Native Music in College Curricula?

Abstract

A significant change has occurred on the Washington State University campus as exemplified by the course Music of North to be re-offered in January of 1987. Although this course has been taught on and off since the spring of 1977 as an elective, cross-listed between Music and Native American Studies, it now reflects the new philosophy of general university requirements initiated at WSU. The course has received approval as meeting both Humanities and Intercultural needs for undergraduate students. It is an indication of the response from one educational institution to encourage the study of world civilizations and to apply interdisciplinary methods. It reflects the need to transcend any single cultural tradition or approach to learning and to link a broad overview of the human past with more specialized subject areas. (Humanities Core Curriculum Committee, WSU.) Choices in Humanities have traditionally embraced only written literatures. This action culminates a ten-year effort to have included among these options the artistic and literary endeavors of oral cultures. It addresses the question of whether study of Native Americans and their music (as it reflects cultural realities, life, thought, religion, and history) is important enough to include in choices of requirements for graduation of all WSU undergraduates. It affirms the premise that humanistic study in American colleges must not exclude the contributions emanating from the oral cultures of native North America, or from any other civilization for that matter. Less than twenty years ago campuses across our nation seethed with unrest. Among the many issues precipitating confrontations between students and administrators, students and faculty, faculty and administrators, were those pointing up the educational community's disregard of the contributions made by ethnic minorities to all facets of this society. After two global wars and two limited actions in Korea and Vietnam, this nation still had done little to solve modern domestic educational and societal problems revolving around facts about, and sensitivity to, its racial and religious minorities. However, our national policy had been to address similar issues for half a century all around the globe in the name of keeping the world safe for democracy and fighting for basic human rights. We had even managed a trip to the moon! Extensive nationwide efforts were long overdue in attending to fair treatment in jobs, voting, housing, and education. But even the very content of that education called for complete revision and refocusing as regards American colleges must not exclude the contributions made by the oral cultures of native North America.