Conference Agenda

Theodore Baker\'s dissertation on Native American music has been omnipresent in music studies since its publication. It was a model for emerging twentieth century ethnologists, a seminal benchmark for those writing the history of ethnomusicology in the mid-to-late century, and later a primary source to analyze non-Native composers’ musical borrowing. To date, Baker\'s work has not been the focus of rematriation movements that have reassessed ethnographic audio recordings.

This paper demonstrates how to critically reread Baker\'s dissertation in order to assess its capacity for community reclamation. I reorganize his writing to combine his generalized analysis of Native American music with his melodic transcriptions. Baker\'s transcriptions are melodic with limited rhythmic or harmonic context. His prose, however, contains both generalized and song-specific analyses of rhythmic and vocal accompaniments. In that writing, Baker argues that Native music is primarily homorhythmic and not significantly polyphonic. These beliefs ground his decision not to systematically transcribe the non-melodic sounds he observed, creating a model that many proto-ethnomusicoloigsts followed for decades.

I posit that it is possible to reinterpret the songs in Baker\'s dissertation by combining the transcribed melodies with rhythmic and vocal descriptions from the written analysis. I re-notate two of Baker\'s transcriptions, an Iroquois dance and an Iroquois Thanksgiving song, and I offer a comparison on the overall sonic textures between the original and re-notated versions. This exercise has two main purposes. Primarily, I argue that reinterpreting transcribed songs and the possibilities of their sonic contexts may help Native communities assess their suitability for rematriation. But I also use this approach to discuss the ethical implications of scholarly analysis as a tool for community reclamation, inspired by recent discourses toward Indigenous methodologies in studies by scholars like Dylan Robinson and Jessica Bissett-Perea. Early Native American musical research like Baker\'s dissertation are appropriately scrutinized for their Eurocentric analyses and questionable authority and ethics. This paper is a case study in critically disentangling what we are able to learn from such sources from their problematic frameworks.

In 1875, seventy-two Indigenous people from different tribal nations were captured as prisoners of war and transported from their homes on the Central Plains to Fort Marion, a military fortress in St. Augustine, Florida. There, they were the subject of an experimental prison education project run by Civil War brigadier general Richard Henry Pratt, who used the “success” of this program to gain federal support to open the Carlisle Indian Industrial School a few years later. As part of the public-facing programming at Fort Marion, prisoners often performed in pageants, including both their own musics as well as garish exoticizations to entice white spectators. During one of these pageants, the incarcerated Kiowa artist Etahdleuh Doanmoe sang what was described by Pratt as a “love song” in his native language: the performance elicited such a raucous response that he was compelled to repeat it over and over again.

This remarkable story from the history of Indigenous experiences of education in the nineteenth century takes on another layer of significance in light of the fact that seemingly the same song appears in Theodore Baker’s dissertation, Über die Musik der Nordamerikanischer Wilden, for which Baker had conducted much of his field work at the Carlisle School itself—where Doanmoe had travelled, along with Pratt, in 1879. Furthermore, as has been marked in musicological discourse, in 1892 the well-known “Indianist” composer Edward MacDowell interpolated a small fragment of Baker’s transcription of the Kiowa song in the Largo of his Indian Suite. This paper reconsiders this citational constellation by centering Etahdleuh Doanmoe and the Kiowa experience of assimilationist education more broadly. Based on original archival research in federal and boarding school archives, engagement with Indigenous studies literature on musical rematriation, as well as ongoing collaborative interpretation with [Gáui[dóñ:gyà (the Language Department of the Kiowa Nation), this paper reframes Doanmoe’s song, not as a bit of Dvořákian “raw material” to be extracted by researchers and subsequently “developed” by art music composers, but as a complex resource for the generation of Kiowa memory and geographies beyond the carceral institutions within which it has been bound.

Theodore Baker included two Cheyenne songs in the notated examples of his 1882 dissertation. Categorized as “war songs” (Kriegslied der Cheyennes), one song (song XXV) combines vocables with a text translated as “Friends – stone – always remain firm – forward.” The second song (song XXVI) sets vocables only and features a descending melody similar to other war songs collected from Native peoples from the northern and southern Plains.

It is not known who sang the Cheyenne songs for Baker when he visited Carlisle in the summer of 1880. This paper explores the most likely consultants: adult Cheyenne students Henry Roman Nose and Walter Matches, also referred to as the “Florida boys” in some Carlisle records. Both men had been incarcerated at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, before being institutionalized at Carlisle in 1879, where they remained during the summer of 1880. In his writing for the school newspaper, Roman Nose describes going to war as a teenager with his father against the Pawnees. He and Matches later participated in demonstrations of Native warfare at Fort Marion, where the incarcerated men were forced to perform. According to a settler newspaper from April of 1880, both men subsequently sang with their fellow Cheyenne students at Carlisle in an exhibition of Native music and dance.

With these potential consultants in mind, I consider how the Cheyenne war songs in Baker’s dissertation point to the shifting contexts of “war” in nineteenth-century Cheyenne experience: from the intertribal and settler colonial warfare on the Plains to the performative labor endured in institutionalized contexts. All of these settings required persistence and courage. One needed to be resolute like a stone, to move forward with intention, and to take courage from friends and allies. Perhaps the war songs that Baker heard at Carlisle were sung not just for him but also to nurture continued strength in the men who sang them.