Authors

Recognition of the potentially literary value of Native American chants and songs may be dated from the eighteenth century when Lieutenant Henry Timberlake in his 1765 Memoirs included a “Cherokee War Song” that he had translated in rhymed couplets! Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the mid-nineteenth century worked out a method for the translation of songs that included a “literal” and a “literary” version of them, and this has been carefully examined by Dell Hymes in his seminal work “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (1981). Less literary but undoubtedly more accurate translations by amateur and government-bureau anthropologists began to appear near the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically literary collections of these materials may be said to begin with Natalie Curtis Burlin’s The Indians’ Book (1907, 1968). Although Burlin’s collection tends to museumize the literature of indigenous people as a priceless relic of the past, it does gather an extensive selection of songs, some of which are transcribed versions of the originals as well as translations. In The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indians (1951) A. Grove Day also emphasizes the “literary” over the “literal,” but ranges widely. Margot Astrov’s American Indian Prose and Poetry (1962, originally published as The Winged Serpent: An Anthology of American Indian Poetry, 1946) also is worth consulting. Several of John Bierhorst’s compilations are well worth consulting, in particular Cry from the Earth: Music of the North American Indians (1979). Larry Evers and Felipe Molina’s Yaqui Deer Songs, Maso Bwikam (1987) explains Yaqui culture and the song’s place in it. Ruth Underhill’s Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians (1938) remains useful, among older collections, as do Frances Densmore’s many collections, e.g., her Pawnee Music (1929, 1972). David McAllester, in “Coyote’s Song” (Parabola 4 [1980]: 28–35), presents a fascinating Navajo song attributed to Coyote. Gertrude Kurath and Antonio Garcia’s Music and Dance of the Tewa Pueblos (1970) presents songs collected from 1957 to 1965. Leanne Hinton and Lucille Watahomigie’s edited collection Spirit Mountain: An Anthology of Yuman Story and Song (1984) is worth consulting, along with Charlotte Heth’s Traditional Music of North American Indians (1980), and Judith Vander’s Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women (1988), which shows how music is a part of these women’s lives, and song a living, changing art form. Brian Swann’s recent Wearing the Morning Star: Native American Song-Poems (1996) is a valuable collection of songs. Thomas F. Johnson’s Eskimo Music by Region: A Comparative Circumpolar Study (1976) and Paul Zolbrod’s Reading the Voice: Native American Oral Poetry on the Written Page (1995) are useful studies of these materials. The Navajo Night Chant was first described by Washington Matthews in 1894 and, in a posthumous publication, as late as 1907, with the fullest text dating from 1902. Berard Haile’s “Navaho Chantways and Ceremonials” (American Anthropologist 40 (1938): 639–52) remains an important early study. James Faris’s The Nightway: A History and a History of the Documentation of a Navajo Ceremonial (1990) usefully provides what its title promises. Commentary on Densmore’s collections of music from many tribes appears in anthropological and ethnomusicological journals, but there is no comprehensive study of her work to date. The contemporary Anishinabe  (Chippewa/Ojibwe) writer Gerald Vizenor has taken note of Densmore’s Chippewa songs in his People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories (1984) and in his Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories, edited and “re-expressed” by Vizenor (1981), which contains song lyrics and tales, and a glossary of Anishinaabemowin—Chippewa—words. The Library of Congress, Division of Music, issued a sound disc of Densmore’s recorded Songs of the Chippewa in 1950. The first and most indispensable source of material for the 1890 Ghost Dance is James Mooney’s Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, first published in 1896 and available in an abridged edition with an introduction by Anthony F. C. Wallace (1965). Mooney also published “The Indian Ghost Dance” (Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, vol. 16) later in his life, in 1911. An informative biography of Mooney exists in The Indian Man: A Biography of James Mooney (1984) by L. G. Moses. Stanley Vestal’s New Sources of Indian History, 1850–1891: The Ghost Dance, the Prairie Sioux: A Miscellany (1938) remains interesting, and Leslie Spier’s The Prophet Dance of the Northwest and Its Derivatives: The Source of the Ghost Dance (1979) places the 1890 Ghost Dance in historical context. Michael Hittman’s Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, in its expanded edition of 1997 (the first edition of 1990 was specifically produced for the Yerington Paiute Tribe), is the fullest account of these matters, with appendices and bibliographies that are guides for further study. Russell Thornton’s We Shall Live Again: The 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance Movements as Demographic Revitalization (1986) discusses the importance of these movements for ongoing Native “revitalization.”