ojibwe music #2

This is a bit complicated and I hope I get it right! In the second volume of Gilfillan's scrap book, there is an article that he clipped from a 1902 edition of the New York paper, The Evening Post. The title of the article is 'The Music of the Ojibway Indians: Aboriginal Tunes on the Scene of Longfellow's "Hiawatha"' and it discusses a composer called Frederick R. Burton ('of Yonkers, N.Y.'), who had had been studying Ojibwe music and had made arrangements of some of the songs he had heard.

In the opening years of the twentieth century, at the instigation of one Louis Olivier Armstrong, a company of Native American performers had begun to enact scenes from "Hiawatha" with dialogue in Ojibwe. The performances took place at Desbarats, Ontario, and subsequently also at Little Traverse Bay, Michigan. Armstrong worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and the performances seem to have been, at least in part, intended to draw tourists. Burton became involved with these productions when a tour of urban centres was planned for 1903 and he agreed to arrange the music. So, I guess the article in The Evening Post must have been part of the publicity for the tour.

I'll post something about the article in The Evening Post later. What's pretty cool is that our man, Michael McNally, who wrote the book about Ojibwe hymn-singing, did an article on these Native language performances of "Hiawatha" in a 2006 edition of the journal, American Quarterly. I can probably get hold of that through the university library but, at any rate, the abstract is freely available and this is it:

Each summer from 1901 to 1918, and intermittently thereafter through 1965, Odawa and Ojibwe actors in Northern Ontario and Michigan took part in operatic Native language performances of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha financed by area railroads and captured on silent film. While audiences and reviewers understood the pageants to validate the reality of Longfellow's representations of vanished noble savages and while Native actors peformed this script for pay in lean times, a closer look at their offstage lives, their onstage improvisations, and especially their humor reveals that these were also Indians playing Indian for Indian reasons. In an era of assimilation policies that outlawed drumming, dancing, and ceremony in public, and on stages designed to render them absent as twentieth century Native people, the actors insinuated their presence in heavily ramified, if subtle, ways. Crucially, performances enabled them to embody and thereby maintain a musical and dance repertoire associated with peoplehood and power, that could be rekindled with greater sovereignty by subsequent generations.

Interesting, no? And worth bearing in mind while reading the account of Ojibwe music developed in the 1902 newspaper.