Welcome to the Native American Music tab!
Here you will find resources and materials on Native American music to assist in your research.
We have a Research Tools box with databases, articles and websites among other resources, a Spotify Playlists section with selected playlists you can play directly from your browser, selected music videos from a few Indigenous artists to check out, and a side panel section that features books on researching music and Native American/Indigenous music.
Music is a central element in Native American culture from the time before contact with Europeans to the modern era. From birth to death, music is part of each rite of passage, each celebration, each social event, and each moment of solemnity. Explorers and settlers from the 16th century to the 20th century wrote descriptions of Native American songs and dances, marking the frequency of musical activities, and noting that, often, a musical celebration would last an entire night. Journals also noted individuals respected within a specific tribe as outstanding singers or dancers, often expressing surprise that warriors and leaders such as Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and Quanah Parker were as famed within their own culture as musicians and creators of songs as much as they were for their leadership in war.
Key Terms
A user can find relevant articles with key search terms. A combination of the following will yield appropriate responses: “Native American” “Native” “Indigenous” “American Indian” or specific tribe names such as “Ojibwe” “Pequot” or others, and “music” "music theory" "musicianship" "musicology" "musical performance" or specific genres of music such as "rap" "powwow" and others.
Boolean Operators
In addition to using keywords listed in the box above, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) will assist you with finding sources.
AND: will return results containing both words entered in the search (Native American AND literature)
OR: will return results with either search term used; can be helpful when searching for synonyms or related terms (Native OR Indigenous)
Quotation marks will search the exact term ("Native American literature")
Parenthesis will help improve a search by allowing for multiple search filters: (Native American OR Indigenous OR American Indian) AND Comics
Truncation will widen a search with a wildcard symbol (*), so any variation of the root will be gathered (music* will return music, musical, musicology, musician etc.)
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An enhanced electronic version of the print Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians providing the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource on all aspects of music. Includes regular online updates of the complete text of the print edition with links to thousands of images, digital sound files and other related web sites.
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Provides access to a streaming audio collection that supports the teaching and research of music. It currently includes access to over 7 million tracks from almost 70,000 albums, with new titles added each month.
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Updated frequently, Grove Music Online is the world’s premier online music encyclopedia, offering comprehensive coverage of music, musicians, music-making, and music scholarship.
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Updated quarterly. Contains records describing articles in over 640 international periodicals in the field of music and related disciplines. Includes book reviews, recording and performance reviews, and obituaries.
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This encyclopedia's 30,000 entries cover all genres and periods of popular music from 1900 to the present day, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music. The expanded Fourth Edition includes thousands of new entries on trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals. Key dates, biographies, and further reading are provided for artists covered, along with complete discographies that include record labels, release dates, and a 5-star album rating system.
Contact the liaison librarian to the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, Adriana Casarez (adriana.casarez@austin.utexas.edu) for research help.
This playlist features Native American Music Award winning Drum Groups, created by NAMA LIVE.
This is the Halluci Nation features all the essential songs for this Canadian electronic music group who blend instrumental hip hop, reggae, moombahton and dubstep-influenced dance music with elements of First Nations music, particularly vocal chanting and drumming.
This playlist features music from the documentary, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World. Check out our Film section to learn more about this documentary.
Native American flute music is highlighted in this playlist, Dreamcatcher.
Pow Wow Radio created their own Spotify playlist of Pow Wow Genre music.
Created by the Native American Music Awards, this playlist highlights recordings of Best Blues Music winners at NAMA.
"Buffy Sainte-Marie, CC is an Indigenous Canadian-American singer-songwriter, musician, Oscar-winning composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues facing Indigenous peoples of the Americas."
"Martha Redbone is an American blues and soul singer of part Choctaw, European and African-American descent. She has won awards for her contemporary Native American music. Her music is a mix of rhythm and blues, and soul music influences, fused with elements of traditional Native American music."
"Pura Fé (Tuscarora), is an Indigenous singer-songwriter-musician, story teller, instructor, seamstress, artist and reviver of Canoe song/dance and woman's drum."
"Timothy Archambault is a Native American flutist, architect, and composer."
"Joanne Lynn Shenandoah was a Native American singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist based in the United States. She was a citizen of the Oneida Indian Nation, Wolf clan, based in New York."
Johnny Curtis (San Carlos Apache Tribe) was a gospel musician and pastor at the Fort McDowell Miracle Church of All Nations. His music spans several decades, making him the predominate gospel music icon throughout the Native North America and First Nations Indians of Canada.
Encyclopedia of Native American Music of North America
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This book is a one-stop reference resource for the vast variety of musical expressions of the First Peoples' cultures of North America, both past and present. Encyclopedia of Native American Music of North America documents the surprisingly varied musical practices among North America's First Peoples, both historically and in the modern context. It supplies a detailed yet accessible and approachable overview of the substantial contributions and influence of First Peoples that can be appreciated by both native and nonnative audiences, regardless of their familiarity with musical theory. The entries address how ethnomusicologists with Native American heritage are revolutionizing approaches to the discipline, and showcase how musicians with First Peoples' heritage are influencing modern musical forms including native flute, orchestral string playing, gospel, and hip hop. The work represents a much-needed academic study of First Peoples' musical cultures--a subject that is of growing interest to Native Americans as well as nonnative students and readers. Provides print and Internet resources with each entry Presents exclusive information derived from the personal research and fieldwork of the editors Includes a timeline that highlights important developments in First Peoples' musical expressions Supplies an index that allows users to easily look up all of the relevant information on a topic
Excursions in World Music
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Introduction : studying musics of the world's cultures including a section by Thomas Turino on Native American music
Hip Hop Beats Indigenous Rhymes
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Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.
Hungry Listening
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WInner of the Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience​ Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the "whiteness of sound studies," Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism's "tin ear" that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of "doing sovereignty" in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence. Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
Indigenous Pop
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Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. From Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra to Jim Pepper, from Buffy Saint-Marie to Robbie Robertson, from Joy Harjo to Lila Downs, Indigenous Pop vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent. Arranged both chronologically and according to popular generic forms, the book gives Indigenous pop a broad new meaning. In addition to examining the transitive influences of popular music on Indigenous expressive forms, the contributors also show ways that various genres have been shaped by what some have called the "Red Roots" of American-originated musical styles. This recognition of mutual influence extends into the ways of understanding how music provides methodologies for living and survival. Each in-depth essay in the volume zeros in on a single genre and in so doing exposes the extraordinary whole of Native music. This book showcases the range of musical genres to which Native musicians have contributed and the unique ways in which their engagement advances the struggle for justice and continues age-old traditions of creative expression.
Intertribal Native American Music in the United States
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The development of a shared musical heritage amongst the various Native American tribes reveals a history fraught with the tension of the give-and-take between cultural maintenance and new cultural creation. In Intertribal Native American Music in the United States, author John-Carlos Pereaexplores this tension and shows how traditional sounds, such as the powwow song and cedar flute, have developed into increasingly recognizable forms, like Native jazz and rock.These older sounds and their modern incarnations form the four themes around which Perea frames his discussion. First, he examines powwows - American Indian social gatherings founded upon an intertribal repertoire of music and dance - and shows how the assemblies of Northern and Southern Plains andNavajo tribes represent a singular performance encompassing disparate stories and sounds. From the relative insularity of the powwow, Perea then looks at the mainstreaming of the cedar flute and its role in introducing Native American music to broader audiences. From there, he surveys Native rockand jazz, considering their roots and their trajectories, as well as the milestone creation of the Best Native American Music GrammyRG Award in 2000. With this book, Perea offers readers the only brief text that makes clear the interconnectedness of Native American music through a lively analysis ofhow it began and where it is headed.Designed to be used as one of several short and inexpensive case study volumes in the Global Music Series, this volume is appropriate for introductory undergraduate courses in world music or ethnomusicology and for upper-level courses on Native American music and/or culture, as well as NativeAmerican Indians courses in Anthropology. The twenty-second volume in the Series, this text is based on the author's own extensive fieldwork and features interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations. The book also features listening activities that enablestudents to engage critically and actively with the text. The included 70-minute CD contains examples of music discussed in the text, and supplementary material for instructors will be available on the companion web site.
Mediating Indianness
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Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media--including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric--that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The contributors to this collection are (Native) American and European scholars whose initial findings were presented or performed in a four-panel format at the 2012 MESEA (Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) conference in Barcelona. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of "authenticity." From William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging "true-to-life" scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC's announcement that his songs tell his people's "own history" and draw on their "true" culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy. This volume does not shy away from the issue of evaluation and how it is only tangential to medial artificiality. As evidenced in this collection, "the vibrant, ever-transforming future of Native peoples is located within a complex intersection of cultural influences," said Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness.
Moving Within the Circle
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This is a dynamic collection of twenty-four social songs, dances, and flute songs. Also included are several guided listening experiences and instructions for making traditional and contemporary instruments. This collection is the culmination of years of exploration by Bryan Burton, who is of Caddo, Choctaw, and European descent. Included are pieces from the Pueblo, Lakota, Kiowa, Nanticoke, Hidatsa, Haliwa-Saponi, and Seneca people among others. Each selection was taught directly to Bryan Burton by group members. This well rounded collection blends the old with the new. From ceremonial pieces to American Indian rock, the songs presented here are heard at intertribal pow wows, cultural centers, and blasting from radios. Appropriate for use with students in grades K-12, college music education classes, ethnomusicology and Native American Studies.
Music of the First Nations
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This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to an ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this collection promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods. Contributors are T. Christopher Aplin, Tara Browner, Paula Conlon, David E. Draper, Elaine Keillor, Lucy Lafferty, Franziska von Rosen, David Samuels, Laurel Sercombe, and Judith Vander.
Native American Music
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Explores history and cricism of Native American music and Mexican Indigenous music. Contents include: What is Native American music? --
History of the Euro-American study of Native American music --
Culture and Aesthetics --
The Native American as living fossil: areal studies and music --
Music and mana (power) --
Nativistic music --
Music and the Native American church --
Music and ceremonial --
Music and the lifestyle --
What is Native American music?
Native American Music in Eastern North America
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Native American Music in Eastern North America, a case study in the Global Music Series edited by Bonnie Wade and Patricia Shehan Campbell, is one of the first books to explore the contemporary musical landscape of indigenous North Americans. This volume looks at how performance traditions ofNative North Americans have been influenced by traditional social values and cultural histories, as well as by encounters with other indigenous groups and newcomers from Europe and Africa. Drawing on case studies from communities in eastern North America such as the Iroquois, the Algonquian-speaking nations of the Northeast, and the Inuit of the far north, this book discusses the specific histories and locations of Native North American musical practices including intertribal celebrations, contemporary popular music projects, and other expressive domains such as dance, art, and film.The author also looks at how performance contexts and styles have responded to economic, social, and environmental changes brought about by the arrival of non-natives, how technology has mediated contemporary cultural communication, and how traditional ideas about social roles and gender identitieshave been altered through music.Designed to be used as one of several short and inexpensive case study volumes in the Global Music Series, this volume is appropriate for undergraduate courses in world music or ethnomusicology and Native American anthropology. Based on the author's own fieldwork, the text features interviews withtribal elders and First Nations performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations. The included 70-minute CD contains examples of music discussed in the text; these include unique and rare recordings.
Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures
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The representation of non-Western cultures in opera has long been a focus of critical inquiry. Within this field, the diverse relationships between opera and First Nations and Indigenous cultures, however, have received far less attention. Opera Indigene takes this subject as its focus, addressing the changing historical depictions of Indigenous cultures in opera and the more contemporary practices of Indigenous and First Nations artists. The use of 're/presenting' in the title signals an important distinction between how representations of Indigenous identity have been constructed in operatic history and how Indigenous artists have more recently utilized opera as an interface to present and develop their cultural practices. This volume explores how operas on Indigenous subjects reflect the evolving relationships between Indigenous peoples, the colonizing forces of imperial power, and forms of internal colonization in developing nation-states. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, ethnomusicology, cultural geography and critical discourses on nationalism and multiculturalism, the collection brings together experts on opera and music in Canada, the Americas and Australia in a stimulating comparative study of operatic re/presentation.
Spirit of the First People
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This book and an accompanying compact disk offer a rare glimpse into Native American sacred traditions of song and dance. Arising from a unique exhibit and live performance at the Northwest Folklife Festival, Spirit of the First People is a collection of personal narratives, stories, and essays on the music of the First People in the region that now encompasses Washington State. From tribe to tribe and reservation to reservation across the state, a wide range of musical genres and individual styles have developed, including social dance songs, game songs, and hymns. Skagit elder Vi Hilbert, a principal adviser to the tribal council and the one who gave the book its name, introduces the collection. Contributors include Bruce-Subiyay Miller (Skokomish), Cliff Sijohn (Spokane, Coeur d'Alene), Jeanette Timentwa (Okanogan) and Rebecca Chamberlain, Virginia Beavert-Martin (Yakima), Brycene Neaman (Yakama), Linda Goodman and Helma Swan (Makah), Loran Olsen, and Willie Smyth. Their narratives provide rich detail about tribal music and its significance, past and present. Roberta Haines (Wenatchee) establishes the historical and political background, noting how spiritual traditions were nurtured by dance and song under conditions of government suppression. Song traditions in the Indian Shaker Church are explored by Pamela Amoss and James Everett Cunningham. Appendixes by Laurel Sercombe, Judith Gray, and William Seaburg outline the work of past ethnographers and describe current efforts to preserve and disseminate the music. This book and compact disk are the result of a multi-year collaboration among the members of Washington State's tribes, Jack Straw Productions, Northwest Folklife, and the Washington State Arts Commission's Folk Arts Program.
Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries
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Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries explores several styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene in the western Canadian province of Manitoba, focusing on fiddling, country music, Christian hymnody, and step dancing. In considering these genres and the contexts in whichthey are performed, author Byron Dueck outlines a compelling theory of musical publics, examines the complex, overlapping social orientations of contemporary musicians, and shows how music and dance play a central role in a distinctive indigenous public culture.Dueck considers a wide range of contemporary aboriginal performances and venues - urban and rural, secular and sacred, large and small. Such gatherings create opportunities for the expression of distinctive modes of northern Algonquian sociability and for the creative extension of indigenouspublicness. In examining these interstitial sites - at once places of intimate interaction and spaces oriented to imagined audiences - this volume considers how Manitoban aboriginal musicians engage with audiences both immediate and unknown; how they negotiate the possibilities mass mediationaffords; and how, in doing so, they extend and elaborate indigenous sociability.Musical Intimacies brings theories of public culture from anthropology and literary criticism into musicological and ethnomusicological discussions while introducing productive new ways of understanding North American indigenous engagement with mass mediation. It is a unique work that will appeal tostudents and scholars of popular music, musicology, music theory, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It will be necessary reading for students of American ethnomusicology, First Nations and Native American studies, and Canadian music studies.
Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America
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Revisioning Indigenous musicology Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America is a collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States. The contributors explore the intersections between music, modernity, and Indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip-hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music. The essays coalesce around four main themes: innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange. Closely related topics include cosmopolitanism, hybridity, alliance studies, code-switching, and ontologies of sound. Featuring the work of both established and emerging scholars, the collection demonstrates the centrality of music in communicating the complex, diverse lived experience of Indigenous North Americans in the twenty-first century and brings ethnomusicology into dialogue with critical Indigenous studies.
The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture
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The SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture presents key concepts in the study of music in its cultural context and provides an introduction to the discipline of ethnomusicology, its methods, concerns, and its contributions to knowledge and understanding of the world′s musical cultures, styles, and practices. The diverse voices of contributors to this encyclopedia confirm ethnomusicology′s fundamental ethos of inclusion and respect for diversity. Combined, the multiplicity of topics and approaches are presented in an easy-to-search A-Z format and offer a fresh perspective on the field and the subject of music in culture. Key features include: Approximately 730 signed articles, authored by prominent scholars, are arranged A-to-Z and published in a choice of print or electronic editions Pedagogical elements include Further Readings and Cross References to conclude each article and a Reader's Guide in the front matter organizing entries by broad topical or thematic areas Back matter includes an annotated Resource Guide to further research (journals, books, and associations), an appendix listing notable archives, libraries, and museums, and a detailed Index The Index, Reader's Guide themes, and Cross References combine for thorough search-and-browse capabilities in the electronic edition
Thank you to the Okanagan College Library's LibGuide on Indigenous Studies, featuring a section on Indigenous Music. You can find their LibGuide, which features additional resources, here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.