From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the U.S.
government sought to control practices of music on reservations and
in Indian boarding schools. At the same time, Native singers,
dancers, and musicians created new opportunities through musical
performance to resist and manipulate those same policy initiatives.
Why did the practice of music generate fear among government
officials and opportunity for Native peoples?
In this innovative study, John W. Troutman explores the politics
of music at the turn of the twentieth century in three spheres:
reservations, off-reservation boarding schools, and public venues
such as concert halls and Chautauqua circuits. On their
reservations, the Lakotas manipulated concepts of U.S. citizenship
and patriotism to reinvigorate and adapt social dances, even while
the federal government stepped up efforts to suppress them. At
Carlisle Indian School, teachers and bandmasters taught music in
hopes of imposing their "civilization" agenda, but students made
their own meaning of their music. Finally, many former students,
armed with saxophones, violins, or operatic vocal training, formed
their own "all-Indian" and tribal bands and quartets and traversed
the country, engaging the market economy and federal Indian policy
initiatives on their own terms.
While recent scholarship has offered new insights into the
experiences of "show Indians" and evolving powwow traditions,
"Indian Blues" is the first book to explore the polyphony of Native
musical practices and their relationship to federal Indian policy
in this important period of American Indian history.
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