing both as indexes of diabolical spiritual forces that required particularly English, particularly Protestant, correction.⁶¹ Within these interpretive norms, the messianic language of Dryden’s text—which alludes to the English as those from whom “Mercy flows,” who “came … to … Forgive”—serves to ennoble English colonizers as instruments of a “benevolent,” notionally inevitable displacement of both Indigenous sovereignty and Spanish colonists.

Violence and lethal disregard toward Indigenous peoples by Spanish colonial invaders had already entered the historical record and public imagination through the work of “travel,” “voyage,” and “discovery” writers. These euphemisms persist in the trade lingo of antiquarian booksellers today. Franciscan friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a widely translated witness to New World invasion, documented atrocity after atrocity, including numerous cases of Spanish soldiers killing for sport. But colonial economic activity resulted in an even greater death toll. Documenting the conditions of enslaved Natives in Caribbean mining operations, Las Casas writes, “newborns died soon, because their mothers, because of the hardship and hunger, had no milk in their breasts. For this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned the infants from sheer desperation.”⁶² The titles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English translations of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1542)—usually translated today as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies—demonstrate how his firsthand record of the Spanish invasions was repackaged as anti-Spanish (as well as anti-Catholic) propaganda (see table 1).

For those familiar with the musical and theatrical repertoire of later seventeenth-century England, intertextual associations would have helped to make connections between The Indian Queen and violence in the post-contact Americas identifiable at its first performance in 1695. In addition to The Indian Emperour, musical audiences may also have known earlier works by another notable playwright, William Davenant: the semi-opera The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658, music by Matthew Locke) and the play The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659).

According to literary scholar Janet Clare, works such as the above served as ammunition in a propaganda war against Spain and Spanish Catholicism.⁶³ As early as 1662, Henry Herbert, Master of Revells to both Charles I and Charles II, similarly interpreted Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru as anti-Spanish propaganda. Davenant was employed by interregnum ruler Oliver Cromwell, who governed as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. Following Charles II’s ascension to the throne at the Restoration in 1660, Herbert writes,

The Indian Queen stages the propagation and replication of the cultures of Europe by assimilating fictional American Indian lives—and the nonfictional lives to which they allude—to staunchly European regimes of comprehension. Heidi Hutner explains that “English politics [were] symbolically grafted onto the Spanish and native wars. … Dryden’s and Howard’s Indian Queen and Dryden’s Indian Emperour, written soon after Charles II’s restoration, use[d] the history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico to promote a royalist ideology.” She also notes that “[i]n The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour, the native people are saved by Cortes and the Spaniards, and miscegenation offers the hope of restoration through assimilation of Indian women to European culture.”⁶⁵ In dialogue with early modern English gender conceptions, The Indian Queen feminizes the New World as symbolically and reproductively fertile for projects of accumulating imperial subjects and lands in order to generate profit, incorporating the figure of the Native to work through royalist concerns and imperial anxieties.⁶⁶

These fictional and musical works, along with documentary accounts like those of Las Casas, helped to prop up the “Black Legend” regarding Spanish atrocities in the New World. As historian Noble David Cook writes, “By the late sixteenth century, the Black Legend was the stuff of common belief of non-Iberian Europeans. … If the Spanish were truly as barbarous and cruel as depicted in the popular literature, then any action taken against them in Europe or within their overseas territories could be justified.”⁶⁷ Moreover, Jennifer L. Morgan describes the seventeenth century as “the moment when the English state made foundational commitments to an empire that was rooted in colonial commodities markets and was dependent on slave labor.”⁶⁸ Thus, competing European powers would have interpreted the lethality of Spanish New World coloniality as gross biopolitical and economic negligence with regard to potential imperial slave labor for monoculture plantations (like sugarcane) and precious metals mining (like silver).⁶⁹ In the name of justifying these commitments, English defenses of English colonial activities on the performing stage were always significantly economic in character. Additionally, it is now possible to look back upon the English musical stage’s fascinations and anxieties regarding colonial activity with the discomfiting awareness of the planetary, geological significance of that activity.

These integrated representations of Indigeneity as resources for the European cultural imagination mirror the assimilation of Natives into the ecclesiastical and colonial order through the production of creole statuses and the blood quantum categorization schemes—simultaneously serological and metaphysical—that would shape early modernity’s emerging taxonomies of the human.⁷⁰ This reductionistic hierarchization in terms of blood would eventually biologize and naturalize the emerging concept of race.⁷¹ When The Indian Queen is situated within the events and epistemologies of colonial modernity, it can then point symbolically to some fundamental logics that the Anthropocene inherits from coloniality—such as the proliferation of increasingly homogeneous modes of comprehending and organizing life, the assumption that extractivism delivers progress, and the commitment to categorizing and measuring the world empirically in order to gain more profitable dominion over it.

In the twenty-first century—a historical vantage point capable of taking a long view of coloniality—The Indian Queen has attracted attention anew for its bold portrayal of early modernity’s tectonic shifts. Opera director Peter Sellars’s highly revisionist 2014 production for the Teatro Real de Madrid, the English National Opera, and the Tchaikovsky Opera reworks the text to set the story in the bloody decades following the arrival of Iberian colonizers in the Americas, confronting audiences directly with the topic of colonial violence.⁷² Sellars discards Dryden’s narrative and centers the story on a novel by Nicaraguan author Rosario Aguilar (b. 1938) titled La niña blanca y los pájaros sin pies (The white girl and the footless birds), published in English as The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma. Consequently, the production is focused emotionally on Aguilar’s story line of a princess named Teculihuatzin being kidnapped and presented as a concubine to Don Pedro de Alvarado, a conquistador. The original’s pre-contact confrontation between Incas and Aztecs is therefore replaced with a story of colonial extermination told from womens’ perspectives. It is set to a collage of musical material from Purcell’s oeuvre, in which selections from what he finished of The Indian Queen before his death are interspersed with other works.

One of the most emotionally powerful moments occurs during the interpolation of Purcell’s psalm setting “I Will Sing unto the Lord,” Z. 22 (1679), which Sellars grafts into the first act. The chorus on stage, which comprises a group of Indigenous characters wearing fearful expressions before a patrol of conquistadors, is coerced into a Christian confession. While they sing “As for sinners, they shall be consumed out of the earth,” five of their number are brought forward to kneel before a firing squad of Spanish soldiers (outfitted with twenty-first-century tactical gear and replica assault rifles). Example 1 shows the score of Purcell’s setting, annotated to show aspects of Sellars’s staging.⁷³ As the chorus cadences with a diminuendo to a hesitant G major sonority, the five are executed by bullets to the back of the head. The stunned chorus intones the same text again, now beginning on a catatonic G minor. They sink to the floor in a state of shock, and finish the subsequent phrase—“and the ungodly shall come to an end”—on an open-fifth sonority on F natural, as though Purcell’s setting gapes in horror at the staging of colonial brutality.

Sellars’s production garnered mixed reviews. Some audiences objected to the overtly political tenor of the production and what they saw as a plundering of Purcell’s catalog to suit the impresario’s agenda.⁷⁴ Sellars himself is quoted as describing his desire for the production to “open up some wounds, so that they can be cleaned rather than allow them to fester.”⁷⁵ He saw the production as reviving some of the responses to The Indian Queen’s first performances. Just as, for seventeenth-century listeners, The Indian Queen invoked associations with the bloodshed and loss of life incurred by the colonization of the Americas, so in the twenty-first century, Sellars’s Indian Queen functions in some of the same ways—by inviting scrutiny of what he refers to as the “wounds” of coloniality, which continue to have ramifications today, long after the invasions.

Sellars’s pathogenic analogy—of colonization as an infected wound—is suggestive because it was not just colonial violence that decimated the populations of the American continents. Since the 1950s, numerous historians have pointed out that devastating illnesses played a critical part in the European settler colonial invasions of the New World: smallpox most famously, but also measles, influenza, strains of plague, and typhus, and others.⁷⁶ The global project of colonization was thus shaped by significant biological and nonhuman factors that undermine firm distinctions between natural histories evoked by terms like the “Orbis Spike” and cultural histories evoked by terms like “opera.”

Alfred Crosby’s famous “virgin soil hypothesis” conjectures that Old World pathogens were like embers, that New World populations without exposure and immunities to those pathogens were like dry hay, and that contact between the two led inevitably to the inferno-like spread of devastating disease.⁷⁷ More recently, Paul Kelton has argued that while diseases were an important factor in population decline, colonial violence and practices such as the enslavement of Natives in the Spanish encomienda system, warfare, and the establishment of Christianizing missions created conditions that promoted the spread of disease.⁷⁸ Acknowledging the impact of disease on the New World’s post-contact populations therefore in no way implies—as objected by historians like Massimo Livi-Bacci—that the “American catastrophe [was] a natural, ahistorical event, thus absolving the historian from further analysis.”⁷⁹ Such appraisals of the moral balance sheet are buttressed by assumptions of an innate separateness of social and natural histories. But colonial violence, colonial economies of (increasingly African) enslavement in plantations and mines, colonial theology, and the pathogenicity of microbes introduced during colonization systematically coproduced each other over time. This sociobiological character is fundamental to the Anthropocene’s materialization of social history and planetary history within each other, as we have witnessed in our own global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic—during which we have been disabused of the notion that microbe pathogenicity depends simply on the nonhuman, asocial, amoral caprice of microscopic beings.

Sixteenth-century accounts of the colonies—such as the widely translated Brevísima relación of Las Casas or Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del nuevo mundo (1572), which propagated the “Black Legend” of Spanish brutality in the New World—typically did not mention or emphasize disease, but a number of noteworthy texts did.⁸⁰ Friar Toribio de Motolinía, who arrived in central Mexico in 1524, enumerates in his Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España (1541) ten interlinked “plagues” that ravaged Native populations following colonial contact: among them were disease, war, famines, the brutality of Spanish encomienda systems, tribute arrangements, precious metals mining, and the slave labor systems utilized for rebuilding Tenochtitlán.⁸¹ Francisco López de Gómara, the Sevillian historian who documented the stories of returning conquistadors and who was an important biographer of Hernán Cortés, offers one of the most striking accounts. His Historia general de las Indias, translated into English in 1578, documents how pandemic disease contributed to Cortés’s siege of Tenochtitlán during 1519–21: “At the defence of the citie were al the nobilitie, by reason wherof many were slayne. The multitude of people was great, who eate litle, dranke salte water, and slepte among the dead bodies, where was a horrible stenche: for these causes the disease of pestilence fell among them, and thereof died an infinite number.”⁸² Describing this smallpox epidemic, which researchers now believe began in central Mexico in September 1519, López de Gómara records, “The Indians called this sickness huitzahuatl, meaning the ‘great leprosy,’ and later counted the years from it, as from some famous event.”⁸³ Although the dissemination of these texts occurred before the germ theory of disease was commonly understood, aspects of the biological factors in New World population crashes became known across Europe following the colonial invasions (if not in the same ways as they are understood today).

Evidently, for the Native survivors of this particular smallpox epidemic—who according to López de Gómara “counted the years from it, as from some famous event”—the demographic devastation inflicted by the colonizers was of epoch-defining significance. Of course, factors beyond armed conflict and disease also played a part, and post-contact demographic patterns in Latin America were extraordinarily heterogeneous. Colonizers’ understandings of conflicts between Mesoamerican societies, for example, framed Indigenous polities as riven by tumultuous and decadent leadership, and therefore as particularly ripe targets for invasion and exploitation.⁸⁴ Moreover, conquest introduced other population vulnerabilities such as frequent famines when former agricultural areas were depopulated by disease, war, and the displacement of agricultural laborers for faraway mining and plantation work.⁸⁵ William M. Denevan has estimated that the pre-contact hemispheric population of nearly 54 million had been reduced to one of around 5.6 million by the end of the seventeenth century.⁸⁶ It is therefore unsurprising that survivors of population-level pressures such as the aforementioned would regard the depopulation that resulted from colonial invasion as epoch-defining.

The research into the Orbis Spike establishes parallels between Central American Natives’ attribution of epochal significance to colonial disease pandemics and other forms of mass devastation—as preserved in López de Gómara’s and others’ accounts—and the twenty-first-century proposals to formally locate the start of the Anthropocene at these population losses and their atmospheric significance. Although this proposal for dating the Anthropocene’s early boundary has never been widely accepted within the geological sciences, it commands attention from historians by virtue of its geochronological argument that the colonial invasions of the Americas initiated an on-ramp toward the beginning of the Anthropocene. This realization introduces highly contemporary stakes to musicological investigation into the colonial world, and confronts studies of music and ecological crisis with lengthier historiographical imaginaries. It underscores the historical consistencies behind the contemporary and future fact that climate precarity in the Anthropocene is distributed most heavily among those who contributed least to it, many of whom now live on the very earthly spaces that colonial expansion and enslavement most hungered after centuries ago.

The Indigenous population decline now linked to the Orbis Spike attracted widespread notice. Its traces in works of music and literature like The Indian Queen helped to naturalize such population crashes and embed them in the cultural and sonic imaginaries of colonial powers and their New World satellites. Once the depopulation that resulted from colonial brutality became well known on both sides of the Atlantic, this knowledge gave rise to cultural mythotropes that worked to further rationalize and legitimate colonial expansion, as metropole-periphery colonialism shifted to settler colonialism in the history of the Americas.⁸⁷

Amid ongoing pandemics that had by then spread to North America, colonial settlers in what is now the United States and Canada began to impute to Native Americans a historical role whereby they inevitably died off in the face of the arrival of Europeans with their cultures, their pathogens, and their desires.⁸⁸ This myth had long been buttressed by teleological interpretations of population decline as both an aide to and justification for colonial invasion. Colonial governor of the Carolinas John Archdale recorded in 1634 that “[t]he Hand of God was eminently seen in thinning the Indians to make room for the English,” and that it “pleased Almighty God to send unusual sicknesses amongst them, as the smallpox, &c. to lessen their numbers”⁸⁹—an understanding that inverts and denies the true causal relationship between colonial expansion and the decimation of Native populations.

Changes in the goals of colonial administration as settler colonial regimes took hold also gave rise to changes in the perceived meaning of Indigenous deaths. In the period following European contact, Indigenous deaths were seen as reducing populations of colonial subjects and potential slaves. But as settler colonization took hold, Indigenous deaths became naturalized as a justification not only for colonial expansion, but increasingly for the goals of that expansion: not only a by-product of toppling Native government structures and “civilizing” Indigenous peoples as tributary subjects, but the violent prerequisite for the making of a new civilization.

In the years around 1780, against the backdrop of this ongoing Indigenous population decline, a then anonymous song was becoming popular among British and Euro-American audiences. Alongside other musical and literary works with New World themes, it helped to naturalize the cultural mythotrope of Indigenous disappearance as justification for settler expansion. Titled “The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians,” it purports to record the defiant song or chant of a captured warrior—the son of a likely apocryphal Indigenous American chieftain by the name of Alknomook—who has been sentenced to burning at the stake. It was printed with the claim that it had been transcribed “by a gentleman long conversant with the Indian tribes,” implying that it had originated in expertise about the New World.⁹⁰ Michael Pisani clarifies that Indigenous American practices of “singing a song of defiance in the face of torture had also been noted earlier, particularly in [Jesuit missionary] Joseph-François Lafitau’s 1724 study of customs among the Iroquois.”⁹¹

“The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” circulated without a printed authorial attribution for nearly two decades. An early European description surfaced in 1782 in the diaries of the Welsh-born socialite and arts patron Hester Thrale Piozzi, which serve as rich primary sources for eighteenth-century English cosmopolitan life. One of Piozzi’s entries reveals the song’s author to be the British poet Anne Home Hunter, who also wrote several of the English texts that Joseph Haydn set to music.⁹² Twenty years after Piozzi documented her encounter with the song, the text was at long last attributed to Hunter in her 1802 collection Poems.⁹³Figure 2 shows the song as it appears (though without attribution) in a London print of 1810.⁹⁴

Hunter’s air transmitted to European audiences their colonial envoys’ idealized notions of the peoples native to the so-called New World. But it would have borne no meaningful resemblance to Indigenous musics. The “Scotch snap” rhythms in the third phrase of the melody (occurring at the words “Begin, ye Tormentors, your Threats are in vain” in the first strophe) functioned as generic ciphers for otherness in British musical idioms.⁹⁵ Hunter’s song translated for European comprehension settler perceptions of Indigenous practices surrounding death through an invented idiom—still decidedly English in character—that was marketed, whether sincerely or not, as characteristic of New World societies. This fabrication indicates that Native Americans were resistant to representation by settlers and thwarted colonial mastery, a point to which I shall return. The analysis of the death song trope and its consequences in this section is thus not intended to bring these Indigenous practices under a mastery they had indeed thwarted. My aim is rather to examine how settlers represented Native peoples’ death songs among themselves, what some Indigenous sources have chosen to reveal, and how these representations and disclosures speak to the temporal framework of the Anthropocene.

Scholarship remains divided as to whether the melody of Hunter’s “Death Song” was her own composition or a borrowed tune of some unconfirmed origin.⁹⁶ Whatever its source, by 1802 caricatures of Indigenous death songs had already become a cultural fixture in music, theater, and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, not least because the composition now associated with Hunter had become highly popular in its years of anonymous circulation. And it remained so well into the nineteenth century. John Koegel counts at least fifty-seven print and manuscript sources of the song in circulation in England and the United States between 1780 and 1855.⁹⁷

By the time the “Death Song” appeared in Hunter’s 1802 Poems, the tune and/or its text had already been incorporated into numerous contemporaneous works but without Hunter’s bass line. These include Samuel Arnold’s comic opera New Spain, or Love in Mexico (1790), performed at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket; Sally and Eliza Marchant’s song “The Indian Chief” (1783), with an alternate bass line from their collection of seventy-four copied tunes; Royall Tyler’s comic play The Contrast (1787); and Ann Julia Hatton’s (now lost) libretto for the extremely popular musical/opera The Songs of Tammany, or The Indian Chief (1794), which was premiered in New York.⁹⁸ The last of these (Hatton) is the first known American libretto by a woman, and the first known libretto written in the United States about an American setting. Summarizing this history, Pisani notes that “The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” “played a substantial role in theatrical productions in the decades following its appearance in print. As a stylistic topic, it also influenced other music for Indian characters.”⁹⁹

In Boston, American poet Sarah Wentworth Morton incorporated some verse (not derived from Hunter’s poem) entitled “Death Song” into her Ouábi, or The Virtues of Nature: An Indian Tale in Four Cantos (1790), published under the nom de plume “Philemia” (sometimes transmitted as “Philenia”).¹⁰⁰ Hans Gram, a Danish composer who settled in Boston in the 1780s, set Morton’s verse for solo tenor with orchestral accompaniment, entitling the setting “The Death Song of an Indian Chief” and publishing it in the Massachusetts Magazine in March 1791. Copies of the setting as it appears in this publication survive in the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and at the Library of Congress. In the upper left-hand corner of the copy held at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, a pencil annotation makes the following claim: “Mass Magazine March 1791, the first orchestration printed in the U.S.”¹⁰¹ (see figure 3). Though Gram’s setting was evidently not as popular as the tune and text associated with Anne Home Hunter, this claim makes it no less significant.

Gram’s “Death Song” is acknowledged as the first orchestral score printed in the United States, and Hatton’s Tammany is acknowledged as the first known libretto written by an American woman. What does it mean for these musical firsts to have focused upon the deaths of fictionalized Native Americans? Historian Philip J. Deloria (Sioux) interprets the portrayals of defiant Indians and their death songs in works like those by Hunter, Hatton, and Gram as allegories for American defiance toward the Crown, and thus as forming part of a search for a national identity.¹⁰² He argues that settlers sought ultimately to absorb into their constructions of themselves the virtuous traits they first imputed to idealized Indians through rhetorical devices like the death song trope—traits such as stoic bravery and being in union with the natural world. Settlers situated themselves as the inheritors of these traits and then figured actual Indians as violent brutes incapable of preserving their own societies and virtues. These overtly negative portrayals were discursive strategies for positioning white settlers as the “natural” inheritors of the continent in the face of the rapid (but long-term) decline in Indian populations. The death song trope thus participates in a paradoxical construction of Indigenous peoples that would present them as both life/vitality and death/debility: simultaneously as an archetype for “authentic” living and flourishing within the New World, and as inevitably dying away and ripe for being dispossessed of land, lifeways, and life itself.¹⁰³

The death song trope thus participated in a certain hemispheric imagining of the categories of the human and the natural or nonhuman. As Tiffany Lethabo King summarizes, “starting in the mid-1400s, Black people become lesser humans; Indigenous peoples soon follow in the 1490s, when the bloody theatrics and overrepresentation of the human are restaged at the site of Indigenous bodies who become lesser humans on the other side of the Atlantic in what will become the Americas.”¹⁰⁴ By constructing an image of “inherently,” “naturally” stoic Indigenous people, the death song trope consolidated a colonial imaginary in which Amerindians became regarded as predisposed by nature, disposition, and biological destiny to yield to or even welcome without complaint the dispossession of their lands and ways of living. The death song trope therefore indicates how a naturalistic, biologized conception of racial difference produced the “naturalization of colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans,” as Aníbal Quijano writes.¹⁰⁵ Extending this line of reasoning further, Achille Mbembe argues that “[i]n the conqueror’s eyes, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension,” something demanding strict management, even to the point of elimination.¹⁰⁶

It is imperative—as an Anthropocene priority—to expose and disrupt this conquistador hubris within the musics, literatures, and histories that have propagated it. As Amitav Ghosh writes, “it is increasingly clear that those who deny the reality of climate change … believe in inaction, on both climate change and matters of public health, because they think that only those who are congenitally weak and vulnerable will suffer,” a belief that historically links certain climate- and Covid-19-related Darwinist attitudes with the projects of colonial empire.¹⁰⁷

The death song trope in the anglophone Atlantic’s popular compositions largely associates its imagined Indigenous subjects with deaths in battle. But death songs were also inscribed into the colonial archive of the Americas through settler ethnographic records in which Indigenous peoples’ death songs were documented in connection primarily with smallpox. For instance, the nineteenth-century artist George Catlin cited a death song in remarks on the effects of smallpox among Sioux and Winnebago of the Upper Mississippi River. Catlin’s recollection eventually reached physician Joseph Barnes, who published it in 1848 as part of an article on a strain of the disease in a medical journal. Catlin recalled, “O-wapa-shaw, the greatest man of the Sioux, with half his band, died under corners of fences, in little groups, to which kindred ties held them in ghastly death, with their bodies swollen, and covered with pustules, their eyes blinded, hideously howling their death song in utter despair.”¹⁰⁸

Around the same period, a Kansas state official named James R. McClure, while helping to take the 1855 census, recorded an encounter with a group of Indigenous people: “When I came near the camp, I observed all the bucks squatted in a circle, chanting in a mournful tone one of their songs, which I afterwards learned was a death-song. … I afterwards learned they had buried one of their braves who had died from smallpox. … The smallpox had broken out among the Indians, and proved very fatal.”¹⁰⁹ Medical historian Donald R. Hopkins further notes that “two massive, devastating pandemics, in 1801–2 and 1836–40, dealt the coup de grace to many tribes of indigenous Americans.”¹¹⁰ It is these pandemics and their ensuing reinfections that form the biological backdrop for Catlin’s and McClure’s accounts.

These instances of Indigenous death practices documented by Catlin and McClure would have been understood as responses to particularly abject deaths. In the centuries that saw the European colonization of the American continents and its segue into the statist project of creating the United States, smallpox and a few other pathogens were among the deadliest known afflictions. The notion of death songs as actually observed, however, is only vaguely defined among settler sources that are witness to them; they yield limited possibilities for providing ethnographically reliable insight into Indigenous death practices and attitudes concerning death songs, precisely because they are settler sources. What these settler accounts can confirm is that settlers developed some notion of death songs as Indigenous responses to disease epidemics.

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, smallpox and other pathogens that were propagated via colonization continued to decimate Indigenous populations.¹¹¹ One particularly insidious example is the infamous Fort Pitt incidents of 1763 in Western Pennsylvania, in which Lord Jeffery Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America, and Colonel Henry Bouquet contemplated sending smallpox-inflected blankets from the outpost’s hospital quarantine supplies to local Lenape groups. One of the soldiers there, Captain William Trent, recorded in his journal that at a meeting with two Lenape leaders on June 24, “[o]ut of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox hospital.”¹¹² The history of smallpox contagion and other diseases in North America points to a broader relationship in which practices of colonial violence such as warfare—and also slave taking and violently coerced labor—contributed significantly to the epidemiological conditions of pandemic disease spread in North America. Within ethnographic records alluding to Native American death songs, some of the microbial agents that contributed to the Orbis Spike depopulation and subsequent waves of North American Indigenous population decline are inscribed into the archive via vocal sound and a concept of song.

Historians should be cautioned about inferring too much from what has entered the written and largely colonial record concerning Native peoples’ death songs. As Glenda Goodman warns, “the materials for researching early American music are densely populated with the productions of settler colonists, and the apparatuses for conducting research make it conducive to stick to such materials.”¹¹³ The availability of settler materials hence makes it easy to reproduce the biases and distortions of perspective within them. Yet the unreliability of what the colonial, settler-produced archive can reveal about the death song should also remind us that the songs themselves showed resistance in the face of the colonial project of mapping, measuring, and rationalizing conquered peoples and lands in the idiom of mastery. As Goodman writes elsewhere, Western representations of Indigenous music and song served as “proxies for experiences that were partly incomprehensible,” experiences that thwarted forms of colonial domination that sought to master and discipline the knowledges of the Other.¹¹⁴

The European death song trope points to a failure to capture in musical notation the fugitive nature of Indigenous vocal sounds.¹¹⁵ Settler earwitness accounts speak poorly to actual death song practices. Indigenous peoples’ death songs therefore persist opaquely in the archive, in ways that elude being captured, grasped, and exposed by coloniality’s “hungry listening,” as Dylan Robinson (xwélmexw/Stó:lō) describes.¹¹⁶ Even as death songs and their musical and ethnographic representations appear to testify to the lethality of colonization, there is also a sense in which they speak back—via their very opacity and reticence—against the colonial violence of their real-life singers being measured, analyzed, and mastered by the desires of colonization and its techniques. Noting these anticolonial implications is by no means intended to downplay or “spin positively” the extent of the loss of life incurred by colonization. Rather, it aims to warn against the extractive assumption that settler tools of knowing have the mandate to trespass wherever they wish, licensed by the sentimental appeals of cross-cultural understanding and reconciliation politics—a line that I perhaps blunder too close to in the above case study of the death song trope. As Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) explains, dissimulating antagonisms between Indigenous peoples and settlers can “reproduce nonmutual and unfree relations” when they are “determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in the relationship.”¹¹⁷

Despite the ideological projects and settler colonial distortions in which the death song trope was enmeshed, it does in fact reflect an actual practice among various Indigenous communities. It is still acknowledged today by Native Americans, and its opacity deserves to be taken seriously. On one internet question-and-answer board, quora.com, a question asking about death songs in the context of Native American culture was met with a guarded response from a respondent identifying as Comanche/Numunu: “This kind of thing is too intimate for me to want to talk about with strangers. … For most Native people spiritual/religious topics are considered intimate/sacred/private in the way mainstream/Non-Native people would consider topics like personal sexual experiences. This is a real cultural difference.”¹¹⁸ The only other respondent to the question, identifying as Ojibwe, writes, “For my tribe, if you’re in the heat of battle, and you’re not gonna make it out alive … start singing. As for what and why, I’m not gonna tell you.”

Reflecting on literary instances of portrayals of death songs, Warren Cariou (Metís) writes that, against the backhanded representations of Indians within the literature of Romanticism as “autonomous, thoughtful, even virtuous,” there was “a counter-discourse that also clings to many of these representations: the specter of Indigenous extinction.”¹¹⁹ Cariou observes that a “rhetoric of [Native peoples’] extinction seems to increase dramatically in the [Romantic] period,” prefigured by losses of Indigenous life following European invasion significant enough to set the tone for fundamental aspects of centuries of the colonial gaze and its varying administrative forms from invasion to statist expansionism. He explains that in colonial fiction of the period on both sides of the Atlantic, it eventually became difficult to find major Indigenous characters who do not perform a death song. Indeed, in Samuel Arnold’s abovementioned New Spain, the character Alknomook (notionally the father of the narrator in Hunter’s song) appears for the sole narrative purpose of staging a death song.¹²⁰

Though the Anthropocene is not Cariou’s frame of reference here, his choice of the term “extinction” suggests possibilities for seeing the loss of human life and the disruption of relations between peoples, lands, and co-dwelling species during colonization as coincident with “the sixth major extinction event in the history of life,” as stated by biologist F. Stuart Chapin III and collaborators.¹²¹ The broader connections between death songs and disease in the colonial ethnographic record further put death songs into conversation with planetary, Anthropocene history. Scholars have already interpreted death songs within the conceptual frame of global history as traces of genocidal events within the societal processes of coloniality. However, situating these Indigenous population crashes within the planetary and geological origination story of the Anthropocene begins to suggest that the colonial violence deposited in the sedimentary archive at the Orbis Spike is a yet greater, more temporally unbound violence even than what global history and its concept of genocide can hold up for scrutiny.

It is imperative for ideas of extinctive threats to human populations to be configured in ways that avoid the historical blunder of associating Indigenous people with the themes of animality and inhumanity with which the term “extinction” can be freighted. This would be a disastrous (if sadly familiar) way to characterize the deaths incurred by colonization, in that it could be seen as alluding to a simple zoological failure to adapt (in vulgar Darwinist thinking). Instead, considering death songs in music and literature alongside both Cariou’s use of “extinction” and an awareness of the colonially induced Anthropocene as the sixth mass extinction event in biological history crystallizes a warning about the ecocidal ramifications of coloniality and its systems of agriculture, industry, labor, militarization, finance, and so forth.¹²²

As King writes, “conquest, its subjects (conquistadors), and its daily instantiations (modes of conquering) must be spoken in a sharper vernacular and hypoglossic speech that can give signification to its forms of violence that remain unnamed in the wake of discourses of settlement.”¹²³ The epoch-defining and pervasively multispecies, ecocidal character of colonization—long identified by Indigenous and Black thinkers—suggests that speaking of the fatal processes of colonialism as “genocide” may not adequately capture its sprawl across the kinds of political, cultural, geographic, temporal, and species fault lines that typically enclose genocides and give them specificity. Mbembe frames coloniality as a system that not only produced and regulated power itself as “the acceptability of putting to death,” but also set the terms for the naturalization of African slavery, for class-based systems of antiproletarian racisms that “ended up comparing the working classes and ‘stateless people’ of the industrial world to the ‘savages’ of the colonial world,” for the Nazi extermination, and now for the Anthropocene’s “complex networks of extraction and predation, many of whose forms have led to the transgression of planetary boundaries.”¹²⁴ This “necropolitics”—a definition of sovereignty according to which power inheres in the capacity to decide who is preserved and who is exterminated—meets the Anthropocene and its multispecies character in Justin McBrien’s neologism “Necrocene,” and in Ghosh’s proposal that coloniality was not only genocidal but “omnicidal.”¹²⁵

This is to say that the lethal processes disclosed by the death song trope not only belong to the time and place of their instrumentalization in the name of conquest, subsequent nation-state formation, and the accumulation of capital. They also link to the existential threats that contemporary climate change poses especially to present-day Indigenous communities as well as to other people of color and marginalized communities—who are often the first to be exposed to the harms of toxic pollution, to rising sea levels in coastal floodplains and island nations, or to further endangerment resulting from the extractive economies and environmental decisions of neocolonial administrations in contemporary states.¹²⁶ Interactions between the biological and social processes of coloniality are keystones of the Anthropocene’s origin story. But these interactions also point to their messy ongoingness and futurity—their proliferating consequences for other life-forms and the biological underpinnings of human life, which are not easily metabolized within the anthropocentrism of societal or global history, or its received terminologies and timescales.

Cariou’s invocation of “the specter [my emphasis] of Indigenous extinction” in Romantic literatures also alludes, however, to the fact that Indigenous peoples of the Americas are living today—that the extinction of Indigenous people continues to be thwarted and, like a ghost exorcised, not permitted to lodge. What becomes obvious from anticolonial scholarship in Indigenous, Black, and Africana studies is that writing about the lethal histories of coloniality and its enslavement economies only in terms of their lethality and the figure of death is a practice of forgetting and rendering invisible. Inspired by Katherine McKittrick’s critical practice of reading not only for the inscription of anti-Black violence in cultural and social histories but for Black “livingness,”¹²⁷ I consider some sonic enactments of Indigenous livingness following the decimation of Indigenous populations in and beyond the early modern period. McKittrick’s methodological prod calls for a discourse that disrupts and surpasses (without denying) the Orbis Spike data’s framing of the Anthropocene as originating in nonwhite death and dispossession.

Studies of early Native American Christianity have revealed how, in encounters between Indigenous peoples of southern New England and British settlers, the singing of psalms translated into Indigenous languages carried spiritual significance. Goodman, for instance, relates that in the 1640s, English Puritan missions began to convert Natives, focusing on groups of Algonquin Indians. These groups had experienced “depopulation from disease, dispossession of their lands, and threats from more powerful surrounding tribes, and … were seeking a safe harbor where traditional customs could be salvaged.” Goodman shows that psalm singing was a way for some Algonquins to “open themselves to the new spiritual power [the God of the Puritan settlers] through this communal form of worship.” She links coloniality and the decimation of Native populations in her exploration of hybridized, asymmetrical practices of psalm singing, which she characterizes as practices by which “Indians in seventeenth-century New England sought to rebuild their strength.”¹²⁸

Goodman further notes that “the same epidemic[s] that decimated New England Native groups also disrupted the transmission of cultural knowledge and shook communities’ confidence in spiritual protectors.”¹²⁹ Hence, some New England Natives who found themselves dispossessed and displaced by colonial contagion and expansion, and who incorporated the English mission into their survival strategies, were also responding to the collapse of their constructions of reality—to the loss not only of their lands but of the ontologies and belief systems by which they parsed the world. As Lawrence Gross (Anishinaabe) writes of the arc of Native American histories following European settler colonialism, “Native Americans have seen the end of their respective worlds. … [T]his should be correctly termed an apocalypse.”¹³⁰ The rending of Indigenous American worlds marks continuities with present-day apocalyptic rhetorics of the Anthropocene and the catastrophic climatic consequences—like water shortages, deadly heat waves, and crop failures—that have already begun.¹³¹

Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi) clarifies that “[t]hough the climate destabilization described in Anthropocene futures may be a distinct ecological challenge for Indigenous peoples, we experience it nonetheless as associated with the repeated patterns of industrial settler tactics that we know all too well.”¹³² As Daniel Wildcat (Yuchi, Muscogee) similarly describes, contemporary climatic pressures on northern Indigenous populations, forcing them to relocate in the face of melting glacial ice, are sadly redolent of prior removals of Native peoples from their lands, such as the transference of Indigenous peoples to reservations and the placement of Indigenous children in settler boarding schools.¹³³ Whyte and Wildcat issue reminders that, for many Indigenous peoples, the catastrophic conditions of Anthropocene climate change cannot be imagined grammatically or historiographically via the future tense alone. Ultimately, Gross considers a point that compels both a form of difficult optimism and ongoing duties of decolonial care: “Just as importantly, though, Native Americans survived the apocalypse.”¹³⁴ The very presence of Indigenous singers in Goodman’s investigation of psalmody points to survivors of apocalyptic events, and offers the possibility of a temporal stance radically different from mainstream pre-apocalyptic framings of the Anthropocene.

Another example of an Indigenous sonic practice that stood against the apocalyptic, cosmology-shattering conditions of the post–Orbis Spike Americas is found in the Ghost Dance movement. Scholars often characterize Ghost Dances as demographic, spiritual, and communitarian revitalization movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century among numerous societies in the western United States and Plains. Ghost Dance ceremonies have been the subject of extensive study, and capturing the contextual specifics of the political and spiritual purposes they served for different communities of participants is far beyond the scope of the present article. What I would like to dwell on are the ways in which Ghost Dances often functioned as practices of post-apocalyptic revival and survivorship. The documentation of these practices reveals forms of Indigenous anticolonial resurgence that refuse the narrative trope of Native disappearance amid the apocalyptic conditions of coloniality. In contrast to a politics of recognition grounded in reconciling with the settler state, or a politics of Indigenous resiliency grounded in the settler state’s dissimulation of its capacity to meaningfully harm Indigenous communities, Coulthard describes practices of resurgence as “Indigenous peoples empowering themselves through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning that seek to prefigure radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power.”¹³⁵

The widespread Ghost Dance movement of 1889–90 was a messianic revival movement briefly shared among many Indigenous societies in the American West and Plains. Its ceremonies continued into the twentieth century—although the brutality of the massacre at Wounded Knee of December 1890, following a Lakota Ghost Dance ceremony that the US Army mistakenly believed to be a preparation for war, drove down Ghost Dance participation.¹³⁶ The ceremonies were typically conducted over periods of four consecutive nights and involved song, dance, auxiliary activities, and belief systems that would have varied from one society to another. James Mooney, the anthropologist who first provided extensive documentation of the Ghost Dance among Arapaho, Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, and Paiute communities, made its musical features central to the way it would be understood by other scholars when he recorded himself singing a number of the songs he heard—having likely been taught them by Ghost Dance participants with whom he spoke.¹³⁷ Various regional and national differences notwithstanding, ethnomusicologist George Herzog later argued in 1935 that Ghost Dance ceremony songs “preserved a surprising degree of stylistic unity while spreading on the Plains. In structure, comparatively narrow range, and some other features, the melodies are essentially in the style of the Paiute groups.”¹³⁸

As Herzog and others describe, a Paiute prophet named Wovoka is credited with disseminating the Ghost Dance ceremony and instructing practitioners in its songs and specifics, which individual societies then adapted to fit their own practices, needs, and cosmologies. Mooney’s eyewitness account, attempting to capture emic understandings among various western Indian societies, describes that the primary spiritual framing of the Ghost Dance typically involved imagining the return of the dead and restoration of conditions of flourishing. Mooney writes, “The great underlying principle of the Ghost Dance … is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease and misery.”¹³⁹ William G. McLoughlin gives a more structurally oriented summary: “The essential ideological features of true ghost dance movements were the rejection of European concepts of progress through the subjugation of nature, the rejection of the individualistic ethic of material acquisitiveness and the market economy that encouraged it, and the rejection of the European assumption that whites were the chosen people of God, with a manifest destiny to rule the world.”¹⁴⁰

Recalling the contagions that helped produce the Orbis Spike and were then spread and reintroduced in North America, B. C. Mohrbacher reminds us that “[s]ocial reality for many Native Americans in the late nineteenth century was grim. … Fatal diseases, imported with European immigrants, were at epidemic levels among some Indian nations and were devastating populations. Cholera, smallpox, and measles were diseases against which native people had no resistance.”¹⁴¹ He further details the destruction of hunting grounds, the elimination of game species like buffalo, and Indian relocation policies as factors that led not only to population losses but also to community fracture and declining participation in cultural practices among many Native North American societies.

However, the anthropological and ethnomusicological data on Ghost Dance ceremonies and their music need to be considered beyond their causal factors. Ghost Dance ceremonies were not simply the product of the dire conditions of coloniality but were also generative practices that served as cultural starting points. Mohrbacher asserts that the songs that were sung and developed for Ghost Dance ceremonies, “both as cultural artifacts and as annunciations of identity, helped to replenish cultural stock by increasing the quantity of culturally significant expression.”¹⁴² Anthropologist Alexander Lesser also described in 1933 how Pawnee participation in Ghost Dance ceremonies inspired renewed interest in older cultural forms of expression: “They revived war dances and societies; they revived the Horn Dance, the Young Dog Dance, the Iruska, the Big Horse Society, the Roached Heads, the Crazy Dogs. Again they carried out the Pipe Dance; they renewed interest in the Doctor Dances. They played handgames. In short, the activity of the Ghost Dance times was not a mere revival of old ways, it became a renaissance of Pawnee culture.”¹⁴³ Ghost Dance songs showed that “the dynamics of settler colonialism exert force upon but do not define the limit of Indigenous possibility, placemaking, and perception,” as Mark Rifkin writes.¹⁴⁴ They were used not just to protest spiritually against and commemorate the abjection experienced under coloniality. They also engendered new forms of musical play and renewed participation in traditional practices, and hence livingness and futurity.

These final two examples of Indigenous peoples asserting and enacting their surviving of apocalyptic conditions with the help of song—psalmody and Ghost Dance rites—reveal a surplus livingness that resides within and because of that survivorship. This surplus cannot be found within the humanism of the West, which looks ahead in pre-apocalyptic moods of anticipatory despair, denial, and even techno-salvific optimism toward the prospect of encountering the Anthropocene and its difficulties. I refer to such moods as a kind of Anthropocene “chrono-melancholia,” to describe the reflective stance and contemplative pause taken by those who promulgate them in confronting the (geo)chronology that awaits them.¹⁴⁵ My skepticism toward narrating the Anthropocene in terms of future threat is intended not to dismiss the importance of patient and careful thinking in the face of formidable difficulties to come, but to point out that such care has a very different character when the difficulties in question are understood as historical crises.

Concurring with Indigenous theorists cited above, Mbembe writes that “for a large share of humanity, the end of the world has already occurred,” yet that share nevertheless takes on the question of “how to live with loss, with separation,” declining the paused temporality of chrono-melancholia to instead get on with ongoingness.¹⁴⁶ Acknowledging the post-apocalyptic state of what Mbembe calls “a large share of humanity” will also raise questions about another kind of chrono-melancholic settler temporality, what Alexander Rehding refers to as “harnessing a sense of nostalgia … under an ecological banner.”¹⁴⁷ Rehding continues, “in marveling at landscapes as an integral part of our cultural identities, we begin to understand how much else we stand to lose if those landscapes disappear.” He tentatively prefers nostalgia to the apocalyptic alarmism of much ecocritique.

But it is worth remembering that nostalgia—and the reflective pause it embodies—is not necessarily a self-evidently recuperative or benign affect, even if it arrives via the idiom of care. As Hester Bell Jordan argues, the nostalgic capacity of landscape music to marvel sonically at threatened landscapes in order to motivate protective sentimentality in the Anthropocene was itself nourished by the colonial imaginary’s Edenic picture of the pristine, unpeopled landscapes that made up the New World (and, later, Australia and New Zealand).¹⁴⁸ No such Edens existed, so coloniality needed to invent and instantiate them in order to posit an object for its desire. This portrait eventually justified the settler colonial project of rendering invisible and nonexistent—whether through murder or assimilation—the Indigenous people who stood inconveniently in the way of this imaginary landscape. Moreover, as Shawn William Miller describes, largely as a consequence of the arrival of Old World pathogens and the epidemiological conditions that enabled their propagation, by the time settler colonial expansion began to predominate in North America, the New World was indeed “a greener, wilder place than it had been” prior to the initial colonial invasions, when more of the New World was cultivated and populated.¹⁴⁹

Both chrono-melancholic stances—pre-apocalyptic alarm and arcadian nostalgia—are settler imaginaries of Anthropocene time that can countenance neither the pastness of climatically significant apocalypses dating back to early modernity, nor Indigenous and other temporalities of post-apocalyptic futurity and ongoingness that emerged thereafter. But temporalities belonging to people of color who have survived the coming-to-an-end of their worlds-as-known and have innovated new lifeways have the power to demonstrate post-apocalyptic perdurance precisely because these modes of Indigenous and nonwhite living-being continue to live to tell of apocalyptic survival in coloniality and to oppose continuing colonial, racial dispossessions and environmental dispossessions in the Anthropocene.

One important beginning point for decolonial thought and praxis is developing an understanding of coloniality and its consequences by focusing on Indigenous and nonwhite knowledges—especially regarding those consequences, such as Anthropocene late modernity, that are not yet regularly uttered in the same breath as a discourse on the histories and persistence of empire. Coloniality stubbornly outlives formal colonial administrations in imaginaries, hierarchies, internalized metaphors, and ways of relating both to the self and to others as well as to place. Decoloniality is therefore a horizon, and thinkers may either face toward it or turn away from its beckoning. Its undoing, however, is to imagine it such that it might one day be considered a fait accompli—a maneuver not of completion but of dissimulation.

Ramón Grosfoguel locates a counter-presumption for decolonial praxis and scholarship. He writes that “a truly universal decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects [gesturing] towards a pluriversal as oppose[d] to a universal world.”¹⁵⁰ The homogenizing character of the Anthropocene and once common public rhetorics has in the past threatened to propound a mythic planetary Oneness facing ecological crisis.¹⁵¹ This illusion demands the same variety of antihomogenizing critique that Grosfoguel uses to take aim at the assimilative, flattening character of colonial modernity and the mythic Oneness—the one model of the rational and therefore good subject—by mandate of which it sought to devour the world in order to achieve its desires and its replication. As Zoe Todd argues, a decolonial investigation of the Anthropocene will need to begin with questions concerning the narratives we already enunciate about the Anthropocene and its ecological crises: “What other story could be told here? What other language is not being heard? Whose space is this and who is not here? … Who is dominating the conversations about how to change the state of things?”¹⁵² Such questions should prompt music scholars to seek out where narratives of music’s environmentality and embeddedness within climates have relied on settled, accepted imaginaries that occlude histories of coloniality and disregard the knowledges of those subjected to colonial powers.

Colonization’s history, its rationalities, its economies, and the voices of the thinkers shaped by its wake bring added complexity to conceptualizing alternate possibilities in the Anthropocene. Holly Watkins, for instance, considers Arthur Schopenhauer’s remarks on natural beauty and plant life—in which he privileged the beauty of uncultivated flora precisely because it was untouched by human hands—in order to then suggest an eco-aesthetics of music rooted in a flight from the human (itself grounded in a characterization of music’s resistance to semantic, i.e., human, meanings).¹⁵³ She points out that “[t]he philosopher’s elucidation of a kind of aesthetic engagement that is precisely not about us, that turns on a certain vanishing of the human, holds out the promise of radically noninvasive and noninstrumental modes of interaction with nature.” But she notes that Schopenhauer’s musical aesthetics of human vanishment has “many paradoxical aspects.”¹⁵⁴ Among them is the possibility that these aesthetics might make the most sense only to the subject whose actual vanishing will likely be the last to be foretold if at all—unlike the Pacific Islanders whose homes are now threatened with submergence, or northern Indigenous Americans displaced by currently melting polar ice, or the Central American Natives whose “vanishing” in the sixteenth century helped produce the atmospheric chemistry of the early seventeenth and augured the vanishing Anthropocene biodiversity to which Watkins calls attention. I mention this complication only to note that what may seem like intuitive imaginaries for more ecologically conscious routines of thought signify in more vexed ways when considered from outside of Global North–centered theoretical frameworks and intellectual traditions of Anthropocene discourses. If racial hierarchy and colonial conquest were once deemed “natural,” a decolonial musicological discourse on the Anthropocene will have to exercise appropriate skepticism toward “nature,” “naturalness,” and the sentiments of ecological holism—rather than treating nature and the natural as universally recuperative, “green” positivities to be discerned in or connected to works, artists, organologies, and performances.

A decolonial musicology of the Anthropocene would also involve questioning received (and hence naturalized) notions of how time and the events of history are conceptualized, and what counts as “longue” in the longue durée. Chakrabarty warns that “[i]f we do not take into account Earth-history processes that outscale our very human sense of time, we do not quite see the depth of the predicament that confronts humans today.”¹⁵⁵ But as our fields countenance meeting the historiographical demands posed by the Anthropocene’s timescales of planetary, geological, and colonial history, it becomes clear from consulting Indigenous American histories that what Chakrabarty regards as “our very human sense of time” might refer only to some (archetypally Western) humans’ historical sensibilities. As Whyte explains,

It is important to remember that, as Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang caution, colonization “is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression”¹⁵⁸—that decoloniality is not a metaphorical demand. But it is also important to attend to Indigenous experiences of difference and the direct influence of coloniality in shaping phenomena like racism, gender systems, the rise of capitalism, the regulative force of ideas about the normative body, and ecological (in)justice, as well as the internalized, colonial metaphors through which these phenomena were deployed.¹⁵⁹ Robinson describes how specific decolonial steps might involve turning “a critical lens toward individual inheritances of (hetero)normative, ableist, colonial, and racializing formations … through aesthetically marking what has been previously unmarked.”¹⁶⁰ The formations that Robinson names are all particular sites in which the contemporary planet finds itself riven by asymmetries of power that were naturalized in early modernity’s colonial invasions and their consequences. Thus, when music scholars attend to coloniality, recognizing this difficult manifold of themes and the way in which they structure settler normativity is part of the work of setting music studies on a course toward further decoloniality and settler accountability.

Chakrabarty opines that “thinking globally and thinking in a planetary mode are not either/or questions for humans,” and that encountering the planet musicologically in the Anthropocene must involve assessing its global histories anew.¹⁶¹ As this article submits, a musicology of the Anthropocene requires far more than ecological attentiveness and musical rigor; it will have to be unrelentingly nonreductionistic, decolonial, critical of capitalism, antiracist, anti-ableist, antiheteropatriarchal, honest about the histories of dominant faith traditions, and allied against white supremacism. The stories we as musicologists tell and what and whom we choose thereby to remember, brought into focus through music’s disclosure of how the Anthropocene began and what it has already wrought, will affect how we imagine more robust futures within it, and how we work to bring those futures about. Narrating how the totality of colonial modernity and its hierarchizing, homogenizing rationalities contributed to the onset of the Anthropocene (with its own slate of horrors) may have the character of an unwieldy, monstrous impossibility. But attempting to deal with the full complexity of the issue is not to be evaded on account of its scale, even if we can inevitably only address a fraction of this complexity at a time—because we have no choice.