Umakhweyana: Who gets to teach me?

My perspective will focus around my journey learning and playing indigenous instruments and dance as a young black woman. Looking at the history trail of tradition and hear-say, some of these instruments were identified and known as a woman’s instrument. In questioning who can teach me, I raise my frustration with the barriers erected by academic institutions to the knowledge about and archival access to women’s indigenous music which I have confronted. My narrative speaks to practices of copyright exploitation and gatekeeping which keeps women ethnomusicologists who work as community activists, in the margins. Currently we have men in higher learning institutions as holders of this instrument with teaching rights. I recall several indigenous women performers whose work is widely recognised as contributing to indigenous music and knowledge, who learnt their cultural practices within their communities, many achieving fame even though illiterate. I argue for the old and new to mesh, for our women’s contribution as the holders of intellectual authority, memory and custom to be fully recognised to ensure it is not erased or that woman’s indigenous ways of knowing are lost to us through unacceptable forms of gender bias and artificial knowledge hierarchies. As my teachers, the women who have informed my study and practice, inspire me with the understanding that the body is the archive of sound, how the body helps us to reconnect with the ancestral vibration that is part of who we are. Healing through music and dance and nature is the centre stage of creating environments of connectivity. I conclude with possible methods of teaching indigenous knowledge systems and the value of preserving, promoting, developing and appreciation of our musical heritage as indigenous women.