Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 197-210.
Abstract
The anthropologist and ethnomusicologist William K. Powers, in his Beyond the Vision: Essays on American Indian Culture, laments that the discipline of ethnomusicology-and music pedagogy-with its emphasis on the vocal and instrumental "art music" traditions of musically literate peoples has been lax in accepting anthropological theory. Thus, Powers points out that ethnomusicology, where it is concerned with the music of oral, indigenous cultures, adheres to outdated theories on "primitive" music and displays a telling absence of ethnographic abilities.1 Reflecting Powers' judgment, it seems to me that the conceptual seams between anthropology, ethnomusicology, and musicology are rather formidable.
At the same time, from the endogenous point of view of the indigenous traditional song composers, performers, and audiences, the theories and methods of all three of these disciplines must necessarily too often appear naively uninformed, pejorative, arrogant, exploitative, and even bizarre.
The aim in the analysis below is to bridge yet another obstructive conceptual seam that has insulated two disciplines or subject areas from each other, that of western literary criticism and Native American oral song poetry.
Dearie, each time I come to this place, I cry to myself in secret, day and night. -Lakota song poem
The late Michael Dorris in his 1987 essay "Indians on the Shelf' stated that "learning about Native American culture and history is different from acquiring knowledge in other fields, for it requires an initial, abrupt, and wrenching demythologizing."2 In his meaning, it seems clear that the elimination of pervasive falsehoods, of omissions and distortions, must precede any new knowledge in the area of Native American studies. Like other disciplines, such as women's studies, African-American studies, and Latino/a studies, American Indian studies in general is a revisionist undertaking. Moreover, this arduous "demythologizing" is nowhere more necessary in the area of interdisciplinary American Indian studies than in the academic stance on and treatment of traditional Native American song poetry. The myths that have precluded appropriate study of Native American song texts as literature result from several biases and failings.
Examining this array of biases and failings of American Indian studies in great detail would digress from the thesis of this analysis. Nevertheless, a quick glance at the mistreatment of traditional song poetry in the pertinent enterprises such as literary interpretation and the study of Native American artistic expression will ground the direction of the later exploration. The terms "song poetry" and "song poems" are used to refer to the two central dimensions of the genre-the performance and literary dimensions.
Oral texts of the Native American literary tradition have historically been the domain of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore. The first and perhaps major rationale for relegating oral texts outside the literary canon appears to be the very nature of oral literary expression. The relationship of orality to literacy "problematizes" the traditional Western conceptualization of literature, which has most typically stressed the "close connection with 'literate' forms and 'literate' cultures."3 Yet, if orality were the only challenge, Native American oral narratives, life stories, and other oral narrative forms would also linger in critical limbo. This is not the case.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln