In Doig People's Ears

Abstract

Jn People's Ears is a forty-five-minute composition for audio tape and voice. It is a series of soundscapes that are juxtaposed to create a feeling for the history of the Beaver Indian people (Dunne-Za). work is addressed to the people of the River Reserve, a community near Fort Saint John on the industrial frontier of northeastern British Columbia. The Doig has been the locus of a field recording project that was organized by Robin Ridington, an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, who has known the Beavers since 1964. rhythms of life at and an imaginative collaboration between some of the members of the community and the research team have generated nearly three hundred hours of recordings that document everyday life situations including hunting, homemaking, storytelling, and music making, as well as ambient sound.1 began working with Dr. Ridington as a field recordist and audio documentarian in 1979. Between 1979 and 1982 we made four trips to which ranged in duration from two weeks to two months. Our research used the participant observation technique of social inquiry. We either camped on a hillside overlooking the village, lived with people in their homes, or travelled with people to traditional camping places. Dunne-Za were amused at the way we took sounds in the way that most people took pictures. We recorded crying babies, cooking food, and clothes being washed. Men invited us to tag along when they went to hunt or work on jobs. We joined women for berry picking and shopping trips. Parents were delighted when their children sang or performed recitations for us. We were taken to taverns and churches. We visited family friends. Although we were interested in such cultural products as songs, stories, and the discussion of contemporary issues, we did not seek to buy them. Instead we entered into an emotional and material symbiosis with Dunne-Za who extended themselves toward us. When we had a vehicle we drove people who had no vehicles. When there was good hunting people brought us meat. If someone had trouble with the courts or some other type of bureaucracy we took a position of advocacy. If Indians challenged our presence in social situations someone would speak for us. When we talked through the night about love and death we enlightened each other. When we asked people about their families, backgrounds, and religions they asked us to talk about ours. We gave those parts of ourselves as sacraments to a project of common knowledge and reflection so that both they and we could begin stories in the future, I knew this person once . Beavers trusted that we could use the tapes in a way that would be beneficial to their children and to their children's children: so that if there was a time when there was no Doig, a ghost of would continue to speak. When we produced audio productions we sent copies to friends at the and asked that they share them with other people. Sometimes we received requests for copies of particular master tapes. Our work is innovative within anthropology because it documents the complete range of aural culture and soundscapes. It includes information about a variety of settings from those in which there is little or no human activity through informal conversations to formal events such as interviews and ceremonials. Since the Beavers were until recently concerned with the oral/aural transmission of knowledge and history, our documents of verbal performance styles are especially interesting. Our sense of global audio documentation has been strongly influenced by R. Murray Schafer's discussion of sound symbolism, acoustic community, and the soundscape as an indicator of social welfare (see Schafer 1977). We hope that our archive will serve as a valuable resource for future generations of Dunne-Za as well as for musicologists, linguists, students of expressive culture, soundscape designers, and others who are interested in analyzing the sounding aspects of culture. …