Chippewa Customs

INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT EDITION There is no more significant figure in the study of American Indian music and culture than Frances Densmore. Her study of the customs of Minnesota's largest group of Indian people developed as a part of her research on music. Although she was a musician by training, her interest did not stop with music but went on to encompass the entire fabric of Indian life. So broad was the scope of her work that her full contribution is rarely appreciated. Her orientation was at once scholarly and popular, directed to the entire subject of North American Indian music and its cultural context, but sensitive to the most minute details that distinguished aspects of one group of Chippewa (Ojibway) from another. From the Nootka and Quileute of the Pacific Northwest to the Seminole of Florida, Densmore conducted her research apparently oblivious to obstacles that would have discouraged a person of lesser determination. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing until her death in 1957, she worked determinedly to document and preserve the elements of disappearing Indian cultures. The urgency and commitment with which she approached her mission are best expressed in her own words. "I heard an Indian drum when I was very, very young," she recalled. "Others heard the same drum and the sound was soon forgotten, but I have followed it all these years. Unconsciously it has called me, and I have followed it across the continent ... over the plains and the mountains, across the desert - always the Indian drum calling me."1 Densmore's interest in the culture of the American Indian spanned more than 60 years. A Minnesotan throughout her long life, she was born in Red Wing on May 21, 1867, to Benjamin and Sarah Adalaide (Greenland) Densmore, and grew up in a sympathetic and intellectually stimulating household. The family home looked out over the Mississippi River with a view of a nearby Dakota (Sioux) Indian camp at Prairie Island and within earshot of the drum that accompanied the Indian dances. "Those Indians," her mother explained, "are interesting people with customs different from ours." Curious to know more, Frances would fall asleep, she recalled, "with my mind full of fancies about the 'interesting people' across the Mississippi . "2 After a traditional musical education with emphasison piano, Densmore's interest in Indian culture was sparked by Alice Cunningham Fletcher's A Study of Omaha Indian Music, which she read shortly after its publication in I Charles Hofmann, comp., ed., Frances Densmore and American Indian Music, I (Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, Contributions, vol. 23 - New York, 1968). 2 Nina Marchetti Archabal, "Frances Densmore: Pioneer in the Study of American Indian Music," in Barbara Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter, eds., Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Sketches, 95 (St. Paul, 1977); Hofmann, ed., Densmore, I. v 1893. Fletcher's work included descriptions ofOmaha customs as well as analyses and transcriptions of their music. Although Densmore gradually departed from Fletcher's notion that their music was based on the Indians' unconscious sense of harmony, she retained Fletcher's method of interpreting Indian music in relation to their customs. She adopted as her guiding principle Fletcher's idea that "Among the Indians, music envelopes like an atmosphere every religious, tribal and social ceremony as well as every personal experience. There is not a phase of life that does not find expression in song."3 Along with her study of Fletcher's writings, Densmore laid a solid foundation for her later work by undertaking an intensive study of every aspect of Indian life. "For the next ten years," she wrote, "I soaked my receptive mind in what army officers wrote about Indians, and what historians wrote about Indians [along] with some of the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology. . . . All this was preparation for my life work. "4 Densmore's first contact with the Chippewa people themselves occurred in 1901 when she and her sister Margaret made a trip to Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ontario, an occasion she remembered as "a pleasure trip." Four years later Frances made what she regarded as her "first field trip. " She again visited the Chippewa, this time at Grand Marais and Grand Portage on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. On this second visit she made notes on Chippewa customs and took photographs. ''The most important event of the trip was a ceremony that Little Spruce and his sons gave for us in their house," she recalled...