Beginning in the spring of 1976, the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA began exploring the possibility of developing an interdisciplinary Master of Arts program in American Indian Studies. Given the large number of courses about American Indians already being offered at UCLA (22 undergraduate, 13 graduate) the first attempts were really to identify the mechanics of putting together such a program of study. The American Indian Studies Center also needed a curriculum coordinator to oversee the planning of the M.A. During the summer of 1976, Dr. David Draper joined the faculty and assumed this role.

In presenting this issue of the Journal devoted to music and the expressive arts in general, we hope to emphasize the role of the arts in American Indian life: past, present, and future. The articles and poems presented here address themselves to important musical events and processes both archaic and ongoing. Although several previous authors have dismissed Indian music from the realm of "art music" because they viewed it primarily as "functional," the authors in this collection present evidence of spiritual, aesthetic, and creative values inherent in the music itself. The music and musicians are honored and esteemed by the Indian people who are both the practitioners and beneficiaries. "The Study of Indian Music" attempts to outline both the advantages and disadvantages of studying one's own culture. Although Indian people are usually better prepared intellectually and physically to research their own people, sometimes social constraints influence their access to information and their subsequent presentation of the results of the study. The conclusion is that Indian people are the appropriate reporters and analyzers of their own cultures. Paul Humphreys' work, "The Tradition of Song Renewal among the Pueblo Indians of North America;' shows the insights that a sensitive composer and performer can bring to the study of Indian music. After Humphreys listened, learned, and sang with several Pueblo composers to learn their ideas and techniques, he composed a song to see what an Indian musician would do with it. This synthetic method produced results that were surprising both to the researcher and to the Pueblo composer, proving once again the unpredictability of true creativity. Richard Keeling's analysis, "The 'Sobbing' Quality in a Hupa Brush Dance Song;' grew out of two years' fieldwork and additional archival research on Hupa music. While he was supported by matching grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA, Keeling compiled a comprehensive collection of Northwest California sound recordings. The systematic comparison of old and new performances along with sound registrations produced graphically by machine indicated a Brush Dance aesthetic far removed from Western musical practice. In fact, the musical and spiritual parameters seemed to coincide. Purification, emotional state, and relation to the universe all combined to produce the vocal technique of 'sobbing.'

In recent years, Indian musicians have been accessible to scholars, students, and younger Indian people because many of the singers speak English as first or second languages. This linguistic change does not correlate exactly with musical change or acculturation because many of the most traditional musicians and religious leaders have learned English in order to hold jobs or to interact in other ways with the dominant society, while also retaining their important cultural roles. Although many Indian people today do not speak their own tribal languages, they may be skilled in another type of language-the language of the insider. Teaching and transmitting information by example, parable, symbolism, and understatement is the norm in Indian discourse. A lifetime of sharing (and suffering) jokes about color, degree of Indian blood, blame for rain, and designations of "civilized" or "wild" has prepared Indian students and scholars for a type of field work that goes beyond participant-observation. Sometimes an Indian person who has a great deal of knowledge will give an easy answer (or a throw-away answer) to an outsider to test him or to get rid of him when the answer he might give an Indian person would be different. For example, an elderly Pawnee woman once told an enthusiastic graduate student that she" didn't know any stories in Pawnee" because the younger woman had asked her to tell them in the summer time while the two were working in a kitchen. Both the time and place were inappropriate, hence the "throwaway answer:' It would seem clear that members of the same Indian societies as the musicians would understand the music and the process of music-making better than outsiders. Of course, when a scholar is a native speaker of the Indian language he has a

A problem in ethnomusicology that defies solution is that of influence--was the music we are studying influenced by outsiders? If the music changed because of replacement, acculturation, or attrition, how did it change, and how much did it change? In order to find a beginning point for the music, we sometimes have to start with historical documents written before the first recordings (but not the first songs) were made. The ethnohistorical approach can be useful in finding the starting point. Definitions of ethnohistory vary according to the source consulted. Axtell's consensual observation in his review essay, "The Ethnohistory of Early America:' is that "ethnohistory is not a separate discipline (or even subdiscipline), but rather a hybrid method, process, or approach applicable to a variety of historical problems. It can make no claims to special techniques independent of history, and it has no theory independent of other theories in cultural anthropology. It is an exacting but flexible approach to the problems of cultural process and change, problems that are shared by the complementary disciplines of history and anthropology:'l Washburn has seen ethnohistory a "process and a method, not as a rigid discipline with fixed borders and strict entrance requirements." Reciprocal cultural relations are emphasized by most ethno-historians, as opposed to the frequent treatment by historians of conquered or "primitive" peoples as merely actors on a stage constructed by the conqueror or colonist. Axtell continues arguing that "By emphasizing that each culture must be understood in its own terms . . . we must not only see the ethnocentric biases in each culture but understand the reasons for them:'