Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Music of the First Nations

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Introduction: Studying First Nations and Inuit Music Tara Browner........................................................................................11. Iglulik Inuit Drum-Dance Songs Paula Conlon...........................................................................................................72. Musical Expressions of the Dene: Dogrib Love and Land Songs Lucy Lafferty and Elaine Keillor..........................................................213. The Story of Dirty Face: Power and Song in Western Washington Coast Salish Myth Narratives Laurel Sercombe............................................344. Drum, Songs, Vibrations: Conversations with a Passamaquoddy Traditional Singer Franziska von Rosen (Introduction by Tara Browner).....................545. Identity, Retention, and Survival: Contexts for the Performance of Native Choctaw Music David E. Draper...............................................676. "This Is Our Dance": The Fire Dance of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache T. Christopher Aplin..............................................927. The Creative Power and Style of Ghost Dance Songs Judith Vander.......................................................................................1138. An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-wow Songs Tara Browner.......................................................................................1319. Singing Indian Country David W. Samuels...............................................................................................................141List of Contributors......................................................................................................................................161Index.....................................................................................................................................................165

Chapter One

PAULA CONLON

This article discusses the traditional musical style that dominates the Inuit from the Arctic East to West: the drum-dance song, or pisiq (plural pisiit). The syllabic a-ya-ya, which appears in the text of drum-dance songs from Alaska to Greenland, is used today to designate the whole of the song as well. The 315 drum-dance songs that provide the basis for this study are from the Iglulik Inuit area of northern Baffin Island. The songs were collected from the following hamlets: Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) (collected by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in 1976 and 1977), Igloolik (Nattiez in 1977), and Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay) (Lorne Smith in 1964 and Paula Conlon in 1985) (see figure 1.1).

The Iglulik Inuit of the present day are descended from the people who brought the Thule culture into the Baffin Island area around AD 1200. In 1822 Captains William Edward Parry and George Francis Lyon of the Royal Navy spent the winter at Igloolik during their search for the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. When ethnologists Knud Rasmussen, Peter Freuchen, and Therkel Matthiassen arrived in Igloolik in 1921, they found the way of life still very much as it had been one hundred years before. Hunting was the chief activity, with char fishing as a supplementary activity performed by women (NWT 1990–91: 168).

The period 1920–60 has been referred to as the era of the "big three": the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the missions (Mary-Rousselière 1984: 443). In the 1960s, the Canadian government began systematically regrouping the Inuit around these installations. Modern aluminum houses were built in the hamlets of Admiralty Inlet, Sanirajak (Hall Beach), Igloolik, Ikpiarjuk, and Mittimatalik, and the government set up federal schools in Igloolik (1959), Mittimatalik (1960), and Ikpiarjuk (1962), with compulsory education for all children ages six to sixteen. The Inuit move freely among these communities, but the nomadic way of life, based on hunting and fishing, disappeared in fewer than ten years.

As the fieldwork for this study was carried out after the government's regrouping of the Inuit in the 1960s, these songs were all collected "artificially." The singers were asked to sing for the sole purpose of being recorded, with the result that the musical style of the recordings was sometimes affected by contact with white musical civilization and modern conditions of performance. In this sense, the collection represents the musical state of the Iglulik Inuit between 1964 and 1985 (Conlon 1992).

Song Composition

Traditionally, a man composed a drum-dance song in solitude, usually while hunting. Once he had decided on the text and the melody, he repeated the song over and over so as not to forget it. When the hunter returned home, he taught the song to his wife, who in turn taught it to the other women in the village, to be ready for a public performance at the feasts (qarginiq). The women's role is paramount because "the woman is supposed to be the man's memory" (Rasmussen 1929: 240). When the composer was a visitor, he taught his song to the women of the host camp before the drum dance (Uyarak 1977).

There is no report, either from ethnographic sources or from consultants, of women dancing with the drum in the Iglulik area. Rasmussen notes that every man and woman, and some of the children, may have their own songs (with appropriate melodies) that can be sung in the qaggi (dance house) (1929: 227), but there is no information about how the women's songs are presented. Of the 147 drum-dance songs (of known authorship) from Igloolik, Ikpiarjuk, and Mittimatalik, only 4 are attributed to female composers.

Although the character of Iglulik Inuit drum-dance songs is personal, this is not in the sense of property such as that exhibited by some North American Indian cultures. For instance, it is not necessary to ask permission before singing someone else's song (Nattiez 1988: 45). An indication of the lack of possessiveness of songs is the availability of portions of common text in personal songs by different composers. During my fieldwork in Ikpiarjuk in 1985, many of the singers spoke about the communal aspect of the singing of another's songs, saying that public acknowledgment of the original creator of the song was sufficient. Interviews from Nattiez's fieldwork in 1976 and 1977 indicate a similar attitude toward song ownership at Mittimatalik and Igloolik.

Song Texts

The text in drum-dance songs is in large part linked to basic experiences in the Inuit way of life. Topics of songs include hunting, people, death, qallunaaq (white man), singing, and religion. As hunting is essential for survival and is the primary activity during which songs are created, it is not surprising to find that the theme of 68.5 percent of the song texts revolves around some aspect of hunting, as in this song: "The polar bear over there, I see it over there, ayaya ... My harpoon, I suddenly want it now, ayaya.... My dogs there, I suddenly want them now, ayaya ..." (Panipakoochoo 1977: 5d-84.PI77-10).

The qallunaaq category (4 percent of songs) includes eight versions of a song dealing with "this little hook," a feature of the syllabic alphabet used by missionaries in biblical translations (NWT 1990–91: 196). Whalers brought examples of these syllabic-print Bibles to Mittimatalik before the...