Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850 - 1930)
Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850 - 1930) spearheaded the use of the phonograph in the “research” of Native American cultures. Fewkes focused his work on capturing Native American sounds through audio recording devices, such as the phonograph. He is credited with being the first person to record with a phonograph in the field during a trip to Maine where he worked among the Passamaquoddy and recorded one of his largest collections of wax cylinders (Hough 1932). The trip was a test of the technology before embarking on more extensive “expeditions” in the southwest. His work amongst the Pueblo Indians, including the Zuni, became his focus (1890).
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His “research” focused on collecting songs, celebrations and other events that could be recorded on a phonograph. Fewkes's work would inspire other significant figures in the movement of preserving indigenous cultures such as Benjamin Ives Gilman,who analyzed the use of intervals outside Euro-American tunings in Fewkes's recordings. However, Fewkes conducted “research” in a colonizing manner that wrought epistemic violence upon the musics he encountered. This epistemic violence can be found in the erasure of Indigenous musical contexts and epistemologies.
Prior to engaging in the field of ethnology, Fewkes's main area of study was zoology; he spent four years in Leipzig, Germany studying zoology from 1871-1875. Fewkes’s previous areas of study influenced heavily his work in Ethnography. In his writings about the Passamaquoddy tribe in Maine, he often refers to the “dying out” of their “language, manners and customs” (Fewkes 1890a: 688). His writings and articles describing the Passamaquoddy tribe’s culture deny coeval existence of settlers and indigenous people. This practice of ethnologists publishing writings documenting Native American life as if it were in the past was very common in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. As Sterne points out, this effect feeds the practice of “othering” Indigenous Peoples (Sterne 2003). The denial of coeval existence is defined by the colonialist attitude of refusing to acknowledge Indigenous groups as existing at the same time as a “modern,” settler society. This is done through setting Indigenous groups as “others” who belong to the past within a linear idea of evolution.
Fewkes's background in zoology undoubtedly had a significant effect on his research of the Passamaquoddy tribe. Although he recorded a prolific number of Passamaquoddy voices, he chose to accompany each recording with a transcription and his own observations and interpretations as if they are fact. Take the Passamaquoddy “Snake Song,” for example. In the description of the “Snake Song” recording, Fewkes says, “While there is nothing to prove that it is a remnant of an ancient snake worship, still it is natural to presume that such is the case” (Fewkes 1890b: 270). Much of Fewkes’s work is similar to the game “telephone,” passing through other ethnographers such as W. Wallace Brown, an agent for the Passamaquoddy tribe based in Calais, Maine. Information became distorted and thus likely to be inaccurate to the original person.
To attempt to understand Native American cultures, Fewkes utilized western rhetoric to find analogues between EuroAmerican culture and Native American culture. In other words, Fewkes analyzed indigenous practices through his EuroAmerican lens. Another assumption Fewkes publishes noted that “it may be presumed that it (the Snake Dance of the Passamaquoddy) originally had a religious importance similar to that of the Snake Dances of the Southwest, since the extent of the worship of the snake among North American Indians is known” (Fewkes 1890b: 278). In his writings, Fewkes conflates cultures, denying the individuality of different tribes. In addition, he used analogues to western faith structures in his analysis, but also compared traditions from tribes of the southwestern United States for the study of the Passamaquoddy in New England (Hough 1932: 261-267). Such qualifications and presumptuous descriptions tied to cultural practices, stolen from the original owners, besmirches the meaning and heart of the original owners, erasing their identity and ownership and incurring epistemic violence.
Fewkes had a heavy influence over the sonic colonization and appropriation of several Native American tribes such as the Zuñi and Hopi tribes, not to mention the Passamaquody. These living peoples and their cultural practices were pronounced dead, and their definitions and identities changed in the western eye over the course of ethnographer's “research” over them.
Works Cited:
- Fewkes, Jesse Walter. 1890a. “On the Use of the Phonograph Among the Zuni Indians.” The American Naturalist 24(283):687-691.
- Fewkes, Jesse Walter. 1890b. “A Contribution of Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore” The Journal of American Folklore 3(11): 257-280.
- Hough, Walter. 1932. “Biographical Memoir of Jesse Walter Fewkes.” National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Biographical Memoirs. Volume XV - Ninth Memoir. 261-267.
- Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. “A Resonant Tomb” in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press. 287-333.
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