Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America

8. An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-wow Songs

8 An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-wow songs Tara Browner At modern-day intertribal pow-wows, there are two distinctive regional singing styles commonly referred to by participants and observers as “Northern” and “Southern.” Of the two, Southern singing, the conventional style of Oklahoma, is the most similar to the traditional performance practices of Omaha/Ponca Heluska songs—the songs ancestral in some way to almost modern pow-wow songs because of their influences on formal song structure. Northern style, having been strongly influenced by Warrior Society songs of the northern plains and Great Lakes regions, predominates from the midplains northward, and its performance locales include the territories surrounding the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest. In areas where pow-wows have been more recently established, such as the American Southwest and the American and Canadian northeastern woodlands, pow-wow musicians have a tendency to sing in styles not native to their geographic setting, and often adopt the pow-wow singing style closest in sound (that is, range and vocal production) to their own traditional tribal repertories. For example, Navajo singers, who are geographically located in the Southwest, tend to sing Northern style because vocally it is closer to their traditional songs than Southern style. Pueblo singers, who live in the same general area as Navajo, usually prefer singing Southern, which in range and vocal production technique is similar to their ceremonial repertory. Since the 1950s, a number of factors, including urban relocations and accessibility to recording technologies, have resulted in a series of musical alterations in both Northern and Southern styles that go far beyond basic formal structures, and represent shifts at a deeper aesthetic level as to what sounds “good” to both singers and their audiences. But more important, certain genres within the pow-wow repertory have taken on new meanings beyond the event itself. Key among these is the development of the generic intertribal pow-wow song, those medium-tempo multipurpose songs with texts entirely of vocables that accompany rounds of intertribal dancing. As these songs are traded from group to group, recorded during live performance, and turned into the core repertories of urban Drums with multitribal memberships, the obvious question arises concerning whether intertribal songs maintain any sense of connection to their original cultural and tribal source. In order to understand the origins of intertribal songs and how they differ musically from each other, a new taxonomy of pow-wow song making is necessary, one that examines the music more rigorously than the simple binary of Northern and Southern, but less specifically than the level of individual tribal cultures. Due to their lack of Native language texts and relatively generalized sets of vocables, intertribal songs allow for musical assessment based almost entirely on melodic traits, ornamentation, and vocal-production techniques rather than through the usual linguistic, historic, and larger formal comparative elements such as song structure. Because we can assume that the latter three characteristics will be similar, analysis can be concentrated more on nuanced aural signifiers such as vocal timbre, tempo, phrase structure, and the rhythmic counterpoint created by vocal stresses playing off against the main melody. Pow-wow musicians and dancers (some participants act in both roles) discern musical origins through a variety of ways, but most of all people simply listen to a song, plugging it into an aesthetic framework that is more than intuitive but less than systematic. It is this level of analysis that I intend to explore in this essay, using intertribal songs as the mode of inquiry. Historical Perspectives The separation of Northern and Southern repertories was probably an essential fact in the earliest spread of the Omaha/Heluska/Grass Dance musical form, which has been documented by Clark Wissler (1916) and his informants as beginning in the 1830s. The “Omaha” Dance was in all likelihood a musical form as much as a Warrior Society, and the form, which included an internal repetition and energetic beat pattern with stresses on the second beat of each grouping, proved popular among tribes from the mid-1800s onward. To think that the Omaha Society completely displaced existing Warrior Societies is to assume that tribes did not value 132 Tara Browner their own traditions, and it is far more plausible that Omaha Dancing was grafted on to indigenous Warrior Society ceremonials as it spread across the plains. This is especially true in the Great Lakes region, where the Omaha Society never...