“The archive” has become an increasingly prickly—and even dangerous—idea in the humanities and social sciences as a range of scholars have invited us to probe its limits and failures, faults and fissures, and uneasy entanglements with projects of coloniality and dispossession.Footnote ¹ Far from objective and stable repositories of knowledge and history, archives are shot through with the power relations that surround their contexts and inceptions—in many such cases, the contents housed in these archives tell us more about who collected them than anything else. In music studies, this reflexivity around the archives and sound collections in which we work is still rather inchoate. However, the explosion of discussions by musicologists and ethnomusicologists around questions of ethics, repatriation/rematriation, and the politics of sound collections might be taken optimistically to signal new re-appraisals of our research stakes and methods.Footnote ²

Amanda Minks’s timely new monograph contributes a fresh perspective to these discussions. Indigenous Audibilities reveals the stories, relationships, and networks (personal and institutional) that subtended the creation of a transnational set of collectors and collections of Indigenous sound, music, and orality in the Americas (United States, Mexico, Chile, and Nicaragua) through the twentieth century. Minks’s intricate analyses show how these interrelated archival collections refigured Indigenous music in various ways: in some cases, as symbols of national heritage or “intangible patrimony”; in others, as the sonorous excesses of national and regional histories; and in yet others, as relics of universal human histories (8). Minks’s most lucid intervention is signaled by the book’s title and her focus on “Indigenous audibilities.” Writing against totalizing accounts of colonialist archives that leave little room for Indigenous agencies (188–89), Minks takes these collections to be heterogenous spaces in which an array of Indigenous and non-Indigenous historical actors negotiated multiple, at times intersecting agendas and ideologies. Most importantly, Minks invites readers to listen for the Indigenous stories and voices housed in these archives, the “traces left behind from human lives, traces which become audible when we listen, read, and think beyond the referentiality of the written text” (30).

An ethnomusicologist and anthropologist, Minks trains her ethnographic and interpretive skillset on historical and archival materials to not only unearth the fascinating and little-known stories housed in these collections but also to raise questions of aurality, authenticity, heritage, and historical recuperation across her case studies. Methodologically, the book offers what might be best described as an “ethnography of the constitution of archives” (188), drawing from work in archival collections across four countries and supplementing her historical research with oral histories and interviews with the living descendants of some of her historical protagonists. More specifically, she explores these collections in light of two ideas: heritage discourses and “archival thinking.” Minks is interested in the ways in which collections of Indigenous auralities have been and continue to be called upon by a variety of actors to represent or refigure ideas of national or regional pasts, cultures, and identities. Minks also makes the case that her approach offers a way to listen past the archived objects themselves and instead listen for the “multiplicity of voices and other sounds encoded in written texts and archival collections” (17).

The book is based around four case studies that span the American continents, moving readers through the sounds and voices of Indigenous musicians and communities collected in the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. Chapter 1 centers an archive of oral histories that encodes the encounters between Indigenous people and an institutional project of inscription: the Indian Pioneer Papers, a project of the government-funded Works Progress Administration in Oklahoma in 1935. Minks centers the interventions of one key actor, the Native intellectual Don Whistler (Sac and Fox), whose strict guidelines for interviewing and collecting established an approach to inscription that “reflected the texture of daily lives, without objectifying them as detached historical or anthropological objects” (50). As these oral histories were transcribed by interviewers after the fact and in the absence of actual sound recordings, Minks notes that they are representations of Indigenous voices, rather than the Indigenous voices themselves. Still, for as much as the author draws our attention to the various forms of mediation (cultural and technological) involved in these archival objects and the fact that they were co-constructed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors, she argues that we can hear traces of the Indigenous bodies, lives, and socialities in the initial inscriptions.

In Chapter 2, Minks explores another encounter between Indigenous people and institutional collections, in this case, the collecting activities of the Inter-American Indian Institute (III) in 1940s Mexico. The chapter turns around the North American ethnomusicologist and recordist Henrietta Yurchenco, a crucial figure in the III’s projects in rural Mexico. Working within the fraught ideological debates of postrevolutionary indigenismo, Yurchenco was instrumental in a transition from “aural transcription” (transcribing and notating Indigenous music from repeat performances in the field) to proper field recordings. However, Yurchenco’s writings make clear that she saw recording more as a creative project that “represented Indigenous music-making as constantly changing, adapting, and embedded in specific historical moments” (98). Still, Minks argues that these field recordings established an ideological link between Indigenous “authenticity” and sound recordings, thus firmly locating ideals of authenticity within sound collections, rather than in Indigenous communities themselves.

The second half of the book explores two international networks of “letrados” (lettered men), artists and vanguardists, and institutions in the mid-twentieth century. In Chapter 3, Minks explores the reverberations of the III in 1940s Nicaragua, focusing on a set of archived writings by poet-folklorists interested in “Indigenous folklore,” its sounds and musics, and the development of patrimonial discourses of a national “acervo” (cultural treasures). Minks reads these writings, especially by the writer Pablo Antonio Cuadra, against the grain, showing how folklorists were not able to completely subsume indigeneity within the ideological frame of Nicaraguan nationalism, and instead listens for the traces of subjectivity and agency of those individuals and ideas left in the footnotes of national culture. Chapter 4 moves to Chile to consider several collections of Indigenous Mapuche music created in the 1940s and 1950s: by Chilean composer-anthropologist Carlos Isamitt, the Argentine composer-ethnomusicologist Isabel Aretz, and Chilean composer-artist Violeta Parra. Minks shows how these collections were developed through international collaborations and social-political networks with North Americans, Mexicans, and Brazilians, among others, to trace a particular history of the institutionalization of Indigenous music collecting in South America.

For as much as Indigenous Audibilities can be read as a sustained critique of the longstanding colonial entanglements of sound archives, collections, and the dangers of heritage discourses in the Americas, there is a thread of optimism that Minks weaves throughout the book. Ultimately, the book centers four figures—Don Whistler (Sac and Fox), Henrietta Yurchenco, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and Carlos Isamitt—whose collecting practices challenged contemporaneous institutional investments in Indigenous authenticity, thereby revealing the multivocal nature of these collections. Many of them also represent early gestures towards repatriation: Yurchenco labored to have Indigenous communities in rural Mexico have access to their songs and voices, and Isamitt guaranteed the Mapuche access to his transcriptions, complied with their request not to record their songs, and recognized Mapuche ownership by protecting his work from unauthorized use (159). This is not to say, of course, that these collections were free of their problems—Minks flags the dynamics of power throughout—but they reveal the small and intimate spaces in which an intrepid and careful listener might hear, as Minks does, “echoes of something shared, something remembered, something heard across temporalities” (191).

Minks’s book is impressively researched and carefully argued, written in a way that is both engaging and accessible. The transnational story she unravels over the course of the book contributes to the growing field of global music histories by exploring the international constitution of Indigenous music collections and highlighting the transnational nature of discourses on Indigenous music, authenticity, and heritage in the Americas. Importantly, Minks argues that researchers interested in these sorts of archives must listen to them in relation to the other archives, ideas, and times and spaces. Scholars in music studies would do well to follow her example. Indigenous Audibilities also speaks to heritage studies, Latin American studies, and cultural history, and could well be essential reading for anyone interested in topics of archiving, patrimony, or Indigenous music in the Americas. And as a testament to the possibility of novel ways of listening to the (postcolonial) archive and of a more ethically felicitous archival politics, the stakes couldn’t be higher.