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Sounding Decolonial Futures: Decentering Ethnomusicology's Colonialist Legacies

Example Lesson plan: Indigenous Storytelling

Learning Objectives:

To understand whose story we are hearing and how it is not ours
To understand the power of storytelling for passing on knowledge and understanding
To learn about people who live in Colorado
To learn about Indigenous perspectives including the concepts of reciprocity and the interconnectedness of all things
To understand that everyone has an important story to tell
To create a story

Resources and Materials:

Procedure:

Initial guiding questions: (5min)
What do you think a creation story is?
Why are stories important?
Explain a brief history of the Ute (who are the Ute?) (5min)
- They once occupied most of what we consider Utah and Colorado. Utah is named after the Ute.
- Today, there are three Ute tribal reservations Utah and Colorado which have a combined population of 7,000. The majority of Ute live on these reservations with limited resources compared to their original lands, although some reside off-reservation.
- Explain positionality of the group and yourself (who are we?) (5min)
  - I am a non-indigenous settler teaching on stolen land of the Ute. The lessons I am going to teach you are not mine, but are authored by Ute Spiritual Leader Larry Cesspooch . We are all (or many of us are) non-indigenous settlers. This is not our story but as people living on this land, it is important that we learn from it.
Tell the Ute creation story as told by Larry Cesspooch who was told this story by his grandmother. Use movement and props to help students visualize the narrative. Explain how the story was passed down from generation to generation without being written down(10min)
Ask Guiding questions (10min)
- What do you think we can learn from this story? What can it tell us about the world?
  - How did I tell this story? What did I do to help you picture it?
  - Do any of you have stories you remember your relatives telling you? (ask for volunteers to share)
  - Discuss what the benefits are of passing stories down orally without writing them down
  - Guide conversation towards introducing the concept of reciprocity and interconnectedness which are central themes of the story
    - What makes a good story?
    - Characters, conflict, important lesson
Break students into small groups of 3-4 and have them come up with their own story using the elements we came up with. (30min)
Have them write down big plot points to help with memory but do not allow them to write down the story word for word. We are practicing an oral tradition.
Have them divide the story into sections so they can each participate in the telling of the story
Have them come up with movements to help visualize the story
Have each group tell their story to the class (20 min)

More Resources:

An Educator’s Guide to Ute Tribal Paths- From the History Colorado Center
Teaching Native American Histories
Culture Based Education Through Storytelling- From the National Indian Education Association

I chose to focus on the Ute creation story because I wanted to make sure that I was centering place and this lesson plan will be used in the summer of 2022 in Colorado. The creation story was one of the only ones I could find that I could verify was told by an Indigenous person for the purpose of sharing with non-indigenous people. I transcribed a story from a TedTalk given by Larry Cesspooch who was very explicit about wanting people to learn from this story and continue telling it so it can reach a wider audience. Ideally, lesson plans should be made in collaboration with Indigenous people, however, on short notice, this was the best I could do.

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Educational Compositions 12 Compositions made for use in the classroom using Indigenous material plain 2022-06-07T20:23:06+00:00
In the early 1900’s in the United States, the philosophy behind music education shifted from teaching theory through written exercises to teaching theory through rote song (Parker). This new approach called for short melodies that highlighted and taught different aspects of “western” classical music theory. During this time, there was also a strong desire for music that strengthened the emerging national identity (Tomlins 1927: iii). These two factors pushed publishers of American songbooks to include what they thought were appropriate representations of Indigenous music. The first of these song books was called The Laurel Music Series. Created by William L.Tomlins, it was published in 1901 and contained compositions by Arthur Farwell that were based on transcriptions made by Alice Fletcher (Levine 2002: xxxi). In 1914, the Progressive Music Series edited by Horatio Parker was published. This songbook contained “The Eskimo Hunter” and “The Indian Song,” both of which had English lyrics. “The Eskimo Hunter” was based on an arrangement by John Phillip Sousa of transcriptions made by Franz Boas that were originally published in his book, The Central Eskimo. In many cases, the music listed in these musical readers as ‘Indian Folk Song’ were altered to fit a major or minor tonality in order to teach western music theory. The resulting compositions, while made digestible for colonial ears and eyes, had little to no resemblance of the music they claimed to represent.
Francis Densmore and Alice C. Fletcher both published books based on their fieldwork that were meant to be used in schools. Fletcher published her book Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs in 1915. The purpose of this book was to help children, and Americans in general “learn to feel at home with the winds, the clouds, the fields and the woods” by learning about the “ancient people” who lived on the land originally (Fletcher 1915: 3). Here, her use of the word “ancient” completely disregards the continued existence of Indigenous peoples and plays into the common belief at the time that Indigenous peoples and cultures were disappearing which was used as a justification for salvage ethnography. In the first chapter of the book, Fletcher describes not being able to hear the melodies in Indigenous Peoples music until her “Indian friends” sang to her while she was ill. After this experience she says she “never failed to catch the hidden melody” (Fletcher 1915: 4). With this statement, she shows how she made the decision to emphasize the parts of the music that she struggled to make out over the “tumultuous din” (Fletcher 1915: 4), referring to the non-western qualities of Indigenous sounds. Additionally, she explains her choice to add words to melodies, even when there were none there to begin with, because “unaccustomed as we are to the use of songs that have no words…we would lose much pleasure when singing them. To obviate the perplexities arising from the Indian’s peculiar treatment of words and to make clear the meaning of a song, words have been supplied” (Fletcher 5). Despite these actions of cultural appropriation and cultural erasure, she acknowledges that what she has presented in the book does not “stand alone or apart from the ceremonials or pleasures of which they form an essential feature” (Fletcher 6). She also states that anyone participating in the dances, for which she wrote instructions in a published book meant to be consumed by a western audience, “should never attempt to imitate what is supposed to be the Indian’s manner of singing or his dancing steps and postures…the result would probably be an unmeaning burlesque” (Fletcher 8).
Contrastingly, Densmore's Indian Action Songs published in 1921 specifically calls for “Pantomimic Representation in Schools and Community Assemblies” (Densmore 1). Using her field recordings and experiences from her time spent with the Chippewa, Densmore created a short play complete with songs, actions, and explanations. It was published by the American Ethnology Society and permission to use the melodies, which had been previously published, was granted by the chief of the society at the time, Jesse Walter Feweks. Notably, there is no mention of permissions granted by the tribes from which the information was taken in the first place. There is a long history of Indigenous knowledge and music being appropriated for use in schools. Even to this day, the practice continues. While it is important to recognize and learn from Indigenous knowledge, it is damaging when such knowledge is taken from its original context without permission and altered to be digestible for non-Indigenous ears for the benefit of non-Indigenous people. It is important to learn from Indigenous knowledge but only when it is done in a collaborative way with Indigenous people at the center. To see some examples of how to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into educational settings please visit Steps to Revise a Lesson Plan and Indigenous Storytelling withing Educational Contexts.

Works Cited
- Densmore, Francis. 1921. Indian Action Song. Boston: C.C. Birchard & CO.
- Fletcher, Alice. 1915. Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs. Boston: C.C. Birchard & Company.
- Levine, Victoria Lindsay, ed. 2002. Introduction from Writing American Indian Music: Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements. Middleton, Wis.: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc.
- Parker, Horatio; McConathy, Osbourne; Birge, Edward; and Meissner, Otto W. 1916. The Progressive Music Series Teacher's Manual. Boston, New York, Chicago: Silver, Burdett, and Company.
- Tomlins, W.L. The Laurel Song Book. 1927. Boston: C.C. Birchard & Company.