An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 9 | AMERICAN INDIAN MUSIC AND ITS COLLECTORS 207

in neither. Though well intentioned, the Indian boarding schools constituted an

attack on indigenous culture.

And that was the peaceable aspect of the American Indians’ saga. Even before

and during the Civil War, the U.S. Army was engaged in the Plains Indian Wars,

a series of hundreds of battles with western tribes. Beginning in the 1830s with

the Comanche Wars, this episode in U.S. history includes the Dakota War of

1862–64, the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, and the Battle of Little Big Horn

(“Custer’s Last Stand”) in 1876. The Plains Indian Wars came to an ignominious

end when the Seventh Cavalry massacred about 150 Lakota men, women, and

children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890.

In the same year, 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that there was

no longer an American frontier, no longer a line on the map separating white

“civilization” from “untamed” Indian lands. The 1890s mark the low point in

American Indian history, with the population decimated and cultural traditions

in disarray. But the early years of the twentieth century saw indigenous peoples

making advances, including the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which extended

the rights of citizenship to nearly all Indians; the closing of the Indian boarding

schools in the 1930s; the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which recognized the

validity of tribal constitutions and bylaws; and the 1940 Nationality Act, which

fi nally granted full citizenship to all American Indians. By 1940 the population

fi gures were increasing, and today there are about 2 million Americans who self-

identify as American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut.

AMERICAN INDIAN MUSIC: THE CHALLENGES

TO HISTORIANS

As noted in chapter 1, European descriptions of indigenous music making on

the North American continent go back to the years of fi rst contact in the early

1500s, and a sketchy history of American Indian music can be constructed from

those accounts, fl awed as they are by misconceptions and misunderstanding.

But the story begins to change in the 1800s, when even as Indian life was being

destroyed—or perhaps because of that destruction—Euro-Americans were dis-

covering that the beliefs, tales, songs, dances, and material arts of these ancient

civilizations had their own integrity and might well be worth preserving. The

preservation effort, carried on chiefl y by non-Indians, offers present-day

observers their best window on earlier Indian music making, and it is with these

nineteenth-century efforts that the history of American Indian music reaches

relatively fi rm ground.

Three factors skew the historical record, however: the incompleteness of the

surviving data, the difference between music in its natural habitat and outside

it, and the contrast between native and non-native perceptions of Indian ways.

First, the record of American Indian music captures only a narrow slice of

old and possibly highly varied traditions. When Europeans started settling in

North America, aboriginal populations were both larger and more diverse than

they were during the forced migrations and wars of the 1800s. At one time or

another, North America has been home to as many as a thousand distinct tribal

units, falling into roughly sixty different language families. Yet in only about 10

percent of those units is enough known about the culture to allow any reliable

description of its music.

the Plains Indian Wars

incomplete data

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