Decolonial Hip Hop: Indigenous Hip Hop and the disruption of settler colonialism

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Detroit has gone through many changes – or so it appears. From streets lined with vehicles made by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors and driven by the nearly 2 million people who called the city home in 1950 to certain parts of the city looking like ghost towns; from a population that dwindled to 670,000 to the revival of downtown. Yet, what has been remarkably consistent is the invisibility of the Motor City’s Indigenous population. Indeed, Indigenous erasure, combined with rhetoric and policies that continue to marginalize and subjugate African Americans in Detroit, create a place rooted in multiple colonialisms. This essay examines how Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists resist settler colonialism through art, creativity, and culture as well as the practices of Detroit 2.0, a rhetoric and policy used by Detroit elites to reimagine it as a place of opportunity. By making visible the connections between blackness and indigeneity, as well as by linking the struggle of colonized peoples in Detroit to those in Palestine, Indigenous artists are not only asserting their humanity and challenging the longstanding idea of their erasure, but also constructing pathways for artists and activists to disrupt the effects of multiple colonialisms that continue to marginalize people of colour in urban areas. Detroit’s Indigenous Hip Hop artists make socially conscious music and also participate as activists in the city of Detroit. They serve as a window onto contemporary Indigenous identity, represent an exemplar of the urban Indigenous experience, and combine activism with art in a variety of ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous studies
• Hip Hop
• Palestine
• Detroit
• colonialism
• urban studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is a transdisciplinary scholar in the Department of African American Studies and the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018).

Notes

1. It is important to note that Kevyn Orr declared the bankruptcy, not the democratically elected city council, which serves as the representative body of the people of Detroit.

2. I am not saying that Black Americans have the same experience of Indigenous people. However, they suffer under the same logics of settler colonialism: dispossession and elimination. Furthermore, it is important that we see the connections between African enslavement and Indigenous dispossession as emerging from the same settler state, as those histories run in parallel.

3. Sacramento Knoxx, ‘NiimiDAA/Idle No More/ZaGaaJibiiSing Solidarity.’ January 26, 2014. The video description says, ‘This musical documentation was produced by Sacramento Knoxx with support from the Raiz Up Hip Hop Collective in solidarity with Idle No More. ZagaaJibiiSing aka (Detroit-Windsor) is Anishinaabemowin for ‘place that sticks out of the river.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWZ1LmrYNLg.

4. Palestine, which became a settler colony in 1948, has increasingly become a major part of Indigenous Studies as an analytical case study for settler colonialism—for Palestinians as a people suffering under the yoke of Israeli occupation (Cheyfitz 2014). The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association has endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (NAISA 2013), which seeks to build solidarity in order to end Israeli settler colonialism using tactics similar to the global campaign to end South African apartheid in the 1980s (Salaita 2016). Robert Warrior published an essay in 1989 titled, ‘Canaanites, cowboys, and Indians,’ that, in some ways, signalled a longer relationship between Palestinians and Indigenous studies. This relationship has seeped into Indigenous activism. Russell Means (2009), the long-time activist and early leader of the American Indian Movement, stated before he passed on, ‘the American Indians are the Palestinians of America and the Palestinians in Gaza are the American Indians of the Middle East.’ It is not surprising, then, that Detroit Indigenous artists have made connections with Palestinian Hip Hop artists. In this way, they are representing Indigenous struggles in two very different contexts, but pushing forward an agenda of global Indigenous solidarity.

5. There have been numerous essays written on Black-Palestinian solidarity. However, as Kristian Bailey (2015) points out, this activism is not new, and has existed at least since the social movements of the 1960s.

6. There are other artists in Detroit doing similar work. For example, SouFy has produced a track titled ‘Pay 2 Be Poisoned’ about the Flint Water Crisis. Another artist, Christy B., creates arts to show the ongoing water shut offs in the city of Detroit. In fact, she is a part of the Aaziidookan, a collective of Black and Indigenous artists resisting antiblackness and settler colonialism through art and culture in Detroit.