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

4. Drum, Songs, Vibrations: Conversations with a Passamaquoddy Traditional Singer

4 Drum, songs,vibrations Conversations with a Passamaquoddy Traditional singer franziSKa von roSen (Introduction by Tara Browner) The Passamaquoddy (Peskotomuhkati) and Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik ) are closely related but politically independent peoples who share very similar languages. They are historically part of the Wabanaki Alliance together with the Abenaki, Penobscot, and Mi’kmaq nations. These tribal nations straddle the national borders of the United States and Canada, in areas now called Maine and the Canadian Maritimes (New Brunswick and parts of Quebec). Prior to contact with Europeans, their traditional cultures revolved around fishing and farming during the summer and hunting in the winter months. Wabanaki populations were decimated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by smallpox and other diseases brought by European settlers, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, children from these communities were taken to be educated in boarding schools. The resulting erosion of language skills and traditional culture is a direct consequence of children in these settings being discouraged from speaking in their native language. Maggie Paul, who is interviewed in the article, is a prime mover in the ongoing revitalization of traditional singing in Maliseet and Passamaquoddy communities. The interview, in the form of a conversation, is conducted by her friend Franziska von Rosen, and is in a style known as “dialogic,” which was first pioneered in ethnomusicology by Judith Vander in her groundbreaking work Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women (1988). A significant difference in the interview styles, however, is that von Rosen does not interpret or analyze Paul’s remarks, although she does guide the conversation to some extent.1 • • • There was a time when the sound of the drum had ceased at St. Mary’s Reserve, the home of members of the Maliseet Nation, in New Brunswick, Canada. The silence lasted for two generations. In 1980, the drum—“the heartbeat of the nation”—started beating. That sound “isn’t going to get lost again,” said Maggie Paul, the drum keeper for the community and a founding member of the Wabanoag Singers. I met Maggie Paul and other members of the St. Mary’s community for the first time in 1985 while doing research for the SPINC project.2 Although I interviewed Maggie at that time, my real learning about her music happened more informally. Over the next ten years I had many opportunities to learn from her and other traditional musicians in the Maritimes. When I showed a personal interest, I was invited to participate in ceremonies. There were wonderful social occasions, like the “socials” in Maggie’s house, when people got together informally to drum and chant, to share food and laughter and stories. As I got to know some of the songs, I was invited to sing and later to join them at the drum. For me, Maggie has become a special friend, a person I enjoy singing with, a woman I respect. Over the years Maggie has helped me understand many aspects of the music that she and others on the reserve perform. Often, the way she talks about music is in stark contrast to the way that ethnomusicologists have traditionally tried to study it. For example, scholars are usually concerned with establishing boundaries or categories that classify musics , and tend to set up dichotomies such as: traditional-contemporary, authentic-inauthentic, ours-theirs, sacred-social. These categories reflect academic interests in issues of authenticity, ownership, function, and use. Other areas of research are related to gender roles and to the way people individually or socially “construct” their identities, and again scholars frequently think in terms of oppositions self-other, insider-outsider. Maggie ’s approach, on the other hand, was inclusive, and boundaries that concern Western academics represented no significant meanings for her. Getting the drum to sound again, finding songs and singing them for the Creator, making sure that the next generation has songs to sing—those are the issues and focus of her life. When we were invited to contribute an article for this volume, Maggie and I decided we would just sit together and talk about music. I wanted to have the conversation reflect those areas that she considers important. At the same time I also wanted to make sure the reader would get enough A Passamaquoddy Traditional Singer 55 contextual information, not just through me summarizing it, and thereby giving it a different status, but through our conversation. Stanley Paul, Maggie’s husband...