Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains by Christopher A. Scales (review)

Christopher A. Scales’s Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains is an ambitious book on an important and all-too-often underrepresented topic pertaining to the musicking of American Indians: the struggle over the control of representation via mechanically reproducible recordings. This issue has received considerably less attention than that of visual representation, a circumstance owing perhaps to widespread epistemic bias of image over sound but also probably due to the relatively narrow distribution of ethnomusicological discourse/methodology across the humanities.

Since Scales only touches on the long, contentious history of sonic representation and self-representation within American Indian musicking over roughly the last century— the span of history that encompasses recording technology— a quick overview of major eras and issues is warranted, presented here in the form of “snapshots”: the “primal scene” of ethnographer and the indigenous Other, mediated by the gramophone, whose iconic rendering is the photograph of the Bureau of American Ethnology’s Frances Densmore sitting with the Blackfoot Mountain chief; the rise of independent (and occasionally Native-owned) labels like Canyon Records after World War II whose primary audience was not scholars and library patrons but American Indians themselves; the appearance of American Indian musicians performing in popular genres from the 1960s forward, for example, Buffy Saint-Marie and Redbone; and the effective splitting of the American Indian recording industry into two genres by the inheritors of that postwar label boom— including the still-active Canyon Records— into “traditional” and “contemporary” categories, with the latter encompassing both reservation-based hip hop acts and artists targeting the largely white New Age audience.

Recording Culture is focused primarily on the most recent instantiation of the shifting soundscape of representation and constitutes the culmination of almost fifteen years of research into the contemporary world of public performance and commercial recordings of the various traditional dance music styles that constitute the powwows of the north-central United States and its geographic mirror in Canada. Scales describes his project thus:

I have structured this book in two large sections: the first describes practices of the powwow grounds; the second, the practices of the studio. I constructed the work this way because I wanted to explore the production and consumption of powwow recordings as a kind of closed loop, each context feeding into and becoming increasingly dependent upon the other.

(243)

Unfortunately, this extremely useful explanation comes at almost the very end of the book rather than in the introduction, where it might better have prepared readers for why, in a book where “recording” is the first word of the title, the presumptive central topic is not addressed until approximately halfway through the volume. Scales himself seems to understand the drawbacks to his structuring, if not the placement of his explanation for it, when he writes, on the same page as above, that “the problem with such an organization is that it perhaps artificially separates these two worlds: it is not necessarily an accurate representation of how powwow singers experience performing, recording, and the general business of singing” (243). Scales also suggests that the structure of the book perhaps implies a racial bifurcation that is more rigid (Native singers vs. white label owners) than it is in reality, even if such a division is something that both powwow singers and record industry personnel are willing to exploit in the pursuit of their “various economic and cultural goals” (243).

For lack of a better term, this interdependency is what gives weight to Scales’s project and reinforces his assertion in the introduction that, “contrary to the prognostications of early twentieth- century ethnologists” like Frances Densmore, American Indian culture did not disappear within the upheavals of modernity, and, in fact, “Native Americans are still making recordings. Lots of them” (2–3). To this, Scales adds another salient point, namely, that...