American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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

The musical tradition of the Pueblo Indians calls for both the performance and the "renewal" of songs. While some of the dance ceremonials do not change from year to year, occasions that call for new songs, and even new dances, are likely to outnumber those for which songs are prescribed. Despite ongoing transformation, there is a continuity of symbolism in the costumes, patterns, words, melodies, instruments, and spirit that make up the dance ceremonials. It is a symbolism durably evolved through centuries alongside dominant Pueblo concerns of farming, hunting, and religious activities. These activities have been traditionally carried on in a fascinating, varied, and arid landscape. The need for sufficient rainfall is a concern of Pueblo inhabitants even today. Pueblo culture has evolved in a way, however, that provides this concern with adequate expression. The dances, for which the songs are made and sung, represent a fulfillment of man's responsibility as a participant in the cosmos. Ancestor spirits demonstrate their appreciation for this observance by coming to attend. They delight in the impersonations of themselves that are performed by the dancers to the accompaniment of new songs. There is great emphasis on the propriety of these dance ceremonials for the ancestor-spirits, or katcina, are understood to visit the village as clouds-clouds that bring rain, rain that brings an abundance of crops and game.

ETHNOGRAPHIC INTRODUCTION In the years before 1850 the Indians who lived along the lower reaches of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in Northwestern California enjoyed a fantastic wealth of natural resources. Salmon and acorns were so plentiful that subsistence needs could be met by working no more than a few months out of the year. These Indians-the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok-lived in permanent villages in stout semi-subterranean houses made of cedar planks or thick redwood boards. Among these three groups there was great focus on symbols of wealth, also. The main type of money was dentalium shells, but other classes of objects were also recognized as treasures. These included scarlet-colored woodpecker scalps, large flaked blades of obsidian, unusually colored deerskins, and other object that were precious for their significance in religious ceremonies. Men had their forearms tattooed as a means of calculating the value of strings of shell money, and each could precisely figure the worth of his redwood canoe or the bride price he could demand when his daughter was ready for marriage. Ironically, there was no central authority among these peoples. Rather, affairs in a given small village were settled informally among a relatively few of the richest males. They were known in Yurok as pergerk, "real men" or "real people," and it was believed that their wealth and power accrued from their spiritual superiority over lesser individuals.

Our knowledge and understanding of acculturation in American Indian musical systems remains limited. Few studies have been published that address this important process in Indian society. The scholarly preoccupation with preservation of native repertories is indeed laudable, yet ignoring the documentation of on-going musical change has left gaps in the existing records. For those of us who are confronted, at least to some extent, with reconstructing pre-contact musical categories, understanding this process of change may further clarify ambiguous aspects of the aboriginal repertories. In this article we will focus on one example of musical acculturation, the Christian hymns of the Mississippi Choctaw. Approximately one thousand Choctaw chose to remain in their homeland at the time of removal to Indian territory in the 1830s. Over four thousand Choctaw, descendants of this group, presently reside in Mississippi, scattered in seven communities near the city of Philadelphia. This tribe has been able to preserve some of their cultural traditions. The Choctaw language continues to be the 'first language' of these people. One may hope that the bilingual program recently introduced into the reservation schools will promote retention of the language in the future. Second, a portion of the presumably aboriginal musical repertory is currently performed, although the functions are changing, and the occasions for presentation are diminishing. The last decade has witnessed the passing of many of the older song leaders, who were repositories of this tradition. Third, the institution of the native shaman continues as a viable part of Choctaw life. Individuals in the shaman's role verbalize ideological principles of the native belief system. Thus, the crucial cognitive structures for retention and transmission of native lore have been maintained.

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:'

A Contemporary Tribe of Poets Kenneth Lincoln I weave the night, I cross the weft with stars and the dark hollows of your eyes; I plait the words you've said into my hair. -Anita Endrezze Probst Astounding: less than twenty years ago, there were no acknowledged, much less published, Native American "poets" in America. Exceptions proved the rule: John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, Will Rogers, Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear. The historian, Stanley Vestal, argued that Sitting Bull was a poet in a native epic sense, but the Wild West still framed Buffalo Bill's "American" Indian. Indian literature fell under the pall of ethnological field work. Poor translations perpetuated the stereotype of the unlettered savage, and tribal anonymity shawled any personal sense of craft. Reliving Hiawatha in the nineteenth century, George Copway acculturated as the White man's Ojibwa visionary and died of alcoholism. Until the present generation of post-war Indian writers, who publish in English as a first language, native singers, tellers, and seers were effectively segregated from American literature. The new Indian poets are children of the old ways, students of historical transitions, teachers of contemporary survivals. In the last two decades seminal writing has come from young Native Americans emerging from tribal settings, going to American schools and studying formal literatures, then going back to their own people to write personal versions of native experience. Add "woman" to "man" to "native" American, since these poets, many from matrilineal cultures, are equally gendered. Concentrate, sever, and migrate family histories from country toward city; recombine racial lines, mix cultures, and relocate tribes on the edges of city limits. Voice the truths of pain and love, loss and survival among indigenous peoples. Politicize the poet's sensitivity over centuries of historical dispossession. Break into the caucus of the printed word, through labels of "savage," "heathen," "pagan," and "primitive."