Abstract
On the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona, popular music circulates as a means of constructing statements of indigenous Apache identity in the community. The sense of Apache identity depends at least as much on engagement with, and revoicing of, "dominant" cultural expressions as it does on the persistence of the traditional forms associated with cultural heritage. In this article I trace out some of the aesthetic tropes that recur in these contemporary expressions of identity, arguing that it is a sense of shared history, rather than one of shared culture, that informs identity in this community. I also argue that the theoretical productivity of the concept of hybridity, if anything, is its potential for guiding researchers to foreground the strategic creation of utterances rather than assuming the explanatory power of cultural provenance in a philological sense.
