Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music (review)

In Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music ethnomusicologist Lynn Whidden presents valuable information about the northern Cree and their musical practices and preferences, from traditional hunting songs to country music, hymns, gospel, and contemporary powwow musical expressions. This work is based on Whidden’s field research in Chisasibi, Quebec, and her ongoing relationships with Cree individuals in Thompson (and other communities) in northern Manitoba, primarily in the years between 1970 and 2000. Throughout the book, Whidden details important musical expressions and traditions of the Cree of northern Canada and the changes to Cree traditional life-ways and musical tastes and performance idioms as a result of contact with southern First Nations and non-Natives. In this book, Whidden raises many important contemporary issues in the performance, meaning, and study of modern Native music in northern Canada and beyond.

The first three chapters are particularly valuable for the Cree themselves, as these chapters focus on the traditional hunting songs that were crucial for the success of the hunt, which was essential for the survival of the Cree. This is where Whidden gets the title for the book, and the discussion and presentation of the Cree hunting songs and the fundamental relationship between Cree song and hunting is made clear for the reader. Indeed, Whidden demonstrates how ‘song [is viewed] as a survival tactic’ and is essential for physical and spiritual protection. Chapter 3, ‘Song and Survival,’ is especially insightful, as it is in this chapter that Whidden describes the close relationship between hunting songs and Cree survival, indicating the knowledge that hunting songs held, including information about the animals and hunting strategies, as well as the roles that these songs held in energizing the hunter prior to the hunt and also communicating with and influencing the animals.

Included with the book is a cd that includes fifty-two musical samples, the majority of which are hunting songs recorded in the early 1980s in Northern Quebec. It is definitely the work on the hunting songs and the recording of these songs of elderly Cree hunters that are the greatest contribution of this publication. By including a discussion of the songs, their musical features, textual considerations, the contexts in which they were performed, and selected narratives from hunters about the songs and their meanings, Whidden provides a valuable source for a repertory of traditional music that is no longer performed and about which fewer and fewer Cree know.

The remaining chapters of the book explore the Cree adoption and adaptation of musical and cultural traditions external to their traditional culture, including Christian hymn-singing traditions, gospel, and country music, and Plains-style powwow music. These musical genres are explored vis-à-vis increasing and varied contact with non-Natives, and later with other Native populations. Whidden illustrates how certain Cree sound ideals – particularly a preference for singing and individuality of voice – remained evident in hymn singing, while the adoption of country music, first as music listened to, and later as music made by the Cree, suggests an ‘internalisation of a new way of thinking about and living in the world.’ Importantly, throughout the book Whidden highlights the single thread of continuity throughout the musical change of the Cree: the centrality of oral tradition.

The final two chapters focus on the Cree adoption of the powwow celebration and its musical practices from more southerly nations. The most recent ‘musical transformation’ by the Cree, Whidden argues, the powwow’s Plains-style music, ‘is a musical affirmation for modernism,’ and for the Cree, the powwow and the pan-Indian identity it showcases are replacing a Cree-specific identity. While to this reader this section of the book was the least satisfying, Whidden nonetheless raises many important considerations for future researchers and especially for the Cree themselves to consider. As Whidden states, this book can greatly serve the Cree of today and tomorrow as they seek to reinforce their culture and its traditions: ‘The Cree want to know their history, and this...