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Using beats as resistance  

Native youth incorporate art and hip hop to combat oppression

By Anna Sarkissian

At the Grammys in 2004, hip hop group OutKast closed the show with a lively rendition of their hit Hey Ya!

On stage a half-naked “squaw” emerged from a tipi and danced around in green fringe buckskins and white go-go boots, shaking it “like a Polaroid picture,” as the lyrics go.

This stereotypical depiction of native culture troubled artist, scholar, and professor Dylan Miner, who spoke about the intersection of hip hop, graffiti and contemporary indigenous art on Feb. 2. Miner teaches transcultural studies at Michigan State University.

“This unacknowledged cultural denigration compelled me to begin thinking about the importance of hip hop and graffiti within our communities,” said Miner, who is mitchif (or Métis) and grew up in Michigan. He was invited to speak at Concordia by the Department of Art History.

Hip hop’s popularity among indigenous youth is unprecedented, he said, calling it the lingua franca for many who claim it as their own. In turn, it has become a tool to empower them to resist colonial and capitalist hegemony.

Miner transposed the four elements of hip hop: literature, music, visual art, and dance with indigenous knowledge onto the pan-Indian medicine wheel of Lakota and Anishnaabe spirituality to create his aboriginal turntable (see graphic).

He also looked at the work of visual artist Bunky Echo-Hawk, whose performance-based live graffiti is impacting contemporary native painting and anti-authoritarian murals by the Oaxaca-based street art collective Lapiztola.

While there are many examples of artists and performers who incorporate facets of hip hop to fight oppression, there are also cases in which the iterations are problematic.

A controversial YouTube clip, pejoratively titled Ghetto Pow Wow, depicts a couple at the Chickahominy reserve in Virginia dancing provocatively in traditional attire.

“Not everyone is happy about the incorporation of hip hop into contemporary indigenous lifeways,” Miner said, mentioning that the woman’s jingle dress has important spiritual significance.

Still, he says it is interesting to see how aboriginal peoples have started to transculturate colonial and settler cultural practices into their own, “not simply as a naïve incorporation, but rather as an intentional and complex engagement with contemporary cultural practices.”

Miner repeated a quote from Louis Riel who said on the eve of his hanging, “My people will sleep for 100 years, and when they awake, it will be the artists who give them back their spirit.”

See more about Dylan Miner’s work.