Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music

2. Song and History

Song and History This chapter focuses on the music relationship between the Cree and Europeans through four centuries and shows the challenges to the survival of old Cree song. Before beginning, it should be noted that other Native groups, particularly the Ojibwe, also influenced Cree song, and in the final chapter you shall see how Plains powwow has become a subarctic Cree music. Native music exchanges were accelerated by the displacement of many peoples brought about by European pressures for furs and land. Doubtless there had always been song exchanges between groups, but Native musics were brought together, and songs carried across the continent, at a rate hitherto unexperienced. Those individuals with facility in speaking both the Algonquian and English languages were of crucial importance to trade, both of objects and ideas. That is a subject worthy of independent investigation . The question for this study, however, is how Native music has changed as a result of contact with non-Natives. What European music did the Cree hear? How were the new sounds brought to them? How did all this affect their music practices? Europeans moved people and goods efficiently with their large ships and they organized fur convoys, but, until the missionaries, they were less concerned about transmitting information to the indigenous peoples. The Cree were immediately attracted to essential material items such as European pots and knives, but for nearly two hundred years they exhibited little interest in European ways. Indeed, the European newcomers had more need of Cree knowledge than the Cree had of European. But the Cree did willingly embrace European fiddle music, and they made it their own. European music arrived in the New World at first contact. Song, story, and dance were vital to the well-being of sailors on-board ship, and many of the shanties (the word comes from the French chanter) have become North American standards.1 Whalers, too, sang shanties to help them endure years at a time of rough life on awkward tub-boats that stank of whale oil. The Inuit, northern neighbours of the Cree, acquired from these 31 2 whalers the button accordion and square dance. The eastern Cree also have knowledge of the accordion, and have developed their own word for a “pushing and pulling instrument”: kashehischbitaakanowiich. Perhaps they learned this instrument from the Inuit as well as from the whalers, because after 1840 the Inuit came regularly to Chisasibi to trade fox furs, seal blubber , and caribou skins. On the west side of Hudson Bay, the Cree may have had less exposure to shipboard music, because the ships were anchored several miles offshore at bay ports such as York Factory. This was necessitated by the dangers of going aground on the silt deposits at the mouths of the rivers flowing into James Bay. Furthermore, the west coast of the bay offered no “grog” shops to attract sailors to land. Ships frequently carried a small assortment of percussion and brass instruments. Chappell, in 1817, described the reaction of a Cree chief taken on board the HMS Rosamond in the following way: “He appeared a very intelligent man, and was highly delighted with everything he saw on board the ship. He was not particularly pleased with any of our musical instruments , except the drum” (Chappell 1817, 201). It is likely that his reaction was typical; historians such as Daniel Francis and Toby Morantz (1983) have noted that the Cree did not indiscriminately embrace everything European . As long as they were materially independent, they sought items that had direct utility for their subsistence lifestyle. In similar fashion, they adopted only the European music and instruments that sustained their culture. This history of Cree song focuses on British music, because exposure in the north to French music, such as the voyageur songs, was sporadic. With the exception of exploratory trips into the north, the French were generally confined to fur-trading routes that crossed southern Canada. The first recorded meeting of the James Bay Cree with the British occurred in 1611, with the ill-fated Henry Hudson, who was seeking a northwest passage to the Orient.2 We know that one Cree man boarded Hudson’s ship and conducted trade: two deer and two beaver skins in return for a knife, a looking glass, and buttons. Then, in the summer of 1668, English sponsors, advised by Radisson and Groseilliers, sent a ship, the Nonsuch, to collect furs from the area around Charles Fort. It is known that the Nonsuch had...