Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer

Introduction

1 Introduction Comprehensivestudiesintotherelationshipbetweensongandspirituality are few. Scholars have acknowledged song as important, perhaps even integral to spiritual processes, but inquiry often ends there. While participating in the Ghost Dance, I encountered in a very direct way the use of song as a catalyst for spiritual power (Hamill 2008), experiencing a phenomenon that for millennia has been central to the spiritual lives of Native people. While it may be true that an ethnomusicologist such as myself is inclined to privilege “musical” phenomena over others, the essential role of song in indigenous North American ceremonies is indisputable, for without a thing called song there is no ceremony. As far back as 1965 Alan Merriam, one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, recognized the necessity of song within the ceremonial sphere as well as a need for more substantive inquiry into its relationship to spiritual praxis, a need that remains largely unfulfilled. Speaking to the phenomena of “song acquisition” in the vision quest, he states, “The acquisition of song in these contacts with the supernatural, particularly in connection with the vision quest, has often been commented upon, but its importance to the total experience has not received the stress it deserves. In many respects, song is the central concern in the quest; it is through the conferring of the song or songs that the experience is made meaningful and that the powers conferred by the guardian spirit are made operative” (1965:95). Merriam’s thoughts on song as the primary catalyst for the manifestation of spiritual power highlight a phenomenon that is a critical component of indigenous ceremonies throughout North America and throughout the world.1 While exploring the individual and collective spaces within the spectrum of Catholic and indigenous ritual, I intend to give song the “stress it deserves,” not just as a conduit or catalyst for spiritual power but as the singular thread that ties the narrative of Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau together. Whether the first Catholic hymn sung in Salish by the Coeur d’Alene in the SONGS OF POWER AND PRAYER IN THE COLUMBIA PLATEAU 2 nineteenth century, an ancient indigenous death chant adapted to the Catholic wake, or a medicine song to purge an individual of a terminal disease, song was critical to realizing the ritual. As such, it is within the song that we find the story. Song and Identity The first official Catholic emissary to the Columbia Plateau was a young Jesuit by the name of Pierre-Jean DeSmet. His initial trip west from St. Louis in 1840 was a response to numerous entreaties made by indigenous Plateau people, who sent four delegations to St. Louis throughout the 1830s in a perilous but determined effort to bring “Blackrobes” to the Plateau region. After erecting the first mission among the Salish in 1841,2 Father DeSmet and his Jesuit recruits built a string of missions in the interior Northwest, erecting missions for the Coeur d’Alene in 1842, the Kalispel in 1844, and the Colville in 1845. As part of his vision to establish an “empire of Christian Indians” (Peterson and Peers 1993:23), DeSmet and his fellow Jesuits set about translating Catholic hymns into Interior Salish, a method by which they sought to indoctrinate indigenous Columbia Plateau people.3 Rather than Catholicizing Indians, however, the hymns were themselves indigenized—absorbed, reconstructed, and re-sung as expressions of Native identity. In his landmark work, Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the Apache San Carlos Reservation, David Samuels explores seemingly contradictory expressions of Apache identity enacted through rock, reggae, and country music, challenging popular notions of Native American culture as staunch and steadfastly anachronistic. Speaking to expressive forms of culture, Samuels finds that “the relationships between cultures and identities are not fixed. Rather, identities are emergent, produced out of the practices and expressive forms of everyday life. Traditions are not simply handed along from one generation to the next. Part of their enduring power comes from the possibility of their strategic reinvention in order to speak strongly in new social and political contexts” (2004:5). While leading Catholic Indian hymns, Introduction 3 Mitch Michael was doing more than expressing Christian sentiments, he was invoking over one hundred years of collective indigenous identity within which the strands of Catholicism were woven into the fabric of an indigenous Coeur d’Alene worldview. The Coeur d’Alene became...