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Native Spaces <\/em>is an audio platform co-created by artist Sarah Kanouse and Indigenous elder Elizabeth Solomon of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag. Accessible by QR code that opens the project in any browser, the project\u2019s location-aware website<\/a> also offers a desktop interface allowing remote audiences to simulate the on-site listening experience. The pilot chapter launched on October 11, 2024, in Salem, Massachusetts, with nearly 12,000 listening sessions in its first year. As one of the first sites of permanent English colonization in what would become the United States, the city closely identifies with its colonial history, which is actively and successfully promoted in its tourism outreach. However, for over 10,000 years, the Massachusett people lived in the coastal areas of Massachusetts, between Cape Ann in the north and the town of Kingston, south of Boston. Despite the long history of Indigenous presence in Salem, Native stories, perspectives, and priorities are both unknown and inaccessible to most residents and visitors. The project explicitly insists that Salem remains an Indigenous place while it expands the public\u2019s understanding of Native history and culture with an approach that is equally poetic and pedagogical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Situated at the intersection of socially engaged art and experimental audio documentary, Native Spaces <\/em>is not a conventional audio tour in which a single preproduced track is associated with a given location. Rather, when a visitor physically enters one of five sonic zones indicated on the map, audio clips start, stop, and crossfade algorithmically based on the user\u2019s location. These zones may be anywhere from one city block to an entire neighborhood in size. Overlaid atop a looping background unique to each zone, these clips number more than 200 and include interviews with members of the Tribe, Salem residents, and scholars, as well as voices from the more-than-human world: birds, insects, water, and wind. Sound zones represent locations of significant precolonial Indigenous presence, and each zone\u2019s audio content reflects historic and contemporary themes resonant with the site. Far more than a land acknowledgment focusing on traditional lifeways, the project shares varied perspectives on contemporary issues, including the ethics of property ownership, the relationship of climate change and colonialization, and tensions between place-based spiritual traditions and Christianity\u2014as well as counternarratives of early colonial history that center Indigenous and anticolonial points of view.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n This paper attends to Native Spaces<\/em> as a process-based case study in fostering collaboration between Indigenous communities and settler individuals and organizations in ongoing, mutually transformational relationships. While we describe aspects of the project\u2019s aesthetics and content as they embody or reinforce this relational commitment, our primary goal here is not to offer a detailed formal analysis or art historical positioning.2<\/a><\/sup> Rather, we hope to share insights from our experience to others who may be contemplating similar collaborative work between settler and Indigenous communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Native Spaces<\/em> was released on the anniversary of the signing of the colonial \u201cdeed\u201d of 1686 that legitimized, under colonial law, the then nearly sixty-year-old occupation of the summer village of Naumkeag (\u201cThe Fishing Place\u201d in the Massachusett language) by the English colonists of Salem. Although its production was facilitated and funded by the city to highlight the Tribe\u2019s perspective on the historic deed, the relationships that generated the project and its conceptual scope exceeded the circumstances of its realization. Along with other municipalities in their traditional territory, the Tribe had already been cultivating a relationship with the city of Salem as a practice of community recognition as meaningful as formal federal or state recognition.3<\/a><\/sup> Elizabeth Solomon and Sarah Kanouse first met eight years ago and have collaborated on projects, some legibly artistic and others less so, since 2019. For us, collaboration is not about applying individual expertise toward a predetermined outcome\u2014an approach that tends toward the transactional, rooted in capitalist values of productivity, efficiency, and scalability. Because the project sought to bring Indigenous perspectives to a setting grounded within settler-colonial norms, the collaboration also needed to bridge the divergent and frequently opposing ideas, values, and beliefs of traditional Massachusett culture and the more prominent dominant culture. Rather than one-off engagements with specific, short-term deliverables, the Tribe seeks collaborations that build long-term relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attending to collaboration as process-driven and relational does not so much de-emphasize the outcome, as implied by the familiar phrase \u201cmeans over ends.\u201d Rather, it means that outcomes are understood and function differently for different relational partners, depending on the frameworks and priorities they bring to the process. It also means that Native Spaces<\/em>, even after its public completion, remains perpetually both in process and part of an unfolding, unpredictable practice, a standing invitation to come into relation with all whose traces and labor are evident in the work. Significantly, the invitation to relationship extends to the project\u2019s largely non-Native audience who, because of the algorithmic nature of the piece, compose their own auditory experience through movement. Informed by both Massachusett traditional beliefs and recent scholarship in sound studies, we argue that listening as an embodied process invites what sound settler artist\/geographer A. M. Kanngieser calls greater \u201cattunement\u201d to place and discuss how our compositional decisions challenge or frustrate settler norms of extractive listening.4<\/a><\/sup> Finally, we discuss how our decision to keep the project open to future contributions from non-Native Salem residents supports the Tribe\u2019s goals of cultivating mutually transformative, ongoing relationships with the people of many lands and backgrounds who now call their territory home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this relationality in mind, this paper alternates written text with excerpts from a video call where we developed our ideas. This decision foregrounds the relationality of our collaborative practice and reflects our broadly anticolonial commitments. The paper\u2019s text may align with academic expectations through the presence of footnotes and bibliography, but the video clips resist Euro-American culture\u2019s elevation of the written over the spoken word. They also refuse the tendency of scholarly writing to homogenize, departicularize, disembody, and universalize knowledge, sanding off the jagged edges of process to deliver a finely polished product. Instead, we laugh, start sentences in one place that end in another, say \u201cum\u201d and \u201clike\u201d a lot, and generally exhibit all the verbal tics and ellipses that characterize thought in process. These clips offer glimpses into the texture of our ongoing dialogue and demonstrate, rather than assert, its relationality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Native Spaces <\/em>emerged at a cultural moment characterized by a generative mutual engagement across socially engaged art, sound art, and contemporary Indigenous creative practices. Many leading contemporary Indigenous artists began as trained musicians, such as Raven Chacon (Din\u00e9), Cheryl L’Hirondelle (of Cree, French, German and Polish descent), and Kite (Ogl\u00e1la Lak\u021f\u00f3ta). Others, like Nicholas Galanin (Sitka Tribe of Alaska, of Tlingit\/Unangax\u0302 descent) and Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul First Nation, Anishinaabe) have used sound or listening as significant conceptual and formal elements in installation works. Others, notably interdisciplinary artists Peter Morin (Tahltan First Nation) and Tanya Lukin Linklater (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions, Alutiiq), have employed drumming, instrumental music, dance, and song in collaborative, site-specific performances oriented toward sacred ancestral belongings held in museum collections, while Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) frequently references dance music in his paintings and has invited noted Native musicians to perform with his works. The formal and conceptual scope of Indigenous artists\u2019 sonic engagement is vast and has been taken up in recent exhibitions including \u201cBeat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture,\u201d curated by settler Kathleen Ritter and Tania Willard (Secw\u00e9pemc) 2008\u201314; \u201cwnoondwaamin\/we hear them,\u201d curated by Lisa Myers (Beausoleil First Nation, Anishinaabe) 2016; \u201cSoundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts,\u201d curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross\/Tagish First Nation, Tlingit) and Dylan Robinson (St\u00f3:l\u00f6\/Skwah First Nation), traveling 2019\u201325, and \u201cMaking a Noise: Indigenous Sound Art,\u201d curated by settler Victoria Sunnergren, 2025. While this work is diverse and wildly inventive, a common characteristic is site-responsiveness, understood as a reciprocal, <\/em>even intersubjective engagement with the historical, physical, material, and spiritual dimensions of place. Writing of Indigenous sound art in Canada, the settler art historian Sara Nicole England notes that sound operates \u201cas both a metaphor and material for decolonizing spatial practices\u201d that holds the \u201cpotential to participate in a process of world-making that is rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, assert presence and self-determination, and form solidarity across human and more-than-human entities.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> Sound studies scholar and \u201cSoundings\u201d co-curator Dylan Robinson goes still further, describing an approach that acknowledges \u201cspatial subjectivity . . . addressing the ways by which space exerts agency, affect, and character beyond the realm of striking aesthetic impact.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Outside the relatively niche world of contemporary art, sound has been central to a growing number of cultural reclamation projects that originate with Indigenous communities, rather than individual artists, and use aural media to remap or reterritorialize Native space even (or especially) in places that remain resolutely colonized. In these places, sound offers an affective and informational overlay that attests to enduring Native presence. Some projects, such as Seattle\u2019s \u201cSaltwater Soundwalk\u201d may be framed and funded as public art; others are classified as public history tourism, such as Toronto\u2019s \u201cFirst Story\u201d and the Mohawk\/Haundenosaunee Six Nations Tours on the Driftscapes app or the Yalinguth First Nations walking tour in Melbourne.7<\/a><\/sup> Commissioned by the Niagara Parks Foundation and curated by Michele-Elise Burnett (M\u00e9tis of Nipissing Algonquin descent),\u201cRekindling All our Relations\u201d occupies a space between, artfully combining ambient sound\u2019s immediacy with the intimacy of the human voice to invite a quiet and respectful attentiveness to Indigenous perspectives in the Niagara Glen without clearly framing the project as either tourism or art.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Publishing Native Spaces<\/em> in an academic art journal might suggest that contemporary art, public art, or sound art are the primary lenses through which it can or should be viewed. Indeed, aspects of the project resonates with England\u2019s and Robinson\u2019s analyses of more-than-human solidarity and spatial intersubjectivity, respectively. Elizabeth has described one of her goals for the project as allowing non-Native people to be \u201cwith place\u201d differently\u2014a framing that holds open the potential for an intersubjective experience of space described by Robinson. However, the project sits between art, documentary, and public history. Only the non-Native collaborator identifies as an artist and situates her work within contemporary socially engaged and critical art discourses, rather than sound art. An arts organization did not commission the project; instead, it emerged from relationships among collaborators who each brought with them different frames of reference. While we all agreed on the creation process, aesthetics, and installation (and went through the city\u2019s public art approval process), we never sought nor achieved consensus about what each partner believed the project and its goals to be. Native Spaces<\/em> can be productively understood as a socially engaged art project; as public history; as digital humanities; as a reckoning with past misdeeds; as a way of honoring ancestors and place; as an assertion of Tribal presence, voice, and sovereignty; as a municipal undertaking; as a mechanism for building Tribal capacity; and, for some city departments, as just another aspect of the job. Most partners hope the installation will affect some degree of change in public discourse and public consciousness, but how they see the project achieving it varies according to each partner\u2019s professional background. In our composition process, we sought to balance the vocal intelligibility and thematic coherence that our partners in public history or tourism might seek with an artistic approach to the timbre and rhythms of everyday speech, the layering and expressive use of other-than-human sounds, and a more conversational pacing\u2014including asides, logical leaps, and repetition\u2014than audiences might find in something like a museum\u2019s audio guide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The decision not to seek a consensus understanding of the nature of the project\u2014public history, art, or tour\u2014reflects both a pragmatic and a philosophical orientation. Pragmatically, the flexibility of the conceptual frame allows us to speak and work with a broader range of participants and a wider audience than the art frame alone. Philosophically, forgoing categorical definitions recognizes that differently situated stakeholders might have incommensurable understandings of the category used to describe the project and its stakes. In particular, \u201cart\u201d is an uneasy category for Elizabeth, saying:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/KanouseSolomon_Image02-1000x563.jpg\")
Native Spaces<\/em> as Relational Object<\/h4>\n\n\n\n