Calling (Out) Contemporary Settlers

Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth and "Colonizer" as Trans-Media Indigenous Wonderwork

Abstract

In Split Tooth (2018), Tanya Tagaq (Inuit) crafts the story of a young Indigenous woman who understands and relates to other-than-human elements like land, ice, and the northern lights in ways that depart radically from the teachings of Western epistemologies. Tagaq’s acclaimed 2022 album Tongues is in many ways Split Tooth’s companion piece, borrowing lyrics from the text and using them in songs that contest the Canadian settler project. For instance, the album’s closing track, “Colonizer” attacks the Canadian residential school system while highlighting audience complicity in the projects of their settler states. In both Split Tooth and the music video for “Colonizer” (the “Video”), Tagaq opposes the Canadian settler project by foregrounding the other-than-human. In particular, the land and the northern lights function in both works to transform each into instances of what Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) calls Indigenous wonderworks. I argue that through the common elements of land and northern lights, the Text and the Video speak with one another across borders of artistic expression to become what I call a trans-media Indigenous wonderwork, in which the Video’s pointedly decolonial music, lyrics, and images underscore and bolster the text’s more indirect decolonial message. Combined, Split Tooth and the Video act as a novel form of cultural production grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, working together to call out settler audiences for their complicity in the settler project—past, present, and future.