Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social,
political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently,
Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture,
creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being
Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous
hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous
studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes
argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their
sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land
and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing "traditional"
beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to
challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and
images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and
heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In
addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is,
the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous
people are losing their "traditions." Indigenous hip hop artists
navigate the muddy waters of the "politics of authenticity" by creating
art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be
Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of "tradition" and create
alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that
might look like going forward.
