Powwows and Identity on the Piedmont and Coastal Plains of North Carolina

Abstract

, an unsigned editorial entitled "A Tribe is a appeared in the Raleigh, North Carolina News and Observer:1. . it's rather quizzical that North Carolina's Commission of Indian Affairs ... refuses to grant tribal status to ... the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. The Commission's reason for refusal [is that the petitioners] can show no longstanding governmental structure that proves they were a tribe. Yet the Occaneechi... have lived. .. in Alamance County for as long as anyone can recall. An anthropologist hired by the Commission said they satisfied the state's criteria for tribal status. Commission members, who set Indian policy in North Carolina, understandably worry about the current fad for anything Indian .... And the Occaneechi harmed themselves a few years ago when they adopted some customs and regalia [i.e., powwow culture] from western U.S. tribes. .... But that lapse ca be forgiven. ... [Economic benefits would be minimal, but] recognition by the state would offer the Occaneechi their taste of official cultural pride. Most of the members of the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs are Indians representing the seven tribes and three urban intertribal organizations that do have state recognition. The Occaneechi-Saponi, a much smaller group than any with seats on the Commission, have a long history in north-central North Carolina. To achieve state recognition, they must document how they fulfill at least five of eight criteria set by the Commission, criteria that emphasize continuities of blood-persisting family names, kinship relationships with recognized tribes, group genealogiesand of location, and also take into account earlier descriptions of individuals and communities as Indian. Expressive culture appears only in the seventh of the eight criteria: "documented traditions, customs, legends, etc. that signify the tribe's Indian heritage."2 The Commission's bylaws charge it to help groups like the Occaneechi with their applications, yet the process remains antagonistic. This per

A Consideration of the Relationship Between Music and Collective Identity: From the Viewpoint of Cultural Psychology of Music

“…Kroz muzičku percepciju i prepoznavanje drugih kultura i stalno postavljanje pitanja "koja je čija muzika", obnavljaju se tenzije između sopstva i drugosti (Ristivojević 2009;Žikić i Milenković 2018). Etničke zajednice pružaju osećaj utočišta u stalnim društvenim pomeranjima, koje čuvaju jedinstvo identiteta, između ostalog i kroz baštinjenje tradicionalne muzike (Goertzen 2001;Manuel 1994).…”

North American Indigenous song, the sacred and the senses

“…(Levine 2013). It has since then spread across North America, including to communities whose traditional musical and choreographic practices are very different from those of the Plains (see Powers 1990;Goertzen 2001;Browner 2002 and2009;Hoefnagels 2002;Whidden 2007). Thus, although the contemporary powwow incorporates practices from First Nations whose traditional territories coincide with what is now Manitoba, its presence in many communities is relatively recent, and during fieldwork I talked to a number of Indigenous elders who did not witness their first powwow until well after World War Two.…”

Disciplining Ethnomusicology: A Call for a New Approach

“…As for the first assumption, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that ethnomusicologists are not telling the same story but quite a few different stories about music and identity: how the amateur performance of music can create an identity superior to one's vocational identity (Witzleben 1987); how musicians negotiate between their own low-status identity and the high-status identities they may wish to achieve (Waterman 1982); how the performance of music (or its absence) defines the identity of social groups (Thompson 1991); how new forms of music play a role in the construction of new, emergent identities (Manuel 1989); how changes in the performance of music allow musicians to express a number of different social identities (Turino 1984); how powerful institutions such as the state, community organizations, and the commercial media can overpower and undermine individual agency in the production of identities through musical performance (Goertzen 2001); and so forth. There are, in other words, more interesting and different stories about music and identity in the literature than I had anticipated.…”