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

Christopher Scales’s Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording Industry on the Northern Plains is a welcome and important addition to the literature on the role of song in Native communities. As Scales notes, American Indians and recording technologies have long been intertwined, and this is perhaps no more powerfully illustrated by the recording practices surrounding powwow music. Rather than song traditions disappearing (as was the assumption of many early ethnologists, and indeed many other researchers who followed), recording technologies have greatly enhanced and expanded the practices and meanings of song traditions associated with powwows. But more than this, recording powwow songs is tied to larger sociocultural and economic forces at work in Native communities.

In a study that is both descriptive and theoretically sophisticated, Scales elaborates how contemporary powwow music is both shaping and is being shaped by, specifically, recording studios and labels. This is significant, argues Scales, because “recording technologies and mass media are enmeshed in a network of discourses about ethics, power, the relationship between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition,’ and racial and ethnic identity” (3). Apprehending how a double meaning of “recording culture” functions—on the one hand, as a set of ideas and practices, and on the other, as a process that turns those ideas and practices into marketable products—is critical, Scales suggests, to understanding how a complex of social and economic exchanges inform newer and larger intertribal imaginings of what it means to be Indian in the modern world.

Concentrating his study on the Northern Plains, Scales splits the book into two parts. In the first, titled “Northern Plains Powwow Culture,” the author focuses on how the modular aesthetics of competition powwows, in particular, resonate with ideas and expectations about professionalism and commercialization in the recording industry. In the book’s second part, “The Mediation of Powwows,” Scales explains how the recording industry not only mediates ideas about what powwow music is, but also involves larger contestations of modernity and tradition, culture, and identity.

In the end, Scales pulls off a remarkable study, one that every student of indigenous song traditions should read. The book also includes a cd of powwow songs performed by the Northern Wind Singers, a nice supplement to the text.