The Singing Drum

By Clare Scott-Mitchell

Subjects: indigenous peoples, dispossession, sacred artifacts, colonisation

Description: The Singing Drum tells the story of an object, an object of meaning and power. The object, in this beautifully sensitive story of dispossession, is a drum - a drum made for ceremonial use by the artist-shamans of an Indigenous American community. Many such communities fragmented during colonisation and pillage of North America and sublimely resonant in Scott-Mitchell's telling. The drum is the unseen protagonist of the tale, everseeking to guide humans as they wander, mostly unconscious, in contemporary capitalist American society towards a penultimate moment - uncovering the truth of the drum's purpose, and the fate of its makers.