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Anthropology and Environment Society
Oral Presentation Session
Donald John Hatfield
Berklee College of Music
In this essay I examine strategies of registration and address that configure mud as an active, if mute, partner of settler colonialism. In the muddy wake of the August 8 2009 Disaster, in which several Paiwan and Rukai communities in Southern Taiwan were swept away or buried, Taiwanese Indigenous songwriter Dakanow (Paiwan) composed a commemorative album. Dakanow’s eight poems and eight songs sound diverse human experiences of inundation and displacement, underscored by eight different readers performing the poems. The album also registers non-human voices and includes a song addressed to mud. Disaster affected communities knew mud intimately. In upland Taiwan soil erosion was a constant annoyance before Typhoon Morokot struck the island. Dakanow’s call out to “hometown mud” on the album invites listeners to adopt a stance in which they may voice on behalf of mud, which dumbly indexes conditions normally rendered invisible. Mud covers his hometown but also reveals settler colonial projects of forced removal and resource extraction with which Dakanow’s community has wrestled through the 20th century; thus Dakanow keeps mud discursively present, addressing mud as a subject with whom settler listeners should also become familiar. Tacking between song lyrics and practices of mud removal, I suggest that Dakanow’s configuration of mud as an interlocutor offers a model for how we might uncover social causes of the 8/8 Disaster and engage in broader processes of decolonization