Research profile, Tory čınus (Johnston)
November 03, 2026
Dr. Tory čınus (Johnston) is a kwinaył/Coast Salish scholar of sound and music, guitarist, and former co-host of Sounds of Survivance, the global Indigenous music show at Seattle-based listener-powered radio station, KEXP. He is a new faculty member in the School of Indigenous Governance.
Tell me about your research areas?
I take interdisciplinary approaches to Indigenous Sound and Music Studies. If we start from the assumption that Indigenous peoples have always made things with sound and song, I’m broadly interested in how we carry music practices across space and time as articulations of our place- and water-basedrelationalities.
The mobilization of sound knowledges reaches a variety of disciplinary contexts; if we listen closely, song is an ever present dimension of how we come to know what “music” and “Indigeneity” are, but more importantly what they do. Western ways of doing music scholarship tend to think of sound as an object onto which we apply theory.
I am more interested in how sound itself theorizes our ways of making relations, including how we govern them. I’m informed by my music practice as a guitarist and my sort of punk-ethic around music in the academy (I don’t have a formalized “music education”). As a kwinaył słәgwәlmıš (Quinault person, Indian, Tribal Member) a principle of my work is to mobilize a Coast Salish research paradigm.
This means understanding how song and sound live in protocol and water-based relationships, including events like the Annual Tribal Canoe Journey, and the practices/aesthetics/instruments recognizable by my ancestors and future generations. This has some exciting and self-determining implications. To phrase an example as a question, I might ask - how does building a guitar pedalboard, like weaving a cedar basket, shape the continuity of kwinaył/Coast Salish sovereignty and self-determination?
How did your research interests develop?
I grew up in the village of Taholah, on the Mouth of the Quinault River. It’s a small fishing community where most of the population are Quinault. It’s also home to our tribal administrative offices - the entity with the responsibilities of a municipality, government, and enterprise that we call “Quinault Indian Nation.”
Due to proximity, in Taholah you can hear the Pacific Ocean at all times of the day. Even as other sounds overlap - the frantic, sibilant fanning of dinner plates in the school gym as folks pack in for the Annual General Council Meeting, the playful guffawing of gossiping family, friends and cousins, the prejudicial sneerof some non-Quinault “Harborites” (people from Grays Harbor County), the
ocean is a constant acoustic presence. I call it the ocean’s “sonority.”
I didn’t grow up in a place that churns out professors. However, don’t construe this to mean
that we lack the will or intelligence. Quinault Indian Nation has a long and rich history of action, shaping the fabric of what we call “tribal sovereignty” in the states. We constantly enact self-determined notions of Quinaultness along spiritual, political and philosophical dimensions every day in Taholah, and wherever else one is claimed as Quinault. We don’t churn out professors simply
because of our relative geographic sequestration and how it engenders figurative as well as physical peripheralization. If our will to intelligence is reflected as the ocean’s sonority, our peripheralization is the noise that sometimes cuts through its continuity.
I have often been told that I am the only Quinault person that someone has met, and that’s unacceptable to me because of that sonority - our ocean relative has sounded presence for thousands of years, and so have we. I would be remiss not to mention some of my relations along this path - my mother, a basket weaver; my guitar-playing Navajo in-laws who introduced me to the instrument; my great-grandfather Daniel Chenois and his daughters; my siblings and niblings; Jessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina), who taught me that sound does things; Ines Hernández-Ávila (Nimipu/Tejana), for showing me the palindromic relationship between music and poetry; and Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), for her saxophone.
What do you enjoy most about academia and teaching?
I would like to answer this along three dimensions that stand out to me in the work:
1. Research side: One great thing about the field of Indigenous Studies is our generous critique of the disciplinary. Because of the ways that settler colonialism shapes institutions everywhere, we are often aligned with efforts to address tough issues in myriad contexts while most often amplifying the voices of the original peoples whose land the academy occupies.
A method that arises from this is our imperative to integrate a variety of approaches to research questions, methods, theories, outcomes etc. In simpler terms, our ancestors always mobilized ingenious, capacious approaches to knowing, being and doing. It’s a refreshing (and sometimes daunting) challenge to attempt to forward that approach in an academic setting. My personal example of this approach is how I style myself a “musicologist” while not having a PhD in musicology (it’s in Native American Studies) - while I engage sound and music through scholarship, using Indigenous Studies as an intermediary in the disciplinary context allows for me to be more “promiscuous” in my theoretical and methodological focus.
I also want to mention that I am much more interested in vernacular cultures than, for example, the “art gallery,” the “concert hall” or the “museum,” and the interdisciplinary focus of my work allows for me to redirect my energies to “grungier” things that I am passionate about (i.e. metal music, queer music performance/relationality, improvisation studies, digital cultures, musicking in the reservation context, etc.)
2. Teaching side: I genuinely love teaching. I want to say that up front because that’s not always true for folks in research-focused professor positions. One of the most gratifying things I can think of is when I notice a student’s thinking shift in the relational/learning environment that we create over a term. I also learn so much from my students, and in an amusingly selfish way it is great to assign work that supports my intellectual passions/scholarly goals and have an excuse to cover it/gush about it/rip it apart with other learning beings.
3. Work/life side: I love the flexibility of my job for sure. But even better is finding my “co-conspirators” and “sound nerds’ in other disciplines!
How do you balance work and personal life?
I have just moved to Victoria from Seattle in July, so I’m definitely still trying to find my “groove” vis-a-vis community outside of the academy. But, I have thus far been able to find musical connections/folks to jam with (though I’m always looking for more!) and a nice gym downtown. I am also grateful that Victoria has a few independent cinemas, as one of my favorite hobbies is sitting alone in them.
I always have my nose in a work of SpecFic (mainly Fantasy), right now it’s The Liveship Traders series by Robin Hobb and up next it’s China Miéville’s gargantuan historical epic The Rouse. I am grateful to live near the water/míqәn (beacon hill park). When staring out towards northwestern Washington it puts into perspective how thin the veil of the settler colonies of the U.S. and Canada are in comparison to the relations between Coast Salish peoples and territories. Finally, I love hanging out with my three cats; Ranni, Renna, and Rikke (pronounced “rick-uh”).
What are you looking forward to the most at UVic?
There is so much to look forward to! First, I am looking forward to learning from/working with my colleagues and students in the IGOV. I am already filled with so much gratitude to work alongside such incredible people. I am also looking forward to meeting more sound nerds, rez dogs, and co-conspirators in the broader campus community. I am looking forward to bringing more thought
to sound and more sound to thought; to have more students/colleagues hear me play music, to make international partnerships and mobilize Coast Salish ways of knowing/being/doing, to stake a claim to the field as a kwinaył person, to be in ceremony with people I have and haven’t even met yet, to write and release music at some point, to lean into my burgeoning identity as a foodie, to be one small part of a constellation of Indigenous peoples working towards just futures, and most of all, to respond to Mvskoke literary scholar Craig Womack’s proposition that the field needs to be “funkier.”