Book Review| January 01 2007 Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930. By Alan Trachtenberg. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xxv + 369 pp., preface, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00 cloth.) John W. Troutman John W. Troutman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2007) 54 (1): 197–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2006-046 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation John W. Troutman; Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930. Ethnohistory 1 January 2007; 54 (1): 197–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2006-046 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEthnohistory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. American Society for Ethnohistory2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
Abstract It seemed, in Hawai‘i, that Hawaiian music was in a crisis state by the late 1960s. Neither Hawaiian nor non-Hawaiian residents and tourists seemed to express much interest in the formerly celebrated Hawaiian troupes. Many younger Hawaiians came to negatively associate the steel guitar with Waikiki tourists, Webley Edwards’ “Hawai‘i Calls” radio program, or country music. Some observers such as George Kanahele and Kahauanu Lake became concerned that such a lack of interest in Hawaiian music and language would contribute to a loss of cultural integrity, just as Hawaiians continued to see their lands under siege by military and touristic expansion. Such apprehension, however, soon met a powerful response, a “Hawaiian renaissance,” a movement that would rejuvenate traditional Hawaiian music. While chronicling these developments, this chapter also contemplates the meaning of “traditional” Hawaiian music in the mid- to late-twentieth century, as well as the role of the steel guitar and hapa haole music in the Hawaiian Renaissance and the rise of the kī hō‘alu, or slack key guitar. Featured musicians include Gabby Pahinui, Isreal Kamakawiwo‘ole, Eddie Kamae, Don Ho, Alan Akaka, Genoa Keawe, Jerry Byrd, and David Keli‘i.
The last twenty years have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on the history of American Indian institutional education. The field is enriched by macrolevel education policy studies, microhistories of individual schools, and tribal-specific studies on the impact of state- or missionary-sponsored educational initiatives. In To Win the Indian Heart Melissa D. Parkhurst provides the first comprehensive overview of one school’s musical complex, from the original design of western Oregon’s Forest Grove Indian and Industrial Training School in 1880 through its continued existence, under very different circumstances, as the present-day Chemawa Indian School. Parkhurst sheds new light on the changing uses of music in boarding schools, as well as on the significant changes in curriculum, student demographics, and purpose that have defined the existence of one of the few remaining American Indian boarding schools in the United States.Forest Grove represented one of the earliest efforts by the US government to remove native children from their communities and place them in off-reservation boarding schools. School officials quickly aligned music instruction (and prohibitions) with the assimilationist fervor that guided federal Indian policy in the late nineteenth century. As part of their comprehensive attack on tribal culture, they sought to silence tribally derived music and enforce a regimen of training in marching bands, choirs, and other musical clubs that celebrated Anglo musical traditions. Parkhurst begins her study by recounting how such “compulsory hegemonic devices” (65) generated unforeseen results, as students variously took interest in the musical life enforced within the school, but none did so at the expense of their tribal and/or native identities. The school’s staff was not unique in asserting a relationship between “civilization” and marching bands, orchestras, and choirs, however, and Parkhurst devotes significant attention to other schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, to tell this story. (In fact, the book’s cover features an image from a music class at Carlisle.)As the book progresses, however, Parkhurst reveals the recently renamed Chemawa school’s unique characteristics: by 1920 one-third of the students hailed from Alaska; from 1925 to 1960 Alaska Natives could no longer enroll, with few exceptions; beginning in 1957 and for the next several years, Chemawa came almost exclusively to serve Navajo students; Alaska Natives once again enrolled beginning in 1960; and today more than four hundred students representing seventy Nations are enrolled in the school. Just as student demographics changed dramatically, representing a series of lurches in policy making endemic to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the musical culture shifted dramatically as well. Early on Alaska Natives took prominent roles in campus musical organizations, as many of them had already received training in playing European instruments in missionary schools and in their community-organized brass bands. Large-scale pageants became the order of the day at Chemawa in the early twentieth century, with students often collaborating in off-campus productions with non-Indian organizations. Parkhurst uses the 1928 Meriam Report, critical of the BIA, and the following appointment of reformer John Collier as commissioner of the BIA, to mark a distinctive break in the tenor of Chemawa’s musical productions. Parkhurst demonstrates that after Collier’s appointment pageants originally scripted to celebrate the assimilation agenda transformed into celebrations of Indianness. Other chapters reveal the blossoming of students’ heterogeneous musical tastes. One student, Cherokee vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Clyde “Spade” Cooley, cultivated smashing success as a western swing and television personality before his life unraveled in tragedy. Garage bands became popular in the 1960s, with faculty serving as de facto managers and booking agents for off-campus gigs. Campus powwows with large regional draws gained centrality in the ensuing years. Today, relatives and members of the local native population donate regalia for the dancers, while both male and female students sit behind the drums. Their Chemawa, Parkhurst writes, and their music instruction are now “tenacious and Indian oriented” (171). Because many current students come from challenging backgrounds that include gang affiliation and addiction, the healing power of music and dance that Chemawa’s campus now generates could not come soon enough. Parkhurst’s focus on musical performance at Chemawa provides a unique view into a long century of dramatic change in American Indian education.
Powwow Get access Powwow. Edited by Ellis Clyde Lassiter Luke Eric Dunham Gary H.. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xv + 309 pp. Notes, bibliographies, index. $45.00, £15.50, paper.) John W. Troutman John W. Troutman University of Louisiana at Lafayette Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 1, Spring 2007, Pages 72–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/38.1.72 Published: 01 February 2007
Journal Article Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at Bacone College Get access By Lisa K. Neuman. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. xxiv, 376 pp. $50.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 238–239, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw112 Published: 01 June 2016
Abstract This chapter considers the introduction and history of the Spanish guitar within the political and cultural contexts of the Hawaiian Kingdom during the mid- to late-eighteenth century. It demonstrates the musical dynamism in Honolulu, in the Kamehameha Schools, and in other places in the Hawaiian Islands that prefigured the development of the Hawaiian steel guitar, and it contextualizes the emerging Hawaiian “guitar culture,” then, that Hawaiians deployed to resist American efforts to undermine the kingdom. It also features the tensions between Calvinist missionaries, foreign sailors, and Hawaiians over hula and other musical practices, including hula ku‘i, a form of Hawaiian musical expression promoted by King David Kalākaua and defined by the use of guitars, ‘ukuleles, taro patch fiddles, and other stringed instruments newly utilized in the Islands.
Abstract This chapter focuses upon the interwar years, when musicians and dancers formed a strong Pacific Islander community in Southern California, one that fostered a sense of camaraderie and belonging, and enabled them to work in the motion picture studios and nightclubs that increasingly sought their labor. It also traces this community’s role in influencing guitar design innovations exhibited by Weissenborn, National, and Rickenbacker guitars, which led to the first mass produced electric guitar. Hawaiian musicians such as Sol Ho‘opi‘i, Eddie Bush, and Dick, Al, and Lani McIntire thrived in Hollywood and later in New York City at the Hotel Lexington during this period, although they continued to face significant challenges. While they expanded the American public’s interest in the steel guitar, particularly through the new mediums of radio, “Polynesian” clubs, and motion pictures, they continued to face an industry unwilling to acknowledge their talent and strong work ethic and uninterested in distinguishing their music from the offensive, pseudo-Hawaiian songs peddled by non-Hawaiian songwriters.
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