“Welcome to the Tundra”: Tanya Tagaq's creative and communicative agency as political strategy

Abstract

Indigenous artists are frequently placed within the too-tidy binary of traditional vs. modern. Indigenous culture is considered frozen and, thus, incompatible with modernity. This article examines the Inuk avant-garde vocalist Tanya Tagaq (b. 1975), whose creative and communicate outputs demonstrate a larger political project of undermining mainstream representational practices regarding Indigenous identity (particularly in Canada) and presenting Indigenous-centered sounds and perspectives. While Tagaq has constructed an artistic identity that challenges the simple binaries of past/present and traditional/modern, mainstream media often relies on representational practices straight from the Settler colonialist playbook. This article illustrates how she makes her agency clear in both her artistic output and in her social media activity on Twitter. I examine media coverage of Indigenous artists and Tagaq in particular and then dismantle the self/other and modern/traditional binaries with reference to her two latest albums—_Animism_ and _Retribution_— and two Twitter “wars” in which Tagaq's celebrity status incites both reactive and active critique of Indigenous—and specifically Inuit—representation in Canada. She, in turn, presents her own narrative as a deliberate strategy of cultural and political self-determination.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.