Academic Bio

Located within the Navajo Nation, this research explores Indigenous forms of “sonic resistance” through the underground Heavy Metal scene called "Rez Metal." In North American tribal communities, "Rez" is an acronym for "Indian reservations.” "Rez" is a term that carries a physical location and cultural meaning. This research will investigate how Rez Metal artists have challenged and reclaimed dominant historical narratives that promote the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and reinscribe stereotypes of poverty, isolation, desolation and colonial drawn boundaries of the reservation. 

            This research aims to show how Rez Metal resists settler colonial boundaries of map making through the production of distinctive and visual images that help to (re)map longstanding settler colonial understandings of the Indian reservations and Native people’s connection to land. Visual images are a part of how we experience, imagine, learn, and produce knowledge. (Pink, 2021: 2.).  Sound too plays a distinctive role shaping our experience of the world through its various manifestations in language, music, land, and sensory experiences. Native Americans uniquely experience absolute invisibility in many domains of American life.  Their voices are also often silenced or ignored. When Native Americans are seen and heard, however, it is often through an imaginary redendering of "Indians" as relics of some unfortunate past and disappeared is intrinsic to American settler colonialism. (Leavitt, P.A., Covarrubias, R., Perez, Y.A. and Fryberg, S.A. (2015).  

By tracing the origins of stereotypes about Indian people and by producing new photographic images and sonic representations of contemporary Rez Metal artists, fans, and promoters, this research utilizes digital photography and the analysis of musical performance/ appreciation as critical (re)mapping practices (Goeman 2008 & Iralu 2021) to "unsettle" and push against settler created borders and "expectations" (Deloria, 2004) of how Native people should be. This dissertation project will thus explore how the sights, images, and sounds of Rez Metal reconfigure place-making and (re)map Indigenous experiences.  Drawing from theories and methods that are rooted in Indigenous forms of knowledge and Native feminist spatial practices (Goeman, 2008), the project seeks paths to address the colonial boundaries of such ridged borders such as urban and Rez, which often also are configured according to unexamined gendered assumptions. Over twelve months in New Mexico and Navajo Nation I plan to conduct ethnographic fieldwork, soundscape analysis, and photo ethnography to investigate how the term "the Rez" connects to Indigenous people's spatialized, engendered, and lived experiences in ways that both redeploy and resist settler logics.