Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music

Conclusion

[ Conclusion Remarkable in this history is the observable change in performed music, within three decades, from hunting songs to powwow music. Until the 1970s, for most northern Cree, music was hunting songs, hymns, and fiddle tunes, fashioned over the centuries from the rhythms of the subarctic landscape to fit Cree personality. The Cree hunters sang songs reflecting the rhythms of nature, especially those of the animals they hunted. Before the Euro-Canadians arrived, animals were viewed as benefactors: humankind was dependent upon their willingness to be sacrificed. If moose were encountered, it was believed that they had given themselves, and all would be slaughtered. Proper ritual ensured that the animals would repeatedly and willingly give themselves to be slain. The current view of conservation , made necessary by the killing of more animals than nutritionally necessary, was not held by subsistence hunters, nor was it needed. Over time, trapping changed this covenant with the animals. Guns, better traps, and bait, such as castoreum for the beaver, made the hunters more effective and led to game shortages, such as those experienced in northern Manitoba in the late eighteenth century, when fur-bearing animals were severely depleted. In view of the endurance of hunting, historians have tended to gloss over the different ideologies required for hunting and trapping animals, but the songs embedded in the hunt show that three centuries of involvement in the fur trade, from the proto-contact period around 1682 to the present, wrought enormous change to the Cree ethos.1 Animals were no longer seen as physical manifestations of spirits, but as objects whose numbers could be controlled by humans. Hunting became an increasingly aggressive rather than pacific endeavour; proper thought and proper songs were no longer primary strategies for bringing the animals to the hunter. By the 1930s, the cause of game depletion was understood by the Cree not to be the result of improper religious rites but the result of overhunting. By the 1940s, traplines were introduced into Manitoba. In northern Quebec, the development of family territories and usufructuary 121 rights led to animal management. Some hunters began conservation measures , such as leaving a few beavers in the lodge, sparing juvenile moose and caribou, and allowing the land to “rest” periodically by not hunting on it. In 1982, in Wemindji, Quebec, hunter Harry Hughboy told me, My father would tell us to stop hunting while it was still day because my father wanted to be careful how many birds he hunted My father was always careful how much game he hunted He taught me the lesson only to hunt what I need because if I over-hunt I will pay for it in the end I will not be able to survive. In addition, despite Hudson’s Bay Company pressure on the Cree to hunt and trap, the old primary strategy for capturing animals—mobility— was gradually abandoned in favour of sedentism. Initially, the Cree tended to stay longer and longer at the posts: some, as stated earlier, became “homeguard Indians.” Later, if they wanted their children educated in western style, they were anchored to the community for much of the year. Reliance on food preservation increased; families who no longer moved with the animal populations were distanced, not only physically, but also psychologically from those animals. Moreover, Hudson’s Bay Company personnel assisted with medicine as well as food. Niezen writes, “Alan Nicholson, the post manager at Rupert’s House (now Waskaganish) at the turn of the century, is described in a fur trader’s autobiography as the community’s principal healer” (1997, 470). In 1837, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s charter was renewed on condition that it “improve” the Native people’s spiritual lives (Long 1986, 314), which meant that more missionaries arrived; they offered supplemental food and rudimentary health care. Finally, when the federal government introduced transfer payments, dependence upon the goodwill of animals was over. Indeed, in several narratives, elders jokingly referred to the animals as money: “I’m tearing the paper, I’m paying the bills with the fox as I kill” (Lameboy, Song 62). Western health care was indeed a blow to the continuance of Cree song. In the 1980s, I recorded no songs about healing plants, yet the Cree, like other Native groups, had long used plants for this purpose. (For example, in the early twentieth century, Frances Densmore studied the healing plants and songs of the Chippewa, who speak an Algonquian language as do the Cree.) George Nelson...