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Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934 (review)

2010; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.0.0070

1948-7142

David Fenimore,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934 David H. Fenimore Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934. By John W. Troutman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. 323 pages, $34.95. Far from being another weapon to “kill the Indian and save the man,” in Richard Pratt’s loaded phrase, the European education imposed at Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools armed students with a new kind of firepower to fight on a “moral and cultural battleground” against forced assimilation (7, 150). As one Carlisle student wrote, “Our band can play better than those white boys in town” (128). Since the 1880s missionaries and Indian agents had discouraged Native musical practices, which the moralistic Indian Rights Association called “secret dances of a bestial and revolting character” (76). When President Harding appointed Charles Burke as commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1921, Burke escalated the culture war with a widely circulated yet largely ineffectual memo against the “dance evil” on reservations (69). But “dance spoke louder than words” and was in fact on the increase due to another unforeseen effect of Indian schools: a new and inspiring intertribal awareness of song and dance traditions among returning students (103). John Troutman focuses on how the repressive efforts of the government were transformed into a mechanism of resistance and self-determination. In 1907, almost twenty years after Wounded Knee, an arrangement of the forbidden Ghost Dance songs was performed by the Carlisle band. Troutman recounts the many ways that students, often instructed by Indian teachers, took this kind of “safely contained” repertoire on the road and eventually constructed their own performances of Indianness outside the “savagery to civilization” narrative of the Office of Indian Affairs (195). Native musicians’ mastery of European expressive culture let them negotiate between Indianness and whiteness on their own terms at rodeos, fairs, Wild West shows, concert halls, and even for tourists on reservations. These venues provided stages where “all-Indian” bands performed an evolving and syncretic identity that challenged the “contained, racialized, and docile” model promoted by the Office of Indian Affairs (208). Compositions scored for European instruments would share the program with tribal songs and dances, exploiting every opportunity to “play Indian” for mainstream America (234). These sometimes transgressive, often humorous, and increasingly unmediated performances provided musicians from different tribes a sense of solidarity and a renewed appreciation for their own and others’ traditions. Troutman points out that American popular music in the first decades of the twentieth century drew heavily on Indian themes in ersatz and sometimes [End Page 392] surrealistic ways, which he exemplifies by reproducing the cover page of the sheet music to “Arrah Wanna: An Irish Indian Matrimonial Venture” (1906), visually portraying romance between what looks like Pocahontas and a leprechaun. Indian musicians reclaimed and remarketed these commercial stereotypes by commodifying themselves on their own terms, often with great enjoyment and camaraderie. Troutman describes a long-running operatic adaptation of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855) in Ontario, performed by Anishinaabe actors who inserted a number of jokes—for example, a song celebrating sexual promiscuity into a wedding scene—inaccessible to the paying non-Indian audience. Troutman’s final section, “Hitting the Road: Professional Musicians in the Early Twentieth Century,” presents biographical vignettes of five musician-activists who toured the world performing and composing in popular, jazz, classical, and “Indianist” genres (218). One such was the mezzo-soprano Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone (Creek-Cherokee) who sang opera alongside Indianist compositions like Charles Cadman’s “From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water” while dressed in beaded buckskin on a stage decorated with a pan-tribal array of drums, baskets, and blankets. To greater or lesser degrees, Blackstone and the others strove to use their media connections and global reputations to “tell the truth about the Indian race,” as Blackstone puts it in her autobiography, even as they deliberately “played Indian” when it suited their artistic, political, and economic goals (237). David H. Fenimore University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association