Music of the first nations: Tradition and innovation in native North America
Abstract
This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to an ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this collection promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods. Contributors are T. Christopher Aplin, Tara Browner, Paula Conlon, David E. Draper, Elaine Keillor, Lucy Lafferty, Franziska von Rosen, David W. Samuels, Laurel Sercombe, and Judith Vander. © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
... Understanding the mechanics by which federal actors engaged music instruction to target Indigenous Americans towards the Allotment objectives of extinguishment and assimilation necessitates considering the difference in epistemological and ontological relationships between the traditional musical practices of Indigenous nations and Western art music. Importantly, the musical practices of Indigenous nations are not homogeneous; Indigenous musical practices are as diverse as their histories, languages, and beliefs (Browner 2009;Herndon 1982). Nonetheless, they include common threads, which serve as the basis of this discussion. ...
... Instead, Indigenous nations couch musical practices within the larger, inclusive whole of Indigenous communities, positioning them as a societal functionary or form of doing (Vázquez Córdoba 2019, 208;Robinson 2020, 46). Indigenous musical expressions do not simply bear the substance of historical documentation, law, medicine, narrative, and teachings-they are history, law, medicine, stories, and teachings (Robinson 2020, 8, 41, 46;Browner 2009). Thus, Indigenous music-making is indivisibly tangled with spirituality, history, and community. ...
... Although the hoop dance can also be associated with a healing dance of the Pueblo people of the American Southwest (Browner, 2004(Browner, , 2009, it was chosen as the instructional dance medium for this project because of its historical and contemporary significance to the Anishinabek People. In his book The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (1995), Indigenous scholar Basil Johnston discusses the origin story of the hoop dance in Anishinabek culture. ...
This paper reflects on an elementary school hoop dance project organized by awhite music teacher, taught by an Indigenous hoop dancer, and guided by the Anishinabek goodlife teachings. It suggests that the hoop dance project, and specifically the hoop dancer’s teaching approach, allowed students to experience new, unique, and beneficial learning that engaged the first goodlife teaching: Zaagi’idiwin (love). Furthermore, the experience was a valuable exampleof Indigenous educational practice, centering relationship and participation. The research argues that current educational realities can impede these best practices and run counter to healthy, holistic and culturally based learning.
... Native American cultures also have a long and complex relationship with ecstatic dance. Similar in nature to Dionysian rituals, the ghost dance uses ecstatic circular dance to enter an altered mental state and commune with the sacred (Browner, 2010;LaMothe, 2019). Furthermore, the ghost dance blossomed into a religious movement recasting native social identity and redefining native culture in the face of capitalism and colonial genocide, and is still practiced today (Warren, 2017). ...
History is full of references to dancing plague, dance mania, ecstatic dance, collective effervescence, choreo mania, collective psychosis, and Tarantism. In each of these cases, groups of people come together in joint activity (typically dance) and reach a prolonged ecstatic state in which they cannot stop the movement. To this day, academic literature in medicine, psychology, history, and cognitive science has not been able to answer the question; why does ecstatic dance lead to a loss of executive control? I here focus on the case of group dance and provide an enactive embodied account of the loss of executive control. I argue that dancing crowds are scaffolded, self-organizing, self-perpetuating, dynamical systems. Within such systems, the majority of affordances provided to the individual agent lead to the perpetuation of the system, leading to more dancing. The embodied impact of the crowd, as an emergent entity, on the individual also leads to change in the sense of agency. Dancers experience being “unable to stop” because the sense of “who” is initiating the movements changes within crowd dance interaction. If it is unclear who is moving, then the interaction is experienced as outside individual control.
... Неизбежной была бы также конкуренция с другими обзорными изданиями по индейцам Северной Америки, опубликованными после 1972 г.: общими сводками, которые отчасти воплощали первоначальный план «Введения» Стёртеванта (Biolsi 2004;Kan and Strong 2006;Thompson 1996) и специальными обзорами по отдельным темам, таким как устная история, литература и музыка, народные экологические знания, политическая организация американских индейцев и др. (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997;Browner 2009;Mills and Slobodin 1994;Moerman 2009Trigger and Washburn 1996;Vescey and Venables 1980;Wiget 1996). У нас не было никаких шансов победить эту «армию книг» своими малыми силами. ...
... While powwows are a celebratory inter-tribal gathering with music, dance, vendors, and yummy food, the drum circle is the centre (Browner 2009;Scales 2012). The sound of the steady beating drum supporting the high, tense, male, Northern-style singing is now an easily recognizable sound of powwow. ...
“We are the tribe that they cannot see. We live on an industrial reservation. We are the Halluci Nation.” These words from Indigenous activist and poet John Trudell (1946–2015) inspired the latest album by Ottawa-based Indigenous DJ collective A Tribe Called Red (ATCR) and frame its pan-Indigenous, transcultural message. Inter-tribal relationships are both common and important to Indigenous communities, especially in urban centres. Powwows are also events that emphasize intertribal and intercultural relationships, even as they hosted by a specific nation. With Halluci Nation, ATCR seeks to foster far-reaching allegiances across culture, ethnicity, and place to “[understand] oppression and how to collectively dismantle oppression” (DJ NDN of ATCR).
This article argues that ATCR’s Halluci Nation sonifies a process of decolonization that establishes an embodied network of global allies. I trace the development of ATCR’s music from its original focus on the Ottawa Indigenous community and its non-Indigenous allies to a call for nation-to-nation relationships (see Juno Award–winning album Nation II Nation, 2013), and then now to a concept album that seeks to manifest a real “Halluci Nation” with members from around the world. Analysis of ATCR’s music, audience, and Halluci Nation album is contextualized by studies of community formation and identity politics in intertribal initiatives), such as powwows and friendship centres, and pan-Indigenous activism, such as Idle No More.
... A fourth engagement with soundscape, mediation, and culture ethnographically traces the cultural productivity of formally dislocated sounds, positing a creative and cultural productivity to various schizophonic moments in the production of new forms of identity, performance, and memory. The globalizing music industry (Burnett 1996, Taylor 1997 and the circulation of new technologies of production have bequeathed a preponderance of new forms of emplacement for music and sound, including hip hop in Japan (Condry 2006), new forms of reggae in Jamaica (Veal 2007), country music in Native American communities (Samuels 2004) as well as other new forms of Native American musical identities (Browner 2009, Lassiter et al. 2002, the global circulation of hip hop (Alim et al. 2008), and new forms of musical expression in exile (Diehl 2002). This topic has become central to ethnomusicology, but covering the complete scope of its emerging literature is beyond the range of this article. ...
A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropological approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive interweavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology, we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.
This book summarizes a decade of research on its topic, while each specific perspective either formed in advance, or arose in the process of ethnography and its analysis. The book explores various aspects of Christian music in British Columbia, Washington State, and Oregon, but primarily its historical facets and local palette. The scope of the main topics covers aspects such as historical and local melodies in relevant hymnbooks, musical practices in the Cathedrals and other churches within the designated area, and the creative profile of modern North American composers (including those who have worked in the Pacific Northwest), who made significant contributions to the church music practiced in the area. Other background and supporting topics are a reference on the history and culture of the Canadian and U. S. parts of the region, the study of Native Christian art, its philosophy and examples, and historical stages and the current landscape of Christianity in British Columbia, Washington State, and Oregon.
The book bears the features of a monograph and a handbook at the same time. Among the few other books dealing with specific topics that make up the content of this book, none of them gives an all-around picture of the regional history, society, culture, art, religion, and its musical expression as a holistic phenomenon.
This essay attends to select affective politics of theoretical practices in the study of music and affect. Concentrating on EuroAmerican theoretical frames, I address how assumptions generating key theories in affect studies complicate ethnographic analyses of musics emanating from various historical, social and cultural locations. I attend to challenges that object-oriented approaches provide ethnomusicologists in particular, arguing that a focus on practice affords opportunities to avoid the reifications of ‘music’ and ‘affect’ as potentially agentive. In considering strategies of presentation and publication, I call citational practices into question, elucidating inequities in distinct processes of legitimation. This essay stands as an invitation for increased transparency and personal accountability in theorising, with special attention to affective entanglements and attachments.
For those of us with decolonial desires, the university classroom is a potential space of disruption and reorganization. Our courses, course materials, teaching tools, students, and our own bodies and minds are all technologies that can subvert the colonial machine (la paperson 2017). In the first section, I contextualize my decolonial desires as a non-U.S.-citizen settler Canadian musicologist in the United States. The work of David Garneau, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Andrea Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang illuminates my positionality and power. In the second section, I provide an example of one way I’m disrupting the typical curricula and classroom experiences in a Euro-American classical music school. I discuss my course entitled “North American Indigenous Music Seminar” (NAIMS), including the course structure and content, and decolonizing strategies. Student responses to interviews about the course are interspersed with the discussion of my seminar plans and challenges to claims of “decolonization.” Their responses reveal some successes and many limits for anti-colonial and decolonial work in a single-semester course.
Indigenous musical modernities have thrived across centuries of innovation and mobilisation through both exchange and resistance. Settler colonialism seeks to deny Indigenous Peoples a ‘contemporary’ by asserting both a temporal and spatial boundary. The temporal and spatial boundaries intended for Indigenous Peoples foster expectations from the dominant white culture regarding Indigeneity. Cree Mennonite cellist Cris Derksen and Wolastoqi singer Jeremy Dutcher mobilise settler expectations and institutional opportunities in their distinctive musical practices. These musical practices are the results of exchange and dialogue between Euro-American classical music and Indigenous musics, resulting in what Dawn Avery calls ‘Native Classical Music’. Such dialogues are negotiated through these musicians’ resistance to Euro-American classical music hierarchies, settler logics about authenticity and their resourcefulness in navigating settler institutions. By analysing Derksen’s combination of powwow music and newly composed classical pieces with Orchestral Powwow and Dutcher’s integration of archival research with composition and performance with Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, I argue that heterogeneous musical practices of contemporary Indigeneity thrive within and against the temporal and spatial constraints of settler colonialism. Throughout this analysis, I reflect on my own position as a white settler musicologist and listener in reinforcing these constraints.
Memorialization on the cultural landscape is a common method of celebrating the legacy of an event or person significant to the history of geographical location. The Grateful Dead is a band that continues to define the ideals of the late-1960s San Francisco Sound through their music’s creative freedom and inclination toward experimentation. Although the original lineup of the Grateful Dead is no longer intact, the spirit of the music they created and their psychedelic appeal has been preserved on the cultural landscape. Despite differing reasons for naming their business after the band, hundreds of business owners in the United States have collectively preserved the Grateful Dead’s presence on the cultural landscape. In this paper we explore the distribution of businesses in the United States with Grateful Dead-related names, and how the presence of these business names enriches the cultural landscape with the memory of the band’s music as a product of the iconic San Francisco Sound.
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