Sousa and the Sioux - I am reminded

Last week, walking the maze of streets that made up the old part of city downtown, we came across the Museum of the Native American, or at least the part of the collection that was left in New York after the bulk of it was moved to Washington.

Even so 'depleted', the range of exhibits from all across the Americas pays tribute to the inventiveness of human design, as you compare differences in dress and other artefacts from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.

I was particularly struck by this outfit worn by British lieutenant, Andrew Foster when he was inducted ('adopted') into the Anishinaabe in the Upper Great Lakes area in the late 1700s

I would wonder about the sensitivities around showing this image except for the fact that the outfit looks like an  'interpretation' of European dress, a tunic with a collar, albeit topped by a feathered headdress.

Which all reminds me that I should check up and see what's happened with Sousa and the Sioux, another story of contact that I mentioned to an orchestra out West some months ago.

In December 1890 , the United States army killed 150 men, women and children of the Lakota Sioux and wounded 51 others (some of whom died later) at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Ethnologist James Mooney wrote a report on the massacre, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, which was printed in the Smithsonian's fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1896. Mooney located the source of the massacre in army suppression of a religion known as the Ghost Dance which was taking hold in Indian nations in the closing years of the 19th century.The Ghost Dance religion prophesied a peaceful end to white expansion, although its spread at the same time that the government was moving the Sioux onto smaller reservations to accommodate westward expansion, alarmed some settlers.

Mooney's report displays an astonishing sympathy with Native American culture for the 1890s and his empathy is further demonstrated in the fact that the archival cylinder recordings of Sioux and Shoshone songs accompaning the report are not actually by Native Americans, but Mooney himself. Singing them in the Berliner Studio back in Washington must have involved an extraordinary feat of memory.

But what most strikes me most about Mooney's report is that half of the musical transcriptions of the 50+ pages of Ghost Dance chants are by John Philip Sousa - Sousa, the march king, the composer of patriotic, if not tub-thumping, chauvinistic marches, who would produce The Stars and Stripes Forever and Liberty Bell within the not-so-distant future.You wonder how this assignment might have marked him for later life. Where was he in his career at this stage? Did he talk/write about this work? Did he and Mooney correspond/sit down together? Do we know what he thought? After all, he later wrote those patriotic marches.

At the time I was first thinking of this piece I had no answers to these questions. Except that, in a 1920 edition of Theodore Presser's magazine The Etude, there is an article by a Sioux called Red Cloud which says, in part: 'When I came back to America I became more and more interested in music...and finally achieved my great ambition to play [Sousaphone] in the Sousa band. Mr  Sousa must have an inborn feeling for the Indian because in his famous suite Dwellers in the Western World he has an Indian section which, although composed of themes which are entirely original with him, have all the characteristics of Indian music quite as though some departed Indian spirits had inspired him...' Did Sousa and Red Cloud ever discuss their relationship to Wounded Knee?

All these connections suggested music to me. Among other issues, a performance work could try to answer the question: 'how did transcribing the Ghost Dance chants contained in a report on a massacre affect Sousa's sympathies?' The opposite pull of traditional dances and patriotic marches also provides a clue to a musical plan for a piece.

Most recently I wrote to the Sousa Archive in Chicago to see what they may hold in their collection. They told me additionally that Sousa had been named an honorary chief on July 30, 1925 by the Fire Hills Indian Reserve, then by the Ponca Tribe on October 12, 1928, and for a third time by the Pawnee Tribe on May 16, 1931. Were these publicity type demonstrations, or were they expressions of genuine sympathy? Another thread to explore.

The Archive said that unfortunately there was no specific correspondence documenting Sousa's thoughts on Native American music. But there may be interesting references in the Sousa Band press clipping. That it might be worth coming to Chicago to conduct some further research. Indeed it might.