Many historians have tackled the question of American Indian relations with the federal government and the associated issues of ethnic identity and educational policies but John Troutman has the distinction of being the first to do so from the perspective of music. His study is at once innovative, informative, and significant for offering a new way of assessing old problems with a fresh eye. While it is well understood that music and dance were (and are still) important in American Indian cultures, they are usually relegated to insignificance in reconstructing history. This volume therefore rectifies an important oversight.
Troutman asserts the political nature of music in terms of its persistence in the reservation context in association with dance. He articulates the critical issue succinctly: “For historians, it is the struggle over the meaning of music that is the most revealing” (10). For Indians, music was an integral part of tribal and individual identity; for whites, it was a vestige of the Indians’ barbaric past that must be left behind. Drawing on archival resources supplemented with published works, Troutman takes a broad look at a wide variety of musical forms from the late-nineteenth century until the era of reform represented by the Indian Reorganization Act.
The first two chapters deal principally with dance and the attempts by the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) to suppress it, focusing on the Sioux reservations. Troutman suggests that the persistence of traditional dance (“powwows”) can be interpreted as “‘hidden’ acts of resistance” (20) and documents how, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Lakotas expanded their dance repertory and increased the occasions for dancing despite the government’s attempts to minimize them. One impetus, Troutman argues, was returned veterans from World War I whose new status as citizens allowed them to dance as they pleased. While this may overemphasize the role of the veterans in establishing a “citizenship of dance” (21), the veterans’ experiences in the world abroad cannot have failed to influence their perspective on the restrictions imposed by reservation superintendents. Like the returned boarding school students who had exchanged traditions with members of other tribes and experienced life beyond the reservation, the veterans brought back ideas of personal freedom that were at odds with the policies of the OIA as they were implemented by reservation superintendents. The 1923 circular from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs urging Indians to abandon all forms of tribal dancing did nothing to suppress dancing, and instead made it increasingly politicized.
Chapter 3 investigates the nature of music in the federal boarding schools. There the emphasis was on marching bands and Western musical forms, with Indian music relegated to the occasional entertainment of visitors—music presented not as a living tradition but as a vestige of the past for the amusement of non-Indians and as a measure of how far the students had advanced in civilization. The emphasis on patriotic songs and a musical tradition that was entirely new to them was, it seems, enthusiastically embraced by the students, but not to the exclusion of Indian forms of music, which were actively traded intertribally in the boarding schools.
Chapter 4 deals with what Troutman calls “the music of Indianness,” including both traditional music and dance reduced to cultural performance, and Western music influenced by Indian melodies, recorded by ethnomusicologists such as Alice C. Fletcher, Frances Densmore, and Natalie Curtis. Most famous, arguably, is Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “From the Land of Sky-Blue Water,” based on transcriptions of Chippewa songs recorded by Densmore, which epitomizes the loud-soft beat that became the stereotypical “Indian sound” of American popular culture. Songs and melodies by Cadman and other non-Indian composers became standards for American Indian performers, who first heard some of them in the schools. Real Indians, performing “Indian” music on stage, were a popular draw, as were Indian bands, some of whose members performed, at least part of the time, in stereotypical Plains Indian costumes.
In chapter 5 Troutman examines the careers of five individual Indian musicians who made their careers performing for the public. They are a diverse group. Angus Lookaround (Menominee) taught music in government schools. Fred Cardin (Quapaw), a graduate of Carlisle Indian School, organized an Indian string quartet and played classic and Indian-derived music for audiences throughout the U.S. Joe Morris (Blackfeet) played with predominantly black musicians in jazz clubs on the West Coast. Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone (Creek) partnered with Cadman for a successful career singing Indian-themed music on tour throughout the U.S. and spent the latter part of her career as an Indian activist. Kiutus Tecumseh (Yakama-Cherokee) took his singing to the radio where he complemented his performances with speeches about Indian causes, particularly the necessity of improving the quality of education. They were representative of Indians who succeeded in making their way in the white man’s world through their music, and without surrendering their Indianness.
Indian Blues surveys the diversity of meanings and uses of music experienced by American Indians during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In accomplishing this, Troutman has opened a line of research that will interest historians, folklorists, anthropologists, and other students of the American Indian. His book is sure to stimulate further work in this productive field.
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[Review length: 866 words • Review posted on April 13, 2011]