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To listen to hip hop is to enter a world of complexity and contradiction.
- Imani Perry (2004, p. 1)
Over the past five years I have directed and developed, in collaboration with my Interactive Media and Performance (IMP) Labs' research team, artists, teachers, elders, community partners, and youth, a number of community hip hop arts-based projeds in Saskatdiewaa
These community-based programs have been shaped by the following research questions: What role does hip hop play in narrating settler/colonialism on the prairies or in the north? What happens to stories when mey a« (re)told through a contemporary oral practice and mediated by the discourses associated with hip-hop culture on a global scale? How does hip hop challenge contemporary Canada to think about "Aboriginal" politics and colonialism in the present and the future, rather than framing them as only relevant to the past? How does Indigenous hip hop complicate the spirit of a liberal pluralist society such as Canada?
Four years and nine Hip Hop projects later,2 these questions, although still relevant and necessary, no longer capture how I have come to understand and theorize hip hop as a methodology, or as a conceptual model for researching and articulating ways of knowing (Covach, 2010). Transitioning away from the conventional approach to theorizing community-based arts projects as a discourse of intervention (e.g., by targeting "at risk" youth), I argue the Hip Hop Projects facilitate a recognizable sense of place (Forman, 2002; Forman and Neal, 2004; Marsh 2012), connections to a global world (Mitchell, 2001; Marsh, 2009a), meaningful arts practices (Perry, 2004; Marsh 2009b), and a powerful form of expression (Ntarangwi, 2009; Marsh 2009a), which makes sense for young Indigenous people attempting to create a space for themselves, both within and outside a colonial/ settler framework (Marsh, 2009a; 2011).
Based on my experiences during these hip hop projects, I argue that, in spite of the problematic, often racialized and gendered representations associated with hip hop culture (Rose, 1994; 2008), hip hop programs have the potential to illustrate and facilitate the creative, thoughtful, and artistic subjectivities of Indigenous youth, and, importantly, to challenge the dominant racialized and racist frameworks on which the media so often relies when presenting stories on hip hop culture and Indigenous youth in Canada (Marsh,...