Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America M. Celia Cain Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America. Edited by Tara Browner. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. [184 p. ISBN 9780252022210. $35.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. At St. Mary's Reserve, home of the Maliseet Nation in New Brunswick, Canada, Maggie Paul's grandson Possesom "knows the songs. He sings them . . . if anybody needs a song, he will sing a song" (p. 64). His knowledge is Maggie Paul's remarkable legacy, for the Maliseet drum had fallen silent by the late 1950s. Starting with only one song, the "Kwanute" or welcome song (p. 59), Paul, a Passamaquoddy traditional singer, restored and revitalized the traditional music of the Maliseet, thereby reminding the Maliseet how to be Maliseet and live Maliseet values. Music's ability to construct Native American identities is the uniting theme of this collection. A fire dance, a powwow song, a Waylon Jennings cover, a sung myth, a welcome song—all are different responses to different times and types of colonialism. Whatever the genre, Native Americans perform music as a means of performing indigeneity while intensifying a sense of place, self (p. 139), and the past. With essays focusing on a wide variety of case studies from around North America, some underrepresented in the literature, this volume from the University of Illinois' fine Music in American Life series demonstrates what makes Native American music native. This collection is of particular significance because the essays engage with a [End Page 776] wide variety of methodologies, including ethnographic, collaborative, analytical, historiographic, and interpretative ones. This variety makes the volume especially useful in demonstrating the "many ways of doing contemporary ethnomusicology in Indian country" (p. 2, italics in original). Additionally, a number of the contributors are Native, bringing important emic perspectives. Although Native American music is one of the founding areas of study for ethnomusicology, due to limited funding, decreased emphasis on music in Native Studies programs, and antipathy of Native Americans to being research subjects, in recent decades research has decreased (p. 1). Therefore it is not surprising, but still unfortunate, that this volume took over a decade to come to press. Some of the authors (Tara Browner, David W. Samuels) updated their essays to reflect recent developments in the field, but many did not. Only T. Christopher Aplin seems to have conducted fieldwork on his essay topic in the last decade. Nevertheless, this collection is a valuable contribution to Native Studies and ethnomusicology. While all the authors have conducted historical and/or ethnographic research, the essays by Paula Conlon and Aplin engage more with ethnographic conventions of writing. Conlon's essay examines Iglulik Inuit drum-dance songs, focusing her analysis on the song "I'm So Happy." Conlon argues that for the Iglulik, the text is primary, as drum-dance songs tell the stories of their everyday life. They can serve as a means of reconciliation, as the Iglulik resolve disputes through competition and/or the singing of humorous and castigating songs. Further, there is an interesting gendered aspect of this genre, as traditionally a man composes a song and then teaches it to his wife who serves as his memory holder, and then the wife teaches the song to the other women in the community. The women sing while the man drums and dances. Conlon witnessed the fading of this genre during her fieldwork in the mid-1980s. While drum-dance songs have been reconceptualized in Inuit popular music performance, linking the Iglulik to their past, a major theme of this collection, it is unclear if this has led to a revitalization of the traditional genre. Combining ongoing fieldwork with significant historical research, Aplin's essay on the Fire Dance of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache demonstrates its historical and current role in retaining and forming Apache identity in Oklahoma. The Fort Sill Apache were forced onto reservations in Arizona and New Mexico in the late nineteenth century, but after rebelling against the U.S. government were imprisoned in Warm Springs, Florida and Alabama. After nearly three decades they...