Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

INDIGENOUS CHARACTERIZATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY POWWOW INSTRUCTION

The Indigenous people I talked to often spoke about tradition using the words “the culture,” by which they meant a way of life that was spiritually centered, morally right, and in touch with the Creator and “our grandmothers and grandfathers” (spirit relations both human and more than human). As noted earlier, powwow clubs presented a range of opportunities to become familiar with the culture, and activities at these clubs were widely understood to be linked to larger realms of sacred practice. Most of the Indigenous people with whom I spoke regarded the surge of interest in the culture positively, and in this section I outline a number of things they believed it to accomplish. First and foremost, they understood it to ameliorate the damage caused by colonialism, Residential Schooling, and the child-welfare scoop. Wayne Ruby, a powwow singer and leader at a Winnipeg powwow club, explained, “When we practiced our culture [in Residential Schools], we got hit…. And basically after that … CFS [Child and Family Services] came along. And the kids were taken away from the parents. And they weren’t placed within other Aboriginal communities; they were placed within … basically, white man’s home…. That’s why the culture was slowly vanishing…. And, basically, that’s why [we have] powwow club: because the culture’s vanishing and it needs to come back.” Patricia Olson, a teacher of traditional singing and dancing at a public school with a large Indigenous student population, said of a powwow to be held at the school: “We want everybody to have a piece of what they’ve lost” (interviews, Winnipeg, October 4, 2013). And Rhonda Stevenson, explaining how young people find themselves through powwow clubs, said,

[We] still work with kids that are … in the [child-welfare] system…. It’s just the history with the sixties scoop way back when…. We just have a generation of people that didn’t raise their kids…. [The] young people now are still … learning who they are…. If you’re from a family that’s always been doing [powwow], and you’ve … grown up in it … then you’ve learnt that from day one: all the skills and the dancing, the singing, the beliefs, the traditions. But a lot of the kids that are in care, they’ve had that disconnection. So … when we’re doing this stuff with the kids [we’re trying to make] that reconnection. (Interview, Winnipeg, September 26, 2013)

Rhonda’s remarks refer not only to the cultural disruptions caused by the child-welfare scoop but to ongoing disconnections as well. Indigenous groups now have more say in the running of the child-welfare system, which takes greater care than in the past to place Indigenous children with Native families, but the number of Indigenous children in care remains staggeringly disproportionate. In 2006 only 15.7 percent of Manitoban children were Indigenous, yet 85 percent of the children in care were Indigenous (Kozlowski et al. 2012). Powwow clubs do not simply address the historical legacy of child-welfare provision, then, but also its contemporary consequences.

Some

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