RECORDING CULTURE

POWWOW MUSIC AND THE ABORIGINAL RECORDING INDUSTRY ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS By CHRISTOPHER A. SCALES

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5323-2

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………….ixIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………….11. Powwow Practices: Competition and the Discourse of Tradition……………………………….272. Powwow Songs: Aesthetics and Performance Practice…………………………………………633. Drum Groups and Singers………………………………………………………………..1124. The Powwow Recording Industry in Western Canada: Race, Culture, and Commerce…………………1435. Powwow Music in the Studio: Mediation and Musical Fields…………………………………..1876. Producing Powwow Music: The Aesthetics of Liveness………………………………………..2127. Powwows “Live” and “Mediated”…………………………………………………………..241Coda :: Recording Culture in the Twenty-First Century………………………………………..268Appendix :: Notes on the CD Tracks…………………………………………………………282Notes…………………………………………………………………………………..289References………………………………………………………………………………311Index…………………………………………………………………………………..323

Chapter One

Powwow Practices

Competition and the Discourse of Tradition

For Native Americans and Canadians themselves, each pow wow reflects the cultural specificity of a tribal nation, a unique community, a particular ceremony. But for the different Native people who experience them, pow wows express certain cultural similarities and a deeply felt and shared sense of “being Indian” that threads through the dichotomies used to analyze power and identity—belonging and exclusion, knowledge and ignorance, control and resistance—all signified by the rhythm of the drum and the collective singing of seemingly wordless songs. In this site of cultural struggle over conflicting identities and competing ideologies, Natives, newcomers, performers, and spectators negotiate the meaning of Indianness. —GAIL VALASKAKIS (2005, 152)

Tradition … is less about preservation than about transformative practice and the selective symbolization of continuity. —JAMES CLIFFORD (2000, 100)

Powwows as events in time and space emerge out of the complex social interactions of a myriad of social actors: dancers, singers, drummers, performers and spectators, “hosts” and “guests,” Native Americans and nonNatives, those who are “working” and those who are “recreating.” Clifford Geertz’s well-known metaphor for culture—”webs of significance”— provocatively describes the process of meaning making for these various social agents, and these webs are spun by all who participate in a powwow on any given weekend. In the Geertzian tradition, my understanding of powwow performances, and the emergent ethics and aesthetics engendered in and through these events, is guided by an attempt to trace out some of the strands of these webs, noting intersections and divergences and moments of coherence and conflict. Powwows, as events, are filled with countless productive moments when various participants make claims about the interpretation of particular behaviors and cultural practices, based on the social position and habitus of the social agents (Bourdieu 1977). Powwow participants are all hermeneutic scholars reading and interpreting the social text of a powwow, and creating their own interpretive narratives that add to, combine, or compete with other narratives. But not all these narratives have equal weight or equal resonance or equal power to persuade, and each narrator generates his or her meanings from a particular social position. In this way the experience of powwows is soaked through with power and politics.

Tara Browner has asserted that “all pow-wows have a larger, underlying tribal or regional framework, and by either merging with or deviating from it participants reinforce personal tribal affiliation” (2002, 4). As such, her monograph describing Northern powwow practices is structured to highlight similarities and differences in behaviors and meanings for Lakota and Anishinaabeg (Ojibwa) powwow celebrations. She is certainly correct in pointing out that tribally and regionally defined cultural differences have a significant impact on the form, structure, and meaning of powwows for participants. However, tribal differences are only one aspect among many that may be examined. It is true enough that Lakotas and Ojibwas have different powwows and different understandings of powwows; but what about a teenaged Ojibwa who has lived her entire life in an urban center, or a Lakota elder for whom English is a second language and who still has vivid and bitter memories of boarding school? How do these individuals participate in and interpret powwow performances and experiences? Age, gender, living arrangements (urban or reservation), personal politics, class, and education all contribute to the habitus of powwow performers and participants. It is not that tribal affiliation is unimportant; however, it may be the case that other social factors are equally or in some cases more important. At the same time, ethnographic work is rarely about the study of individuals but rather the study of collectives. I am not suggesting that individuals are so varied and complex that generalities cannot be ascribed to tribal practices and meanings, simply that tribal affiliation is only one of the many vectors of identity that generate differences in powwow practices and interpretations. In this chapter I examine some of the practical and ideological differences between what are known as competition (sometimes called contemporary) powwows and traditional powwows. In the central Plains of Canada and the northern Plains of the United States, powwow participants use the terms competition and traditional almost exclusively to describe and categorize powwow events. In some sense, these terms may be understood as regionally specific genre categories with locally ascribed meanings. For example, southern Plains powwow culture, centered in Oklahoma, does not share the same binary categorization and features a much wider variety of events in structure, organization, and cultural meaning (see Ellis 2003; Lassiter 1998). Further, as powwow events spread to new geographic areas (the east and west coasts for instance) and become popular with different tribal groups, new practices are created and understood outside of, or in between, the basic genre bifurcation of “traditional” and “competition.” However, the northern Plains area is one of the centers of powwow culture today and strongly influences practices as they are adopted across the continent. As such, the structural division of powwows into these two basic categories (with some variation in nomenclature) has become increasingly common outside of this region (although certainly not universal).

The competition powwow circuit began to form in the 1950s as a loosely related aggregate of song-and-dance events that offered modest cash prizes to participants. This circuit became larger and more structurally coherent by the 1970s as more and more reservations began holding annual celebrations open to intertribal participation. The 1980s and ’90s saw the emergence of “mega-powwows” with such events as the Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque, the Denver March Powwow, the Mashantucket Pequot’s “Schemitzun” Green Corn Powwow, and Coeur d’Alene’s Julyamsh. Drawing thousands of participants from across North America and fueled in part by the large injection of capital generated through the proliferation of reservation-based casinos, these powwows began offering cash prizes on the order of thousands of dollars for dance events and tens of thousands for singing contests. More and more powwows are now explicitly stating in their advertising whether they are competition or traditional powwows. In doing so, powwow committees are actively strategizing about the kind of event they are going to host. Explicitly marketing a powwow as a competition event will inevitably bring more dancers, attract more—and probably more professional—drum groups, and require a different kind of monetary investment.

In order to explore some of the important practical and ideological differences between these two types of events, two ethnographic case studies will be presented and analyzed, the first an Assiniboine, reservation-based competition powwow, and the second a reservation-based, Ojibwa traditional powwow. In presenting these two cases I wish to construct a general model of powwow events as cultural performances assembled in a modular way from a bounded set of practices and ideologies. Each of these events follows the general form of a Northern-style powwow, features the same kinds of singing and dancing, and engages similar protocols and standardized behaviors (Grand Entry, feather pickups, scheduled dance events, feasts, etc.); yet in each case certain structural features are highlighted or suppressed, and different practices, ideologies, and discourses are articulated and disarticulated as particular meanings and interpretations are celebrated, reinforced, or contested. In this way, powwow performances, and the meanings and interpretations of these performances, have a unique “emergent” quality (Bauman 1977).

Competition and Traditional Powwows

Since first meeting and working with Gabe Desrosiers in 1999, I have arranged a number of guest lecture/performances for him at the various universities where I have worked. During his visits, I make very few demands about the content of his presentations, suggesting only that he speak in some way about his life as a singer, songmaker, and dancer. When he came to speak in my classes in the spring of 2002, his lectures became more and more thematically structured with each presentation. A central theme that emerged in his talks was the important distinction between what he called “traditional” and “competition” powwows. What struck me about his presentations was not simply the distinction he was drawing, but his use of space in metaphorically demonstrating the point. In speaking about traditional powwows he would point to his right, offering comments about typical practices found at these kinds of events; then, pointing or gesturing to his left, he would speak about what occurred at a competition powwow. Traditional powwows were to the right, competition powwows to the left, and he was in between. Gabe’s careful spatial separation of traditional and competition powwows was a forceful expression of how these two worlds are understood by many powwow participants. Their overlapping nature is suggested by Gabe’s position in the middle of these two poles, an indication of his ability to travel from one to the other as one of the many powwow participants who take part in both worlds. The complex interrelationship of these two kinds of events is indicated by his struggling comments to explain to undergraduate music students the significant differences between these worlds, saying things like “We have these things [activities and events] over here [at traditional powwows], too, but at competition powwows it’s … [struggling for words] it’s different.” Gabe’s difficulty in verbalizing these differences stems from the fact that often what distinguishes traditional powwows from competition powwows is not necessarily the different kinds of behaviors or practices that take place but the way those behaviors are interpreted—what and how they mean and are felt. At the most basic level, the central element distinguishing competition and traditional powwow events is that competition powwows feature formal singing and dancing competitions with cash prizes for participants, while traditional powwows do not. Competition powwows are also generally much larger events and feature a much greater degree of intertribal participation. These events are highly structured proceedings with fairly strict adherence to a schedule of events. They also place a greater emphasis on the strict division of contest singing and dancing categories and do not regularly emphasize community or tribal concerns or local dance traditions. Because these powwows are generally well funded by tribal councils, and increasingly through capital generated by tribal casinos, drum groups hired to host these events are typically well paid, and cash prizes for the competition events can range from $500 to $2,000 or more for dancers and between $5,000 and $25,000 for singing groups. Conversely, traditional powwows are very often smaller gatherings that operate on a relatively modest budget and emphasize community friendship over formal competition. Instead of holding competitions, each participating dancer or singer receives a modest sum of money from the powwow committee to help offset the expenses of travel, food, and lodging. Dancing and singing activities are undertaken informally, and the proceedings will often feature a number of “giveaways,” “Honor songs,” and other events that highlight or emphasize local community concerns.

However, while there are real, practical differences between traditional and competition powwows, perhaps more important are the ideologically constructed meanings associated with particular practices found at these events. Interpretive meaning for participants within these different contexts is generated within and through tribal and pan-tribal discourses about “tradition” and “culture,” and these terms are key “discursive tropes” (Stokes 1994, 7) employed by powwow (and powwow music industry) participants to capture a wide range of practices and link them to ideologies of historical continuity, authenticity, and difference. Broadly speaking, traditional powwows are articulated to (and experienced and interpreted as embodying) “local,” tribally specific, and more culturally “authentic” values and practices, while competition powwows articulate (inter)national, pan-tribal, and variably inauthentic kinds of activities. Authenticity is defined in both cases in terms of actions and ideologies culturally specific to Native American groups as distinguished from non-Natives, and legitimated through the rhetorical force of history.

Powwow people invoke “tradition” for multiple purposes, with multiple objectives, and in multiple social domains. Singing styles are identified either as traditional (sometimes also called “original”) and contemporary, and drum groups become known for their expertise in one or the other of these styles (see chapter 2). At larger competition powwows, singing contests are similarly divided into these two basic style categories. Since the mid-1990s it has become increasingly common to find dance contests split into old-style and contemporary-style dance categories. In each case the stylistic markers and practices that distinguish tradition from its categorical opposite vary but the ideological features remain somewhat consistent. The discourse of tradition often plays itself out in the intercommunity negotiation of the “continuity of tradition,” which attempts to mediate the ideologically conflicting discourses of modernity and tradition. The terms “traditional” and “contemporary” stand in for discursive universes that articulate “authentic” Native identity to song and dance practices and tribal pasts to pan-tribal and intertribal futures.

A Northern Competition Powwow

The Carry the Kettle Assiniboine Nation Indian reservation is located approximately one hundred miles east of Regina along the Trans Canada Highway, just outside the small prairie farming town of Sintaluta, Saskatchewan, on the central Canadian Plains. Measuring approximately fourteen square kilometers, the band boasts a population of just under two thousand four hundred members, approximately eight hundred and fifty of whom reside on the reserve. Every year, often on one of the last weekends of July, Carry the Kettle (CTK) hosts its annual powwow celebration. 5 The CTK powwow is large and well established, and many singers, dancers, and other participants mark their calendars and annually travel to Saskatchewan for this popular event. Like many powwow grounds on the Canadian Plains, the CTK reservation has set aside a large tract of land dedicated to this annual event, found at the end of a dirt road near the heart of the reservation.

Saturday, July 24, 1999, at 10:30 AM. The sun is already high in the sky, hot and unrelenting. Campers have been driven from their sleep at dawn as the morning sun quickly heats their tents to unbearable temperatures. Very little shade exists on the grounds save for those areas carefully constructed by campers using blue and orange tarpaulins held aloft by tent poles or scavenged tree branches. Those who spend their summers traveling the powwow trail know the value of shade on the Canadian prairies. Cars and trailers display license plates from near and far: Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota. People are sleepily, leisurely beginning their day. The dancing of the previous night continued until after 1 AM. At the time of the first Grand Entry, Friday at 8 pm, sixteen different drum groups and more than 250 dancers crowded the arena. The Grand Entry was large and impressive and the dance arena was packed with dancers all night long. But Friday night was just a warm-up. Saturday is when the powwow really begins. By Saturday’s first Grand Entry at 1 PM, all the dancers and singers will have arrived and registered for the appropriate competitions. Spectator crowds will be at their peak on Saturday night.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from RECORDING CULTUREby CHRISTOPHER A. SCALES Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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