Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music

4. Hymns and Hunting Songs

4 Hymns and Hunting Songs By the early twentieth century, the open fire has been replaced with a small stove and the migiwap is now a one-roomed wooden house, although most houses have a migiwap nearby for cooking the geese over an open fire. The family still gathers around the wood-burning stove and the grandfather sings a few of his hunting songs but, at the last syllable, he takes his treasured hymn book out of its colourful fabric bag and the family joins him to sing their favourite hymn in Cree, “The Great Physician.” [ In the early 1980s, when I asked northern Cree elders to sing an old song, several responded with either a hunting song or a Christian hymn in the Cree language. Now, in this twenty-first century, the hymns, as well as the hunting songs, have been largely supplanted by the driving rhythms of the new gospel tunes. In this chapter, we explore why and how the hymns and gospel tunes have become musical descendants of the hunting songs. Despite the beat of gospel music on the radio station, and despite the fact that few people must hunt for subsistence or trap for a livelihood, the hunt remains at the core of Cree ethos in subarctic communities. Listen to the people visiting in the northern malls in the spring and you will hear them discussing the quality of the geese flying overhead and who has their freezer full of them. With modern hunting technology, the hunting songs are no longer needed for a good hunt, and gospel music suffices. While the animals remain the focus of local conversation, the songs and rituals for the hunt are all but gone. Speaking of the youth in Chisasibi , George Pepabano said, “Their way of living is different. It’s not their living , those songs” (1982). Most attribute the loss of the drums and songs almost entirely to the work of Christian missionaries, but, as mentioned in chapter 2, the way was well prepared for the Christian message before the 75 missionaries arrived. Indeed, changes to Cree ways of life prior to missionary activity made an alteration of the Cree worldview inevitable. By the time the Anglican missionaries arrived in the nineteenth century, the songs and the dreams connected with them were no longer essential to the hunt. This does not mean people had stopped believing in the old ways. To this day, most Cree affirm the power of the dreams and song, and speak of them with respect; in fact, one of my translators refused to translate portions of an elder’s description of the shaking-tent ceremony. Some, who have experienced the power of the shamans, feel that they misused their powers, and express the hope that these sorts of activities remain in the past. A few think that the powers the elders held should be revived, often in tandem with Christianity, for the spiritual awakening of First Nations people. Missionaries and Cree Song The missionaries, especially the Methodist missionaries who came from a tradition of congregational song, recognized immediately that Cree spirituality was evoked through songs and through dreams. Vera Fast writes, “From earliest missionary endeavours the Indian love of singing had been harnessed to purposes of evangelism, and in the nineteenth century all missions utilized it to greater or lesser extent” (Fast 1983, 99). Bishop Provencher went so far as to insist that “a priest who could not sing would not be esteemed by the Indians” (220), and Reverend James Evans printed two thousand pages of hymns in Cree before he prepared the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Commandments. Literacy was important to Protestant Christians who believed that each individual should be able to read the Bible. To this end, as mentioned earlier , Reverend James Evans of Norway House devised the syllabics in 1840, 76 Hymns and Hunting Songs Figure 4.1: “The Great Physician” hymn and syllabary (and English translation) (Clarke 1974, 117) a writing system that represented the sounds of the Algonquian language and provided the Cree with a compelling spiritual resource. An effective new way to transmit song had been introduced to northern peoples, and both the Cree and the missionaries of northern Manitoba took readily to reading and writing with the syllabics. By 1842, two Indians from Fort Severn on western Hudson Bay had introduced the syllabics to Moose Factory Christians on eastern Hudson Bay. Reverend George...