Expectation, Christianity, and Ownership in Indigenous Hip-Hop: Religion in Rhyme with Emcee One, RedCloud, and Quese, Imc

The juxtaposition of the words Indians, Christianity, and hip hop frequently unearths a sense of the unexpected (Deloria 2004). This is largely because expectations are too frequently confounded by the inability to recognize the links between African- and Native American peoples, the porous boundaries between the sacred and secular, or the complex relationships between Native peoples and Christianity. This article takes a closer look at the connections between indigenous peoples, pious devotion, and subversive rhyme by describing the characteristic ways that Emcee One, Quese, and RedCloud’s relationships to Christianity are inscribed, communicated, and indigenized through the lyrical messaging of modern hiphop. These MCs in word and action loosen totalizing discourses such as the assimilation/acculturation paradigm characteristic of mid-century ethnomusicology, or its modern consequent the localization/appropriation common to contemporary discussions of global hip hop. In the rhymes presented in this article, our MCs articulate everyday strategies that express both the “already local” nature of globalized hip hop (Pennycook and Mitchell 2009) within indigenous North American communities, as well as their distinctive ownership of indigenous spiritualities