This volume in the Music in American Life series is presented as a reaction to the decrease in Native American music research in recent years, which is attributed by the editor Tara Browner to a number of factors including lack of available funding for North American researchers, lessening musical agendas within American Indian Studies programs, as well as changing attitudes and the increased involvement of Native people themselves in the direction and scope of academic research. Based on the above factors, the individual essays in this collection present much-needed ethnomusicological perspective on the music of Native North America. A variety of methodologies––dialogic, co-authored, historiographic, ethnographic, and interpretive––are employed in the various case studies. The individual essays, collected over a ten-year period, also present a broad survey of tribally-specific music representing the major North American music areas including the Arctic (Iglulik Inuit), Athabascan (Dene), Pacific Northwest (Puget Salish), Great Basin (Shoshone, Paiute), Plains (Lakota), Southwest (Ft. Sill Apache), Southeastern Woodlands (Choctaw), and Northeastern Woodlands (Mailseet, Passamaquoddy). The two final chapters present contemporary, pan-Indian, and popular viewpoints based on studies of regional intertribal powwow musical style and indigenous country-music performance practices.
In the first chapter, “Iglulik Inuit Drum-Dance Songs,” Paula Conlon ties the historically widespread practice of the drum-dance, found throughout the Arctic, to late twentieth-century recordings from Baffin Island. The locus of the essay is an analysis of a representative drum-dance song, “I’m So Happy,” in which the author first presents the Inuit perspective that a song’s identity rests on “what is being said” (14), and then analytically demonstrates how text is intimately tied to melody and formal structure. Although it appears that drum accompaniment and drum dancing were on the decline at the time of the study in 1985, the essay suggests that song is an important means of maintaining traditional musical style through the use of tonal language.
Chapter 2, “Musical Expressions of the Dene,” by Lucy Lafferty and Elaine Keillor, is part of the growing trend of collaborative efforts by cultural insiders and ethnomusicologists. Combining indigenous, educational, and historical approaches, the essay focuses on two unaccompanied song types, “love songs” and “love-of-the-land-songs,” which for the Athabascan-speaking Dogrib living in the remote MacKenzie River drainage region of Canada’s Northern Territories musically express the relationship between individuals, their community, and the physical environment.
In chapter 3, “The Story of Dirty Face,” Laurel Sercombe explores a prominent pre-contact Puget Salish myth-narrative as a means to answer the question: “What gives a song its integrity as a distinct musical utterance?” (36). Collating the work of early folklorists, who collected versions of the story in written form, with the work of ethnographers, who independently recorded the song but not the story, the author compares linguistic, musical, and performance data from ten “Dirty Face” song recordings, illustrating the cultural importance of stories and the power of words, both spoken and sung.
Chapter 4, “Drum, Songs, Vibrations,” by Franziska von Rosen, presents a guided and edited dialogic with Maggie Paul, a Passamaquoddy singer living on St. Mary’s Reserve, in New Brunswick, Canada. The “conversational” aspect of the essay was chosen by both author and interviewee in order to present context and an indigenous perspective, with a focus on singing. Although the work is informative on many levels, perhaps most interesting is its emphasis on the importance of the singing process itself, rather than song origin, in the Maliseet “traditional” music revitalization movement.
In a significantly revised version of a previously published paper from 1980, David Draper reexamines his previous research on the music of the Mississippi Choctaw, in chapter 5, “Identity, Retention, and Survival.” The focus of the essay is the hitla tuluwa (Dance Song) repertoire, with specific attention to comparative analysis of six songs from the amona tuluwa (First Dance) and Jump Dance categories, which act as abstract indicators of importance and “significant markers for the beginning of a [song] cycle,” respectively (90).
T. Christopher Aplin posits the Fort Sill Apache Fire Dance as a representation of collective “culture, history, and identity” (92) in chapter 6, “This Is Our Dance.” Based on ongoing fieldwork and a historical ethnographic perspective, the author adroitly places the Fire Dance of this small tribe residing in the southern Plains within the context of a larger Apache cultural complex of the American Southwest, while simultaneously presenting the ceremony’s multiplicity of meanings to the diverse Native and non-Native inhabitants of Oklahoma.
In chapter 7, “The Creative Power and Style of Ghost Dance Songs,” Judith Vander compares song texts and the contextual orientation of Plains Ghost Dance songs with those of the Shoshone equivalent known as Naraya, hypothesizing that the Ghost Dance was not a homogeneous entity, but consisted of two distinct branches. Then, building upon the early work of Herzog, Vander analyzes Lakota Ghost Dance and Shoshone Naraya songs, noting complex and asymmetrical features within a simple symmetrical framework as measures of the existence of “creative musical style and artistic achievement” (128).
Chapter 8, “An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-wow Songs,” by Tara Browner, is an important beginning at filling a void in the literature concerning regional musical style differences in the contemporary intertribal pow-wow complex. By combining her personal experience with the pow-wow and her academic background by “dancing with a Western Ear” (137), she creates a taxonomy of several regional variations within the two predominant pow-wow styles, known as Northern and Southern. Perhaps most interesting is Browner’s observation of the developing trend of pow-wow music as a popular listening genre in addition to its traditional role complementing dancing.
In the final chapter, “Singing Indian Country,” David Samuels expands on his writing about Indian country music on the San Carlos Apache Reservation by tackling the cowboy versus Indian dichotomy through the visage of Native American country performers. Although country music is stereotypically associated with “white, hardscrabble, blue-collar, evangelical, [and] sometimes racist ideologies” (141), in this essay Samuels examines the historical and cultural forces that have produced context and provided meaning for Native country performers. Quoting Spokane/Coeur d’Alene novelist Sherman Alexie, Samuels characterizes Indian country music as an aesthetic voice of memory, linking “cultural history to an affective sense of exploitation and desire” (156).
Works Cited
Draper, David E. “Occasions for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music.” In Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, edited by Charlotte Heth, Vol. 3, No. 2:147–174. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
Herzog, George. “Plains Ghost Dance and Great Basin Music.” American Anthropologist 37 (1935): 403–419.
Nettl, Bruno. North American Musical Styles. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. 45 (1954).
Samuels, David W. Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.
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[Review length: 1120 words • Review posted on September 15, 2009]