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Like “mainstream” history (if there is such a thing at this juncture), written histories of Native America have privileged political events, war, and, conse- quently, the narratives of leaders and warriors. Some such leaders (e.g., Membertou, Wovoka) had a huge impact on song culture, but many tradition bearers have been storied outside of these privileged historical foci. A number of (auto)biographies of both male and female traditional song carriers (espe- cially Frisbie’s work with Frank and Rose Mitchell [Mitchell 1978; Mitchell and Frisbie 2001]), or Levine’s work on Arzelie Langtry (1991) complement the picture. Vander’s (1988) work with five Shoshone song carriers is an important instance of tracing a century of history by focusing on the agency and explanations of individuals of different generations. Other studies of both traditional and contemporary musicians (e.g., Nettl 1968; Young Bear and Theisz 1994; Bissett Perea 2012) demonstrate how individual life stories carry the traces of complex intercultural historical interactions.

Scholars have made contributions to the growing body of work demonstrat- ing how women experienced colonialism very differently from men, particu- larly along the Atlantic seaboard (see, among others, Green 1975; Mihesuah 1993; Perdue 2001). Of particular importance for music scholars is the fact that many women served as cultural mediators as both visual artists in the context of trade and tourism since the mid-nineteenth century6_{and performers.}7_{In the}

past couple of decades, oral historical work (including many published inter- views with culture bearers)8has proliferated, providing a very different picture of human agency within the period of living memory.

6 See Phillips (1998) for a particularly wide-ranging exploration of “trading identities.”

7 McBride’s biographies of Molly Spotted Elk (1995, 1999) and Lucy Nicolar (2001) are cases in point. 8 One instance is the 2012 anthology Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, co-edited by A. Hoefnagels and B. Diamond. Interviews and “conversations” appear alongside academic articles, in an explicit effort to explore processes of knowledge production.

Nonindigenous scholars often find the modes of telling life histories challeng- ing for various reasons. The difficulty of understanding how life stories inter- weave with narrative and song was addressed by anthropologist Julie Cruikshank in Life Lived Like a Story (1990), and by her former teacher Robin Ridington in Trail to Heaven (1988). A second challenge may be that, as Nabokov and others have observed, the historical reference points in many Native American contexts are often individual experiences. Our consultants and teachers are often careful to indicate that a story is their version, or perhaps that they learned that from a specific person. A good illustration in recent ethnomusicology might be found in an interview that Franziska von Rosen (2009) conducted with Passamaquoddy singer Margaret Paul, who often started her descriptions of the past with reference to a specific version of that past: “The way Mike described it” (ibid., 59), “this friend of mine, she said” (ibid., 61), “That’s what that spirit told me when I went into that sweat lodge in Alberta” (ibid., 62). Because of the authority that individual experience is afforded, multiple versions of the past more easily coexist in Native America than in Euroamerican “ways of history.”9 Any study of agency must explore the complexity of power dynamics. Recent music scholarship helps to demonstrate that the power relationships between colonizers and Native Americans were fluid and complex. Interactions between Native Americans and missionaries have been a particularly fruitful sphere for examining the power dynamics of colonizers and indigenous hosts and for exploring the role of singing in cross-cultural negotiations of control. It must not be denied that Christian churches were complicit in running boarding and residential schools that were genocidal in intent and often physically, psycho- logically, and sexually abusive. Recent research, nonetheless, firmly debunks earlier assumptions that missionaries were necessarily in control of these encoun- ters.10Anne Morrison Spinney (2005) looks closely at the relationship between missionaries, shamans, and political contexts in Penobscot history, arguing persuasively that Aboriginal medicine people made alliances or, alternatively, maintained antagonistic relations with Christian priests, in order to achieve political ends. Christian hymnody played a role in this process. Luke Lassiter’s work on Kiowa hymnody similarly reveals that “what often emerges in the stories of missions in Indian country is a complicated narrative dominated by negotiations and accommodations on all sides” (Lassiter, Ellis, and Kotay 2002, 116). He notes that “[w]hen one listens to Kiowa people talk about Indian

9 It is all the more regrettable that many early records and modern interpretations of them are often unable or unconcerned with identifying the specific Aboriginal participants especially in everyday post-contact encounters.

10 This work carries much further earlier work on hymnody that explored localizations of the texts and functions of hymns by Aboriginal performers (Diamond 1992; Keillor 1987; Whidden 1985).

hymns. . . models like assimilation do more to obscure encounter and experience than to elaborate on it” (ibid., 117). Similarly, Chad Hamill asserts that mission- aries to the Salish underestimated the “ingenuity and resilience of the cultures they encountered” where old medicine ways and new hymns “both contributed to a sense of collective indigeneity” (2012, 4). Ethnomusicologists have studied instances of dual religious belief (Powers 1987), indigenization of Christian practices (Diamond 1992), and syncretic religious rites such as the Native American church (McAllester 1949).

Related to agency is the incompleteness of human-centered historical accounts. Creation stories are important texts of Native American history, as are many other types of narrative and mythology. These texts, with their numer- ous nonhuman characters, early time periods (or timeless ones), chronological discontinuities, and unquestionable “truth” value, pose one of the greatest challenges to Eurocentric constructs of history.11One aspect of that challenge is, of course, the very scope that is “thinkable” within certain “ways of history.” The tendency is for those who work with print to equate history with the written records of colonizers and to describe earlier events as prehistory. Mythic time is not so constrained. Giants and spirits, birds and animals, are historical agents in this context. A larger-than-human agency demands, however, that we assess the purposes and priorities of history. Nabokov asks whether history should priori- tize “facts and chronologies or themes and attitudes” (Nabokov 2002, 67). Many of the examples cited in the present chapter emphasize that themes of regaining balance or renewing beliefs, for instance, are more central to Native American (music) history than exact chronology.

Humans are often not the agents, in the sense of instigators or creators, but the mediators for teachings, which may include song. This is particularly true of communities where songs are received (not consciously created) in dreams or during fasts. The Innu of Labrador and Northern Quebec, for instance, along with many other Algonquian-speaking First Nations, regard all traditional nikumana as emanating from dreams (Armitage 1992; Diamond 2008). In some communities, dreams also validate an individual’s right to undertake certain work: hunting in a certain territory or even making a drum (see Audet 2012). The temporality of dreams is, of course, not congruent with chronological frameworks.

Environment as agent is a particularly noteworthy trope in the history of Native American traditional narrative. There are now many scholars who are looking to indigenous narratives that relate to dramatic environmental events in human history. Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank, in her groundbreaking book

11 Nabokov (2002, 67) reminds us of the mid-twentieth-century debate between anthropologists Robert Lowie (who felt that Indian narratives were historically useless), John Swanton, and Roland Dixon who were more interested in what such narratives might convey about pre-contact times.

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (2005), not only expands the purview of history to environments, but also looks at divergent historical narratives about environmental change in the Yukon. She reminds us that both indigenous people and environmental histor- ians “advise us to examine nature as a continuing force in history, not in a determining role but as one actor in relation to others” (ibid., 9). While those who study expressive culture might initially think her work is remote from the work they do, the role of expressive culture in mediating the relationship between human societies and nature is a significant one. In one instance, she describes how First Nations travelers on dangerous glaciers,12which might have surged or receded unexpectedly, marked their journeys with song, as well as with respectful practices such as remaining quiet in certain contexts or not consuming grease in the vicinity of the glacier:

Songs, such as the Marching and Resting and Dancing songs that Copper River people composed during their migration toward the coast, play an important role in clan histories. K’áadasteen spoke to Swanton in 1909 about the mourn- ing songs his ancestors sang to commemorate companions lost in fog on this journey. Forty years later, in 1949, Sarah Williams sang the same songs for Frederica de Laguna, and she contrasted these dirges with the joyful songs clan members composed when they actually discovered Icy Bay: “They danced down from that mountain. They were happy when they were coming on this side. Lots of things happen[ed] there and there are songs” [about those events]. (Cruikshank 2005, 34–5)

Cruikshank sees such songs as historical sources, but she also recognizes how they not only mark events but also reflect emotional relationships, themes, and attitudes. In forging a relationship to the dramatic and changeable landscape that humans traverse, these songs are performative like, but not quite like, creation stories and mythologies that speak of primordial times. They constitute a different historical layer.13_{They mark events or places, as in}

Cruikshank’s example (after Swanton and de Laguna). Or they may recreate those events and places using mimesis.14