Ancestral War Hymns: Opacity and Indigeneity in Gyibaaw

Chapter 4 considers how new Indigenous sensibilities and political ambitions on the North Coast were prefigured in the music of Gyibaaw, a project that cultivated critical forms of Indigenous self-recognition through a globalizing cultural idiom of black metal. In conversation with family members, friends, and Gyibaaw’s two founding musicians, the chapter charts a history of the band, looking at how teenage passions, fugitive aesthetics, extractivist development pressures, and living connections to territory marked a short but eventful career. Here, the chapter considers both the local relations the band sought to cultivate and the unexpected embrace their music would find in white ethno-nationalist musical communities. Bringing Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation into dialogue with Glen Coulthard’s grounded normativities, it proposes Gyibaaw as a propitious site for grasping the central role of opacity to Indigenous aesthetic politics while exemplifying music’s dangerous powers as a medium for cross-cultural expression.