The sound of settler decolonialism: Van Armenian, Decolonization to Degenociding: Reimagining Settler Canadian and Indigenous Futures Through Music, PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The sound of settler decolonialism: Van Armenian, Decolonization to Degenociding: Reimagining Settler Canadian and Indigenous Futures Through Music, PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: This dissertation is a literature-based, interdisciplinary philosophical inquiry that examines whether, in light of Canada’s human rights obligations and ongoing cultural genocide identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, creating meaningful spaces for Indigenous musics and worldviews within Canadian society can shift settler understandings, nurture reconciliation, advance decolonial praxis, and thereby contribute to what I call degenociding Canada. Using a rhizomatic framework inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the dissertation brings into relation four interlocking assemblages: decolonial praxis, Indigenous voices, human rights discourses, and sound studies. Methodologically, it combines Critical Discourse Analysis with a Human Rights Based Approach and centres Indigenous and Global South voices in order to develop an accountable, non-extractivist mode of inquiry. Its central claim is that the continued invisibilizing of Indigenous presence harms both Indigenous and settler children, denies their dignity, and leaves Canada in dissonance with its obligations concerning education, participation, and cultural life. Performative reconciliation remains one of the dissertation’s central concerns. In response, the dissertation theorizes music as a transformative space through which legal obligation, ethical responsibility, Indigenous resurgence, and human flourishing may be rehearsed together. Across these assemblages, state obligations, Indigenous-defined protocols, and settler responsibilities converge in a shared field of accountability. Music thus becomes a relational practice capable of unsettling colonial listening habits and reorienting Canadian public life toward dignity, accountability, and more truthful relations. The dissertation culminates in the Degenociding Plateau, modelled through the rehearsal logic of a string quartet, which brings into disciplined relation Indigenous grounded normativity and protocol, decolonial reorientation, Human Rights Based accountability, and music’s cultural resonance. Degenociding shifts the conversation from apology to obligation, from symbolic inclusion to accountable transformation, and from colonial inheritance toward the difficult, unfinished work of more ethical futures.

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