Native American Arts and Culture

"Inspired by elements of Navajo culture ... Each piano piece is preceded by a short introductory passage in Navajo. These passages are accompanied by Native American flute and piano."

R. Carlos Nakai's first album of solo Native American flute music since 2008. An 11-time Grammy nominee, Nakai (Navajo-Ute) has sold over 4.5 million albums in his 35-year exploration of the expressiveness of the traditional flute. Continuing his lifelong service of providing peace and healing through his art, Nakai created Nocture to be enjoyed on continuous play in an endless soudscape of tranquility and reflection.

Contents: In me (Paola Prestini remix) / Tongues (Backxwash remix) -- Tongues (Daedelus remix) -- Colonizer (Joel Tarman remix) / Colonizer (The Halluci Nation remix) -- I forgive me (July Talk remix) -- Earth monster (Chad Van Gaalen remix) -- Earth monster (Dave Parley remix) -- Earth monster (Ash Koosha remix).

Contents: In me -- Tongues -- Colonizer -- Teeth agape -- Birth -- I forgive me -- Nuclear -- Do not fear love -- Earth monster -- Colonizer :

Contents: The crossing -- Walk with me -- Uangilaa -- Tikitaummata -- Winder's dream -- Do set free -- Ada -- Journey home -- Into the light -- Forever young -- People's soul (Arviat) -- Ataniq quagilippagit (thank you lord).

Contents: She calls me (3:56) -- Tall grass (3:55) -- The healer (3:52) -- Skoden (3:34) -- Light me up (2:59) -- Cut my hair (4:55) -- No breaking (3:46) -- AK47 (3:58) -- Sweetwater (5:40).

Subject Term: Jazz -- 1981-1990.
Contents: Witchi tia to (8:22) -- Ya na ho (3:01) -- Squaw song (5:25) -- Goin' down to Muskogee (5:50) -- Comin' and goin' (4:41) -- Lakota song (4:23) -- Water (5:40) -- Custer gets it (3:02) -- Malinyea (4:15).

Contents: Interlude 1 -- Seeseepano -- Interlude 2 -- Bringing the fire -- Interlude 3 -- Long gone -- Interlude 4 -- War cry -- Interlude 5 -- Here I am -- Interlude 6 -- Bones -- Interlude 7 -- River -- Interlude 8 -- We were here -- Interlude 9 -- Ego death -- Nomads.

The second full-length album from Black Belt Eagle Scout. 10 Indigenous Musicians You Should Listen To Now from Berklee Online.

Reggae Music: Ideal -- Last train -- Rez cop -- Brother Leonard (set him free) -- Mighty rebels -- If you're ready -- Honor the people -- Who is the enemy -- Babylon world -- Love life -- Ideal dub -- Rez dub.

Reggae Music: How the west was won -- No dibi dibi -- Don't dem dnow -- Rub-a-dub style -- Hopiland winter -- Make it rain -- Hopiland girls ; Interlude: Staying high! -- Jealousy -- No Indian -- Crossing the borders -- Sounds of reality -- Hopiland dub.

Pop and hip-hop rhythms meet reggae vibes and gospel lyrics on Hoka, an uplifting and philosophy-filled LP where the average lyric goes as deep as "The more I understand about the human race/The less I understand about our purpose and place." For Nahko and his band, think Michael Franti and Spearhead but through the lens of a man who's been a victim of human trafficking and was raised white, only to learn of his Apache heritage later in life. Heavy numbers like "The Wolves Have Returned" reveal that these scars run deep, but uplift is all there is to be found on "Love Letters to God," which Darius Rucker could pick up, while the cool rocker "We Are on Time" is Dave Matthews Band worthy. Add Hawaiian elements and Nanko's cutting raps and there's almost too much to consume, but the tangled and bewildering Hoka is also dazzling and unclassifiable. (ALL MUSIC GUIDE)

In a career built on reflective, deeply personal songwriting, Nahko's extraordinary new album, 'Take Your Power Back' (May 15, 2020), stands as far and away his most profound, revelatory, and fully realized collection yet. Recorded in Los Angeles and Executive Produced by cut and dry, the record grapples with grief, trauma, and reconciliation, learning to face heartache head on and embrace the peace and serenity that comes with understanding and acceptance. As heavy as all that may sound, 'Take Your Power Back' is as uplifting and infectious as anything Nahko has ever released, blending socially conscious folk and rock with soulful, alt-R and B, genre-bending production.

Songs, Hawaiian

Contents: Jammer from the slammer -- B.E. son -- Easy on the cide -- Bezhigo -- No chants -- Can key -- Jr. Flip -- Turned engine / Ch. 1222 -- Phil's offering.

Cree. Genre: Powwow Songs; Folk Songs; Folk Music. Contents: Kakike Hopelessly devoted Skatin I don't know what to do Lullaby for Ambrose Uncle's hand game song Singing and praying Ahâsiw hop TG The late Charlie Wood II's round dance song Hope

"10 Indigenous Musicians You Should Listen To Now" from Berklee Online.

Jeremy Dutcher's album serves as an intervention in the ripples of shame and fear that have, over time, buried tradition. Under the guidance of Maggie Paul, one of his Nation's song-carriers, Dutcher took century-old wax cylinder recordings in Wolastoq from the archives at the Canadian Museum of History, and transformed them into a masterpiece of musical imagination, blending his own voice with the voices of his ancestors. (NPR 50 Best Albums 2018) Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa stirs something in the listener that cannot be ignored. It's the sheer beauty of the sound of the Wolastoq language, whose vowels Dutcher stretches across continents with his soaring voice and whose words you do not have to understand to feel their depth. And it's the knowledge that true reconciliation is about more than land and money, it is about identity and therefore about art. It is about raising the voices of those who have been silenced through history and opening our ears to listen. —Talia Schlanger (WXPN's World Cafe)

Over time many Native American tribes have developed a shared musical culture that is prominently audible on local, national, and international stages. In Intertribal Native American Music in the United States, ethnomusicologist and GRAMMY® Award-winning musician Dr. John-Carlos Perea shows how traditional sounds, such as pow-wow and Native American flute songs, have developed in tandem with increasingly recognizable forms like Native jazz and rock. Perea provides an in-depth look at how Northern and Southern Plains pow-wow practices represent a singular performance encompassing disparate stories and sounds. The result is the only brief text that makes clear the interconnectedness of Native American music through a dynamic and thorough analysis of how it began and where it is headed. Intertribal Native American Music in the United States is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present.

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.

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. 

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

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.

Inside Dazzling Mountains provides fresh new translations of Native oral literatures of the Southwest, a region of vital and varied cultures and languages. The collection features songs, stories, chants, and orations from the four major language groups of the Southwest: Yuman, Nadíne (Apachean), Uto-Aztecan, and Kiowa-Tanoan. It combines translations of recordings made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a rich array of newly recorded and produced materials, attesting to the continued vitality and creativity of contemporary Native languages in the Southwest. For southwestern linguistic and cultural traditions to be more widely recognized and appreciated, retranslations of older works have been sorely needed. Original translations were often flawed and culturally biased and made use of literary conventions that were familiar to Anglo-Americans but foreign to the Native tribes themselves. Inside Dazzling Mountains corrects these flaws and celebrates the diversity of Native languages spoken in the Southwest today. Skillfully edited and translated by David L. Kozak, who offers a wealth of editorial tools for interpreting songs, song sets, myths, stories, and chants of the Southwest, past and present, this volume contributes to the continued vitality and cultural complexity of the region.

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.

Emory Sekaquaptewa dedicated most of his life to promoting Hopi literacy and creating written materials to strengthen the language and lifeway of his people. He understood how intimately cultural ideas are embedded in language, and by transcribing and translating early recordings of katsina songs he helped strengthen the continuity of Hopi religious thought and cultural practices. Sekaquaptewa believed that the advice contained in the katsina songs, some of which were recorded over a century ago, could be used by future generations as guideposts for navigating contemporary life.   Hopi Katsina Songs contains Hopi transcriptions, English translations, and detailed commentaries of 150 katsina songs, recorded throughout the twentieth century from all three Hopi mesas, as well as twenty-five recorded by Sekaquaptewa himself. To further continue the creative process of the Hopi legacy, Sekaquaptewa included song fragments with the hope that readers would remember the songs and complete them. These features make his collection an invaluable resource for preserving and teaching Hopi language and culture.