6 - Native American ways of (music) history

Summary

This chapter explores how First Nations, Inuit, and Métis music history is beginning to be reconceptualized, by recognizing localized ways of history within indigenous communities. As scholars of Native American song and dance cultures rethink historical paradigms, there is growing acceptance that different cultural views of history should be regarded as complementary. The chapter provides some examples to emphasize that themes of regaining balance or renewing beliefs are more central to Native American music history than exact chronology. The focus of Native American historical work on renewal and revitalization seems to resonate with Aboriginal performance traditions as ways of remembering. In many Native American communities, ceremony may involve the enactment of a creation story or classic narrative. Historians such as L. G. Moses, have argued about the change in valence that Native American music and dance was given in the course of the twentieth century.