A concept that emphasizes a society founded on principles of equality, one that values and promotes human rights … [It] involves actively working to eliminate structural injustices based upon one group or individual having unfair power or privilege over another group or individual (Hadley, 2013, p. 121).

My father's parents fled their home, with light bags and strong bones. Mygrandmother, our pillar. Through each trial, her love prevailed. My mother's mother fled her life, left her little child behind. My mother, heartbroken, came to reject her Choctaw blood. Yet, she spoke her people's wisdom, and she made her peace with them. She made her peace before she travelled through the veil of life and death.

I let her go, compelled to know more about our people's ways. Many nations took me in, called me sister. Called me daughter. Every human is a soul, on whom we can't impose our will. The Spirit will decide, I learned this from my Haida mother. Interwoven plight and beauty, stories that elude the mainstream. Stories that infuse my bones to champion from the margins (Lindan, 2015, p. 27).

For I am in many ways only a product of my culture, a culture which has developed mind to amazing lengths and created an ever-increasing hunger for that mind to be satisfied with intellectual insights and understands - an over-abundant assignment of word symbols. As all nature, mind is a thing of great beauty. We tend to get lost in words. We work to understand and describe the things we love. Music is one of these mysteries, which defies description (p. xii).

We speak only of observable data. We superimpose statistical formulae, hoping that if we develop the scientific side, the artistic, spiritual side will magically emerge. We rarely mention that music goes beyond sign to spirit. We describe and develop the objective, knowing all along that the subjective has as much, if not more, influence on our patients, our clients, and ourselves (p. xiii).

Music is a resource pool. It contains many things – images, patterns, mood suggestions, textures, feelings, processes. If selected, created and used with respect and wisdom, the clients will hear what they need to hear in the music, and use the ritual as a supportive context (p. 5).

The central thesis of this work is that music communicates patterns and structures of tension and resolution that translate into themes of death and rebirth that can be effectively used in music therapy. This work can be characterized as distinctly ecological (2002a).

Music is the expressive connective tissue guiding us into wholeness. It is not only a metaphor, but a living model which resonates the deep truth and beauty contained in the phenomenon of wholeness (Kenny, 1985).

The Native principle of noninterference is about recognizing conditions, as we do with the land. This is much like The Field of Play. For me, it's not about interventions. It's about paying attention to the conditions and having a sense of mutuality, as opposed to domination. That is why I have a very hard time with behavioural theories. I do not think that we should impose goals and objectives about changing people's behaviour to make society more comfortable (p. 32).

The Field of Play suggests an attention to subtleties, quiet and implicit non-verbal cues, which communicate the natural healing patterns of the human person and imply an order which can guide and inform us into the best movement, which will lead us into wholeness (p. 139).

I really feel that our job as music therapists theoretically is to create a space: a space that nurtures growth, but does not determine what that growth should be. In The Field of Play, I give conditions of the space and certain primary principles, like mutuality. But beyond those, I want people to fill it in with their own particulars (Kenny in Lindan (2015, p. 36).

In general theory, we would like to see general principles which could help us to understand different methods, different populations, different models. We are seeking coherence and subsequent foundational ideas. Nevertheless, this coherence would need to be flexible, if it is to embrace the complexity and difference necessary to be relevant and useful to a large group of music therapists (p. 128).

The construction of general theory will take an honest engagement, one which is constantly monitored by both the acute listening and finely-tuned articulation of each music therapist. How do different music therapists interpret the grand narratives of their region? How can we include music therapists who are not represented in our conversations? How can we gather and interpret data from patient experience with an eye for general theory? (p. 134).

As modern intellectuals, we engage in discursive practice. And in the present intellectual climate, if we are playing by the rules of discourse and if we are in the current "thought stream", we refer to ourselves as located, situated, embodied beings. This is context. This is how we identify who we are, where we are from and the details about our location, our situation, our bodies in time and space (p. 127).

An aesthetic approach reminds us that we can make sense out of our lives, even when they seem fragmented or chaotic. This coherence comes through authentic expressions in the music. Something settles. Something reassures. Something works when music brings our lives into an aesthetic form. The music therapist, of course, is both participant and witness in this process (p. 129).

Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy (ISSN 1504-1611) invites dialogue and discussion about music, health, and social change. The journal values inclusiveness and socio-cultural awareness and has increasingly nurtured a critical edge that refines the focus on cultural issues and social justice. Since its inception in 2001, the editors have been committed to developing an egalitarian and interdisciplinary forum so that multiple voices can be heard. This publication will encourage participation from every continent and will nurture the development of discussion and debate. Because culture has an important role in music and music therapy, we will encourage contributions that find their source in the cultural influences of each continental region (www.voices.no).

Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy seeks to nurture the profile of music therapy as a global enterprise that is inclusive and has a broad range of influences in the International arena. The forum is particularly interested in encouraging the growth of music therapy in developing countries and intends to foster an exchange between Western and Eastern as well as Northern and Southern approaches to the art and science of music therapy (www.voices.no).

If we imagine that solutions to our dilemmas will only be found in fields of engagement that focus on military, diplomatic and economic solutions, we are badly mistaken. Solutions are found in everyday life. And perhaps the solutions we can discover and create are available to us through collegial relationships and conversations about our work in music therapy. We consider the individual and collective questions. We think about how we can apply sound principles to our work. Often these principles have secure roots in cultural values, beliefs, norms, behaviors, feelings, customs, taboos, languages and other cultural practices (Kenny, 2001).

This is the underlying rationale for the study of concepts rather than imitating practices when it comes to the traditional healing systems of Indigenous peoples. Concepts allow us to engage in the material world as academics without committing the colonizing act of appropriation (Kenny, 2002a).

When non-Western Music Therapists create their research protocols and standards on models from the West, we can use our imagination to balance out the cultural factor in an attempt to avoid hegemony. Hegemony reminds us that any system is embedded with the values and beliefs of the people who created the system. We can ask the question:

What kind of research and standards would these cultures have invented for Music Therapy if they had not had Western models upon which to base their own models?

… we can only function well as global citizens if we embrace the diversity of life, which includes the diversity of standards of practice and research protocols.

The diversity of voices represented in Voices invites us into a shared conversation about how to improve our human condition in old and new ways, diverse ways, without a pre-ordained hierarchy placing West, East, South, and North (Kenny, 2006).

The Field of Play is all about conditions in the space, the primary one being, as my mother instructed, being and a focus on being. It is a theory that suggests connection to all living things. Imagine a rain forest or a field of daisies—ecosystems just like us with conditions (Kenny, 2014).

The Field of Play is not a theory about how to do. Rather it is a theory about how to be and how to notice shifts in particular states of consciousness and fields of existence—shifts that carry us along the currents and tides of the great river. It challenges our perception to notice these shifts while simultaneously following our prescribed systems or techniques of practice in music therapy, our layers of abstract theories, our cultural mandates, and our personal and professional ethical codes (Kenny, 2014).

One of my mentors was a Musqueam elder: Vince Stogan. I would have so many problems at SFU (Simon Fraser University) with people not understanding what I was trying to do up there. So, I call Vince, and I'm crying, and I say: Oh, what am I gonna do, they won't hear anything. And he says: I'll come and buy you coffee. So, he takes me out for coffee, but you know what he does to set up the mutuality? He holds my hand and says: Oh, baby, I wanna tell you what I was doing yesterday. And I'm thinking: I'm sitting here in tears, I'm suffering, and you're telling me what you did yesterday?! But you know what? That was a wonderful way to set up the mutuality. I think we can apply that kind of teaching from an elder to stabilize the relationships in mutuality. By telling our own story … . In the oral tradition, I learn all kinds of things when people are telling me their stories. The unfortunate thing in our trainings is that we're told to not say much about ourselves to our clients. Well, that's a pile of bunk in the Native world! Because you're like a non-person until you reveal aspects of yourself. I'm imagining being a client with a music therapist sitting in front of me for the first time. As a client, I'm thinking, who is this person as a person? How safe am I? And only when they hear the music therapist's stories, about their vulnerabilities, will they begin to feel this mutuality with the music therapist. So, I think we need to be more self-revelatory (Lindan, 2015, p. 37).

I feel like I have one foot in each culture. It’s like I have my left foot in one canoe and the other foot is in another canoe. And I’m in the rapids and I have to deconstruct the canoes from a Western paradigm to a traditional paradigm and not drown in the process and sing songs along the way (Kenny, 2015).

When I was a young classical piano student, I obeyed the nuns who were my teachers. I practiced my scales over and over again, played single measures and longer phrases repeatedly until they reached perfection, memorized Bach, Beethoven, Schuman, and others. The nuns were strict teachers. So I learned to play well. I learned the value of repetition and discipline. But in quiet moments when no one was at home, I put aside the strict protocols and gave myself over to the intuitive spontaneity of improvisation (p.1, ch. 25).

Improvising created space for me to claim my uniqueness and my spirit. The piano was a play space in which I could move beyond discipline, protocols, imposed structures, and the expectation of others. It was an unconditional space that invited spontaneity and freedom. On days when I was happy, I played my happiness. On days when I was sad, my playing reflected this. (p. 2, ch. 25).

One is more likely to access a sense of play when one feels secure. Music therapists work with so many people who are traumatized that a sense of play is far from their awareness. So many people coming to music therapy services are unable to imagine being playful. Once a patient feels secure in the musical space, then, a new field emerges—the field of play. This is not a stage or a level. It is a space with particular conditions and can happen anytime in the therapeutic encounter. The primary condition is safety (p. 7, ch. 25).

There is a paradox in the notion that as we move toward beauty, we move toward wholeness if we accept the premise that we are already whole. But this liminality in our patients and ourselves reminds us that we strive toward a more and more elegant and complex beauty and wholeness over time (p. 9, ch. 25).

It takes a great deal of faith to adopt and adapt the field of play. The boundaries are different every time. There are no concrete controls. There isn’t a list of prescribed procedures. The only goal is to play. (p. 12, ch. 25).

If we accept this river, then we can do or try our work as part of a natural process in an ecology of being. This approach mirrors a very important Native American principle—the principle of non-interference. And I can’t help but recall the many times I have seen the term “intervention,” a kind of interference, used in music therapy literature. Maybe that’s why I had to take this journey to find some new language and new concepts for my own practice (p. 12, ch. 25).

Now that I have the field of play I feel liberated from the command and control of language that might inhibit me from the deep and rich human encounters that are available through music in music therapy (p. 12, ch. 25).

As a music therapist, you can't always heal people by keeping them alive or changing a behaviour. In my belief system, even death can be a healing. The Spirit has its own life, and it's going to decide about the healing. So I think of a human being as a soul on a journey, and they are the only one that really knows what that journey is (Lindan, 2015, p. 32).