Dvorak and Natives

Don't we have a musicologist in class? I vaguely remember that someone introduced himself as a student of oriental music of some sort... If that is so, I suspect that this person enjoyed Deloria's chapter on native american music. Being from a through-and-through musical family, and myself a pastime piano player, I found the discussion on the native american harmony, rhythm, and beat immensely interesting.

Deloria's description of composers' attempt to amass native tunes and to transcribe these in accordance with western notation seems to suggest that these attempts were, at least, partial failures; indian music defy the logic of sheet music. I knew Dvorak tried to assemble his impressions of the American continent in his 9th symphony, but not that native american music was supposed to be part of the piece. Maybe Deloria's point is well attested in Dvorak's attempt? Although I love the work, it does not really sound much like the little I have heard of indian music, and the scores Deloria provided in his book. As an aside: the majestic and arousing theme from the fourth movement, was quoted to the tone during the battle scenes of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring – not exactly a moment intended to evoke imageries of native people...

(If you haven't heard the symphony, it is worth checking out: it is, after all, something like a tonal version of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, an excited European's attempt to make sense of, and pay homage to, the New World)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmZ25MDvzNU

Deloria's intimations of feeling offended by use native american music and imagery in the final chapter seemed tenderly honest and made it easier for me to situate his book in a larger historical and political context. And I think I understand where he is coming from. Native Americans have been masters of being unexpected: "thoroughly creative in crafting an Indian life in the twentieth-century United States. And that is something that should not be expected at all" (p. 135). Whites tended to assign natives to two positions in cultural depictions: noble savages or simply savages. Their own adaption was not expected. I understand him to mean that Natives' use of Cars, their careers as actors in Wester movies, musicians, and sports signals an oppressed people's acts of resistance. Adaptation is a form of defying power, at least when the oppressed are expected to continue the life they lived before the arrival of the alien rulers. So, when rap artists and football supporters chant taken-out-of-context native songs, Deloria gets his migraine back: "a five-hundred-year-old headache, and it's called disrespect, injustice, and oppression" (p. 224).

I have made a personal experience that proves Deloria’s point. I thought I had done my homework well when I spoke with an Apache at a bar here in Tucson once. I told him that I had seen and enjoyed the 1993 film Geronimo: An American Legend. To my surprise – an astonishment that possible mirrors that Deloria attributes to Whites witnessing natives' adaptation strategies – the person told me that neither him nor others of the Indian community valued this portrayal of the Apache chief much. As we discussed it, it gradually became apparent that, yes, besides the title, the movie really was a portrayal of white generals, bounty-hunters, and scouts. The true heroes were not the Apaches, but the whites who respected Indians – in this particular film, in the cast of Jason Patrick and Gene Hackman. Besides the valuable historical details Deloria provides, his book is a great reminder that cultural chauvinism might be exercised unwillingly and unintentionally.

-- Alexander