| Summary: | Colonial regimes of sounds used to represent Inuit—what one might shorthand as “the Sound of Eskimo,” an Arctic complement to Deloria’s “Sound of Indian”—can be traced back to cue sheets, scores, and soundtracks that accompanied Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). A lack of musical and cultural specificity granted to Arctic Indigenous Peoples represented in film over the long twentieth century is due to misplaced assumptions about circumpolar lands, waters, and lifeways as monolithic. Until the 1970s, ethnographic records about Inuit lifeways and music-making also lacked radical and relational approaches to research that acknowledged the particularities among and between Inuit communities and performance practices across the Arctic. This chapter traces important shifts over the past century, from non-Inuit ethnologists to Inuit filmmakers, and offers in-depth analyses of soundscapes and soundtracks from Iñupiaq filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s award-winning feature film On the Ice (2010). The author emphasizes three on-screen musical performances—Iñupiaq drumsong, “Eskimo flow” hip hop, and a singspiration, or Presbyterian hymn singing—that archive dense histories of colonization and resurgence in Utqiaġvik.
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