American Indian music is often the most difficult aspect of Native North American culture for non-Indians to meaningfully understand or appreciate. Oddly enough, American Indian musical performance is also one of the most publicly accessible aspects of Indian cultures for the general population, and one of the areas with the longest time-depth of study by professional ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. Tara Browner’s edited volume on American Indian music, originally published in 2009 and issued as a paperback in 2022, provides context and analysis that sheds light on key areas where music intersects prominently with Indian cultures: dance, identity, mythology, poetics, and spiritual power.
The essays in Browner’s collection are a wide sampling of Native North America in geography and across the ethnographic record. The essays cover tribes as culturally far-flung as the Apache from the Inuit, and the Coast Salish from the Passamaquoddy. Some essays are built on contemporary research, whereas others are a complex analysis of ethnohistorical material. In each approach to their varied topics, it is clear that the contributors have painstakingly worked to collaborate with representatives of the tribal groups being studied. Browner herself is insistent in her introduction that this current work should support the interest of Native communities instead of taking Native communities as objects of study. Most essays in the volume balance a cultural and historical approach to music that will be of interest to Native peoples and the general public, with a highly technical musical analysis of songs and texts that will be of interest mostly to trained musicologists.
Paula Conlon’s essay on Iglulik Inuit Drum-Dance songs looks at a collection of songs from the 1960s and 1970s. The composition, structure, transmission, and transformation of songs are analyzed, as well as their place in contemporary Inuit society.
Lucy Lafferty and Elaine Keillor provide a fascinating article on the little-studied Dogrib Indians of the subarctic. After a brief ethnohistorical introduction, they present several Dogrib love songs: songs of love for sweethearts, and for the land. Analysis focuses on how the songs radiate Northern Athabaskan values. This essay is an excellent supplement to ethnography that June Helm has done on the Dogrib.
Laurel Sercombe writes about the songs embedded in the Coast Salish myth of Dirty Face. In the poetics of these myths, characters can enact their helper’s spiritual power by singing the appropriate sacred song. Sercombe’s essay reminds students of mythology that a purely Lévi-Straussian structural analysis may miss important symbols and meanings hidden in Native language poetics.
Franziska Von Rosen’s essay is a dialogue with a Passamaquoddy traditional singer. The conversation is a frank look at how musical revitalization is a choice enacted by the agency of Indian people, and often one that faces challenges from within the community.
David Draper’s article is a rather in-depth study of Choctaw traditional music. His analysis will be of interest to other students of Southeastern music, or the tribes of Oklahoma, who share similar dances, depicting tribal historical and mythical events.
In “This is our Dance,” T. Christopher Aplin traces the long and fascinating history of the Fort Sill Apache Fire Dance from their traditional southwestern homelands, to prisoner of war internment in Florida after the Geronimo campaign, to internment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Aplin ponders the relevance of the dance to modern tribal identity inside a majority-Christian Apache landscape in Oklahoma, and how the context of the dance and the role of Gahe dancers has changed in the twentieth century.
Judith Vander compares Shoshone and Lakota versions of Ghost Dance songs and concludes that there was a Great Basin and a Plains version of the Ghost Dance. Although both regions incorporate symmetrical repetition of verses, Plains songs discuss people, whereas people are entirely absent from Great Basin versions. Translations of Lakota language songs could use updating.
Editor Tara Browner’s own essay on the differences between northern and southern powwow singing traces the historical development and diffusion of the Grass Dance. She presents a method for distinguishing intertribal songs from more regionally specific songs, and then discusses the overlap that can occur in urban-Indian drum groups, as well as transformations that occur when Indians listen to powwow music for the pleasure of the music instead of for the purpose of powwow dancing.
Finally, David Samuels tackles the perceived paradox of American Indian country and western music. He looks at a variety of Indian-country cover bands, the appeal of rural music to Indian peoples, and the adaptability of the genre to address Indian values, longings, and desires.
All of the contributors to the volume have done a good job referencing the appropriate source material for their topics. Their bibliographies encompass scholars of Indian music from the earliest of ethnographers to groundbreaking fieldwork done in the 1990s with some of the last fluent speakers of these groups. Combined with the author’s own fieldwork and library work, each text is well-rounded and suitable for the general public, tribal members whose cultures are being discussed and ethnomusicologists. Students of mythology, ethnohistory, and anthropology will also find useful data points.
Perhaps most importantly, the text showcases the profound meaning of song to Native North American peoples, who are culturally and historically diverse, and yet hold much of their intellectual worlds in common (both historically and today). Music of the First Nations also demonstrates the adaptability of Native people’s music to modernity, and in some instances the importance of Native music to modernity. At the conclusion of David Samuel’s essay on country music, he quotes a passage from Sherman Alexie’s What You Pawn I Will Redeem:
“Do you guys know any songs?” I asked the Aleuts.
“I know all of Hank Williams,” the elder Aleut said.
“How about Indian songs?”
“Hank Williams is Indian.”
“How about sacred songs?”
“Hank Williams is sacred.”
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[Review length: 948 words • Review posted on April 21, 2023]