Making and Singing Pow-Wow Songs: Text, Form, and the Significance of Culture-Based Analysis

Browner, Tara

doi:10.2307/852530

Cited by 19 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Choruses of five to ten men huddled around large rawhide base drums strike a steady beat and chant in piercing falsetto while dancers in spectacular regalia of fringed buckskin, bright cloth, and feathers delight the spectator with a feast of rhythmic colors. Often referred to as war dances, ethnologists and ethnomusicologists have traced them to the Grass, Scalp, Calumet, and Stomp dances of the Great Plains and the Great Lakes (Howard 1955, 16;Young 1981, 103;Browner 2000). A contemporary distinction between Northern and Southern Plains traditions regarding songs, regalia and dance styles still mirrors that diversity of provenance.…”

Section: The Ethnographic Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

"The Canopy Is Her Home" Gendered Space in American Indian Intertribal Gatherings

Bartelt

2022

EJSSS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This ethnographic report of American Indian dance events, called powwows, focuses on the process of gender difference inscribing spatial difference. Among the participants and attendees, middle-aged native women, implicitly charged with the transmission of values and ideologies, wield the power to control the process of cultural production and the generation of signs and symbols, which find expression through the management of the spectator space under a canopy. Article visualizations:<img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0909/a.php" alt="Hit counter" />

show abstract

Section: The Ethnographic Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

"The Canopy Is Her Home" Gendered Space in American Indian Intertribal Gatherings

Bartelt

2022

EJSSS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Ethnomusicological research depends on awareness of the vocabulary and terminology used by communities to invoke culturally specific conceptualizations of music (Feld and Fox 1994:27). Ethnomusicologists are keenly aware of the need to devise "strategies to avoid subsuming Aboriginal performers' realities to our systems of knowledge" (Marett 1991:44) and this approach is generally compatible with a deeper discourse in recent Indigenous music research, which asserts the right for Indigenous people to interpret their own culture for outsiders via the privileging of Indigenous worldviews and language (Browner 2000).…”

Section: Noongar Song Vocabularymentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualizing Noongar Song

Bracknell¹

2017

yearb. tradit. music

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As of 2011, an estimated 669,900 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people accounted for 3 per cent of Australia's total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015). Of that population, over 30,000 people from a uniquely large urban/rural area in the southwest of Western Australia—including the author of this article—identify as Noongar (also spelled Nyungar). This makes Noongar one of the largest Aboriginal cultural groups in Australia (SWALSC 2009; see figure 1); and yet, the Noongar language is critically endangered, with just 369 speakers acknowledged in the 2011 Australian census (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015). Noongar language is not unique in this regard; the most recent National Indigenous Languages Survey indicates that only “around 120” of more than two hundred Aboriginal languages are still spoken and that “about 13 can be considered strong” (Marmion, Obata, and Troy 2014:xii). Music traditions, often strongly tied to language, are disappearing too: approximately 98 per cent of Aboriginal musical traditions have been lost since colonization (Corn 2012:240). As is the case with most of Aboriginal Australia, traditional Noongar music is primarily vocal, featuring lyrics in the Noongar language. This implies an inextricable link between Noongar language and Noongar song traditions, a co-dependency that is critical for the vitality of both.

show abstract

“…This has been reinforced in popular songs (eg, the 1959 Johnny Preston hit, 'Running Bear'), and by personalities such as 'the Indian' member of Village People. Teaching of the range of musics from Native American cultures, experiences of singing and dancing, knowledge of instruments their uses and developments over time, and realisation of the ongoing developmental nature of these cultures, evident in the relatively recent development of intertribal pow-wow songs (Taylor, 1995;Browner, 2000) and the recordings of contemporary Native American popular musicians, teach that Native American cultures are varied and developmental, that they respond like all cultures to ideas and actions, and that they provide a means of comprehending culture as a force in human life.…”

Section: Post-colonial Applications Of Native American Musics In Musimentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching About and Through Native American Musics: An Excursion into the Cultural Politics of Music Education

Burton

Dunbar-Hall

2002

Research Studies in Music Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Expectations that comprehensive music education includes all types of music have led to a situation in which musical diversity has become standard in music classrooms. Concomitant with these expectations is the requirement that the cultural contexts of music are also studied. These developments in music education have produced, however, a situation in which the ways music is taught may be at odds with the cultural contexts of the music in question. This disjuncture between expectation and practice is highlighted here in discussion of teaching through and about the musics of Native Americans. In that their musical characteristics and lyrical messages raise issues of post-colonialism, analysis of the position of these musics in music education acts as a form of post-colonial critique of music education, and is used to raise issues which relate to the teaching of music as a cultural artefact with political and social implications.Educating Native Americans. Those three words encapsulate a 500 year-old battle for power to define what education is -the power to set its goals, define its policies, and enforce its practices -and second, the power to define who native people are and who they are not. European and American colonial governments, operating through denominations of the Christian Church, first defined 'education' for Native Americans as the cleansing, uplifting and thoroughly aggressive and penetrating force that would Christianise, civilise and individualise a heathen, barbaric and tribal world (Tsianina Lomawaima, 1995, p. 331).

show abstract

Making and Singing Pow-Wow Songs: Text, Form, and the Significance of Culture-Based Analysis

Cited by 19 publications

References 9 publications

"The Canopy Is Her Home" Gendered Space in American Indian Intertribal Gatherings

"The Canopy Is Her Home" Gendered Space in American Indian Intertribal Gatherings

Conceptualizing Noongar Song

Teaching About and Through Native American Musics: An Excursion into the Cultural Politics of Music Education

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About