A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography

5. A Spiral Way: Bringing the Voices Home

5 A Spiral Way Bringing the Voices Home I feel there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which for some never comes) when we happento pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and assoon as we have recognized their voice, the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome deathand returned to share our life. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way The modest Capitol Hill row house where Running Scout recorded for Alice Fletcher was razed in the mid-1970s to make way for the James Madison Building, part of the Library of Congress-coincidentally, the very building that would eventually house her cylinder collections and those of her adopted Omaha son, Francis La Flesche. I first encountered the Fletcher and La Flesche cylinders in 1981, in a chilly recording studio tucked deep in the fin-de-siecle Beaux-Arts extravagance of the Jefferson Building, just across Independence Avenue. The vividness of the voices they preserved astonished me. The recordings had less surface noise than most and were exceptionally free from damage and distortion, but it was not so much what the cylinders lacked that struck me, it was what was there, surviving years of neglect-a kind of freshness of presence enabling the listener to imagine not only the singers but the setting, evoking the clarity of light and the quality of the air. I had seen an old photograph of a powwow arena and a grove of oak trees on the Omaha reservation at 118 Macy, Nebraska, where gatherings were held and some of thesesongs must have been sung-but my job was rerecording the cylinders, not musing about their past. I dutifully dispatched the voices in the wax to their places on tape, interspersing each cut with my own identification announcements and technical remarks, and went on to the next batch of cylinders, an unwitting and unlikely newcomer to Running Scout's band of women preserving tradition. Tribal representatives and delegations regularly visit Washington today just asthey have done for the last two hundred years. As word got out concerning the cylinder project, the Library of Congress became a routine stop on their itinerary. In the spring of 1983, Dennis Hastings, the Omaha tribal archivist, called on the Cylinder Project team. Project director Dorothy Sara Leebrought Hastings to the labso that I could show him the cylinders and play some of the Omaha material. He listened with motionless intensity, his excitement clear. Folklife Center staff had already been thinking about producing an album of the Omaha material with accompanying notes, but it was Hastings's enthusiasmthat sparkedthis plan to life. His visit was timely. As the preservation phase of the cylinder project was approaching completion, the staff was looking for models for its final phase of the project, a two-year initiative in which copies of cylinder recordings and related documentary material would be returned to the American Indian tribes from which they had been originally recorded. Seemingly straightforward, this objective posed many delicate problems of ethics and diplomacy: as has been seen, the circumstances under which recordings had been obtained were sometimes questionable, and some of the material was sacred and highly sensitive (Brady et al. 1984:18). Clearly, the return of the cylinders needed careful attention on a tribe-by-tribe basis, with asmuchadvice, assistance, and collaboration as possiblefrom membersof each group. Dorothy Lee was scheduled to return precious archival tapes of the Fletcher and La Flesche Omaha recordings at the Omaha annual powwow in September of 1983. To make a sampler of these recordings even more accessible, Hastings proposed that the Folklife Center coproduce an album with the Omaha Tribal Council, and that the 119 A Spiral Way release of the album coincide with the 1985 powwow, where the music would be welcomed home by the Tribal Council, members of the Hethu'shka Society, and the Omaha people. The Folklife Center would be represented by director Alan Jabbour, Cylinder Project director Dorothy Sara Lee, and me. I was to seethe arena in the grove of oaks after all. I arrived to find the celebration...