Native Spaces : A geography of sonic emplacement

Abstract

Native Spaces is a location-based audio public art platform created through collaboration between the authors and the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag. Aligned with Natchee Blu Barnd’s concept of creative ‘geographic strategies to unsettle settler colonialism’, the project is distinct due to its approach to using sound and emphasis on collaboration, albeit through differentiated roles and responsibilities, between settler and Indigenous participants. The project’s compositional choices challenge colonial sonic imaginaries while striving for public accessibility, sourcing field recordings from Massachusett territory to resist space abstraction and homogenization while incorporating more-than-human voices alongside human ones to destabilize dominant acoustic hierarchies. Moreover, the project’s relational, co-creation methodology emphasized capacity-building within the Massachusett Tribe while honoring sovereignty. Finally, the work extends beyond representation to nurture relationships between tribal members, local governments, and diverse publics, offering cultural geographers an example of a publicly accessible approach to sound (as a medium for creative documentary) that centers Indigenous voices while acknowledging the reality that contemporary spaces are shared by communities positioned by many different legacies.

Introduction

A large, circular medallion, brightly colored in blue, purple, and yellow, beckons on the sidewalk of a New England town. Drawing closer, it reminds you that ‘you are in Native Space’ and invites you to ‘scan to listen’. Using the medallion’s QR code, you open a website on your cell phone that invites you to ‘listen’. Putting on your headphones, your ears fill with a soundscape both familiar and unexpected: traffic and tour guides merge into the sound of waves lapping on the shore, the steady beat of powwow drums, and the murmur of friendly chatter. Within a few seconds, a voice speaks in your ear, offering a fragmentary observation on the colonial operations that made the landscape you see today and the invisible Indigenous relational geographies that persist (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Decal on Essex Street in downtown Salem, Massachusetts.

‘Native Spaces’ (https://findnative.space) is an audio public art platform co-created by the authors, Sarah Kanouse and Elizabeth Solomon, with the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, of which Elizabeth is an elder. Piloted in Salem, Massachusetts in the fall of 2024, the project offers Indigenous and anti-colonial perspectives on place via a location-aware website that algorithmically mixes ‘voices’ – mostly human, but also other beings and elements – based on the mobile listener’s location in one of five sound zones throughout the city. Designed for onsite listening as a re-/de-narration of physical space, ‘Native Spaces’ offers audio transcripts for d/Deaf visitors and a map-based navigation option for remote audiences. Each sound zone corresponds to a site where historical or archeological records indicate significant Indigenous presence, and human voice recordings reinforce themes resonant with the histories and present conditions of the site (Figure 2). For example, in the downtown seat of government, where a main street corresponds to a pre-colonial Indigenous thoroughfare, voices discuss the role of colonial deeds in the loss of not only Massachusett territory but also the seasonally migrational lifeways the land supported. While Indigenous voices speak of ‘us’ and ‘we’, non-Native voices grapple with issues of history, complicity, and solidarity in a contemporary society that remains stubbornly colonial.

Figure 2.

Three views of the web interface for mobile phone.

Although our title derives from Elizabeth’s longstanding use of the term ‘Native space’ to describe the endurance of Indigenous spatialities despite colonization, the project broadly aligns with the ‘geographic strategies to unsettle settler colonialism’ addressed by Natchee Blu Barnd in his 2017 book, Native Space. Unlike the visual art projects discussed by Barnd, ‘Native Spaces’ annotates the colonized landscape of Massachusetts with sound, giving literal voice to the ways that ‘Indigenous geographies have quietly overlapped and coexisted in tension with the geographies of the settler colonial state. . .submerged but not eliminated’. ¹ Our project arose organically, grounded more in Massachusett priorities and relationships than academic literatures. We negotiated questions of space, representation, media, and ethics that are important to geographers, artists, and community culture bearers alike, and we offer this reflection on our process to others who may be traveling similar paths. In particular, geographers have long employed interviews and field recordings as acoustic research material and, in recent decades, begun to analyze (and sometimes produce) creative works like audio walks and sound installations. ² Much of this scholarship has attended to the spatial-sonic experience of audiences, focusing on sound’s ‘capacity to provoke novel ways of perceiving and feeling the world [and harbour] its own kind of intelligence’, as George Burden recently observed. ³ While our project aligns with this scholarship, the knowledge base regarding oral and aural ways of learning and perceiving are an intrinsic component of Massachusett culture. By sharing both our compositional strategies and our relational approach to collaboration in a historically fraught landscape, we highlight the mutually reinforcing roles played by the aesthetic and organizational dimensions of community-based, anti-colonial sonic practice.

As the project’s co-initiators, we carry deep colonial histories: Sarah descends from some of the earliest English colonizers of Massachusett territory, while Elizabeth’s ancestors include Massachusett people, White settlers, and enslaved Africans. We acknowledge our positionalities to ‘emplace’ our relation to one another: to recognize what has brought us together here, in Massachusett territory, and to build projects that encourage others – both Indigenous and non-Native – to be ‘with place’ differently. ⁴ ‘Native Spaces’ grew from a relationship that began about seven years ago and has encompassed multiple creative, public education, and organizing efforts that include many other collaborators and range from a short film to an annual Indigenous-led boat tour to a developing archive of the Tribe’s language preservation curriculum. ‘Native Spaces’ evolved most directly from Elizabeth and Sarah’s contribution to the pandemic-era ‘Sound on Mystic’ audio art tour, which featured fourteen commissioned sound works designed to be experienced alongside the Mystic River via the Echoes audio app. Entitled ‘Headwaters and Homelands’, the short, standalone track convinced us of the potential of annotating space with Indigenous voices while also making us long for a platform that was simultaneously more accessible, more dynamic, and more autonomously directed by the Tribe and its members.

Emplacement/displacement

Built on local artist Halsey Burgund’s open-source platform Roundware, ‘Native Spaces’ is accessible to anyone with a web browser, while the Tribe maintains oversight of its content. As a location-based sound platform, the project embodies emplacement in the most literal sense: it is best experienced on-site, allowing movement through physical space to generate audio dynamically. Because the perception of sound by the bones of the inner ear is involved in proprioception (defined as the ability to sense one’s body in space), the overlay of composed sound over the ‘natural’ sound of place intentionally dis-orients and re-orients the listener. Sonic geographer Michael Gallagher describes this simultaneous emplacement and displacement as a form of spatial ‘haunting’ – a term that assumes additional significance in a colonial context constituted by violence that is both visibly absent and disavowed. ⁵ In Salem, listeners who wander through the city’s ‘quaint’ downtown might encounter a sonic collage in which, for example, scholars describe deeds as mechanisms of dispossession, Massachusett people recount the historical context in which their ancestors signed such documents, and non-Native Salem residents relate a growing unease with the concept of property – all overlaid atop a soundscape of rhythmic powwow drums, punctuated by the occasional honking of geese, the whistle of a train, the buzzing of insects, and the drone of an airplane. Such sounds dis-orient the listener from the ‘givenness’ of place and encourage reflection on the unseen forces – historical, political, and more-than-human – that produced and sustain it.

Significantly, all field recordings used for background tracks come from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – mostly, but not exclusively, from traditional Massachusett territory on the Atlantic coast between Cape Ann and Cape Cod. This insistence on approximate geographic fidelity resists the common practice of sourcing sounds from personal or commercial libraries that empty place of what sound artist and geographer A.M. Kanngieser calls its ‘deeper spatial and temporal orderings and geopolitical contestations’ – a practice of superimposition that recapitulates the neocolonial abstraction of space. ⁶ Moreover, the decision to source field recordings locally foreclosed the use of the ‘pristine’ sounds long fetishized in acoustic ecology and soundscape recording because the territory is, as the commonplace state highway marker reminds us, ‘thickly settled’. In a residential neighborhood across the North River from downtown, for example, powwow drums pick up a beat established faintly by a passing car and later duck over and under the drone of a lawnmower; the tonality of music and machine is complemented by the studio recording of an electric bass improvising open chords. Instead of escaping into a fantasy of untouched or pre-colonial nature interpreted by exclusively Native interlocutors, listeners sit simultaneously with the sonic reality of colonization, the endurance of contemporary Indigenous people, and the uneasy coexistence of modern infrastructure and the more-than-human living world.

Encountering the audience

Sound works presented in galleries, concert halls, and academic journals offer textual framing to orient the audience to a project’s intentions and often use both overt directions and social cues to guide their engagement. Public projects like ‘Native Spaces’ must devise more indirect means of alerting audiences to the self-reflexive mode of listening we wish to encourage. Our compositional choices balance resistance to colonial sonic norms with the desire to remain accessible to a public conditioned to acoustic conventions that prioritize the human voice and linguistic intelligibility. Such conventions are embedded in assumptions about rationality and human supremacy that are profoundly colonial. After unsuccessful early tests that played with multiple simultaneous human voices and extended stretches of more-than-human sound, we arrived at more subtle subversions of acoustic conventions. For example, our voices include bird calls, insect sounds, and the varied sonic expressions of water that periodically silence all spoken language. In places where infill has constructed land over water, the sounds of waves, rendered ghostly through echo and delay filters, lap the invisible shoreline. Human voices are lightly edited to preserve more than is typical of the texture of speech – its hesitation, accelerations, slang, and false starts – balanced with an effort to convey the speakers’ intended meaning. These compositional choices interject just a bit of grit in the gears of the aesthetics of mainstream audio production, encouraging an oscillation between sounds considered foreground and background, content and context.

Indigenous artist and philosopher Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō) sees such a ‘practice of oscillation’ as key to unsettling and destabilizing the ‘hungry’ or extractive listening practices of the dominant culture. ⁷ Drawing on the Stó:lō word for settler, which translates to ‘starving person’, Robinson describes ‘hungry’ listening as that which incorporates decontextualized Indigenous sounds into the body of Euro-American sonic practices as a form of multicultural enrichment, neither recognizing the incommensurable political and philosophical orders from which they emerge nor allowing them to destabilize Eurocentric acoustic regimes. Robinson’s concept aligns with our desire in ‘Native Spaces’ to resist delivering Massachusett stories to a non-Native audience hungry to consume diverse content. Against what Robinson (drawing on political scientist Davide Panagia) describes as normative ‘narratocracy’, we offer thematically grouped fragments arranged algorithmically without a clear beginning, middle, or end. Sonic zones are not introduced but periodically invoked in a series of refrains that welcome the listener to Native space and evocatively describe the location’s significance to the Massachusett people. For example, near the intersection where archeologists found a small carved bear and placed it in the collection of the nearby Peabody Essex Museum, voices speak to traditional and contemporary spiritual beliefs, including the Tribe’s 17th century conversion to Christianity, a religion some members continue to follow. This site’s refrain acknowledges the bear’s removal to the museum while asserting that ‘the land still holds our beliefs, traditions, and the useful and sacred things we created’. Moreover, in selecting project sites, we avoided drawing attention to culturally sensitive places, especially burial sites – an act that asserts what Édouard Glissant calls the ‘right to opacity’ and Audra Simpson refers to as ‘refusal’. ⁸ Moreover, our sound zones overlap unevenly with Salem’s tourist landscape, and the project does not react to, interpret, or subvert the city’s many monuments. Just as Barnd maintains that ‘Indigenous geographies can never be just a response to settler colonialism if they signal the continuation. . .of precolonial epistemologies, ontologies, and practices’, ‘Native Spaces’ decenters colonial narratives of place while complicating Eurocentric expectations of visibility and access. ⁹

Nurturing relationships

As a project, ‘Native Spaces’ embodies and encourages different relations with place; as a process, it builds on and furthers relationships between and among people. An outgrowth of a ten-year relationship between the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag and the City of Salem, the pilot iteration of ‘Native Spaces’ was paid for by the city but directed and maintained by the Tribe. Elizabeth and I call ourselves initiators rather than artists to foreground tribal leadership; and the public release event opened with a sacred greeting in the Massachusett language and a welcome from the Tribe’s Sagamore before comments from Salem’s mayor and ourselves. All interviewees approved the clips used in the project and received original files and edited transcripts to do with as they please. We have also initiated a process for archiving ‘Native Spaces’ source files and the Tribe’s language program materials that will be maintained under tribal authority but with institutional digital stewardship. These protocols express Massachusett sovereignty and frame ‘Native Spaces’ as a gift given by a sovereign equal rather than a gesture of liberal exclusion extended from the city to the Tribe.

‘Native Spaces’ sought to build capacity for future Massachusett initiatives while respecting the energy and capacity of tribal leaders who are often overextended. Our recording sessions piggybacked on existing events, such as a regalia workshop and the annual spring pow-wow, and we traveled to meet people where they live or work to conduct interviews. Mindful that the strongest voices in the Tribe are middle-aged or elder, Sarah led a series of workshops to train youth to interview age-mates, ensuring age diversity among the speakers while building media production skills and creating an equipment pool for future tribal oral history or interview projects. These efforts established the project as an opportunity for relationality within the Tribe, not just between the Tribe and a non-Native public whose well-intentioned desire to learn from Indigenous perspectives can sap rather than strengthen capacity.

Finally, ‘Native Spaces’ is not a one-and-done project: the Salem pilot constructed a digital infrastructure that can grow over time. We are planning public events affording the city’s residents and visitors structured opportunities to listen and speak, adding to the archive of voices heard in the project. Future chapters are being planned for other towns that have ongoing, reciprocal relationships with the Tribe. These places are simultaneously colonized Massachusett territory, international tourist destinations, and sanctuary cities that have attracted thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who are themselves often displaced Indigenous people. Our decision to include non-Massachusett speakers recognizes that these lands are now inhabited by many people whom we invite into a relationship of mutual respect and shared obligation. While centering Massachusett voices and building technical and social infrastructures, ‘Native Spaces’ asks a broader public to consider what it means- to be in reciprocal relation with the places they work, play, and live.