The Indian Congress at Omaha in 1898
In conjunction with this event was the Congress of Musicians, attended by one of the most influential ethnologists of music, Alice Fletcher. The Congress of Musicians consisted of many ethnographers and other specialists in music attending daily sessions where they observed concerts held at this Omaha Congress. Fletcher recorded many Indigenous songs that she heard at the congress, later transcribing them and thereby extracting these tunes from any sociocultural context. She made the tunes palatable to white people, later publishing them in a book called Indian Story and Song from North America and turning a profit. In the preface for this book, she notes the “scientific value” (Fletcher, 1900, viii) of these songs, thereby disregarding the cultural values and people behind it, reducing indigenous culture and experiences to a useful statistic – useful, that is, to white people. At one point, Fletcher outright acknowledged that white people can benefit from this music, noting the Indigenous songs’ “availability as themes, novel and characteristics for the American composer” (Fletcher, 1900, viii). This act of extraction and transcription for personal benefit is a very common form of epistemic violence found in the colonial underpinnings of ethnomusicology, as it removes the piece from cultural context, often fails to cite the creator, and generally uses it for the larger benefit of westerners, keeping it from the rightful owners, sometimes for decades.
This world’s fair was an atrocity in its own right, displaying Indigenous people as “primitive” and “savage.” These people were made to recreate battles in mock Indigenous villages, forced to pretend to fight with cowboys (the “Cowboys vs Indians” exhibit, where the Indigenous people were portrayed as savages who attacked heroic, noble white men and lost), and, overall, were used as entertainment for profit.
These atrocities seem so far in the past, but they affect the way our world works today. The academic colonialism demonstrated in this event has not gone away, and even the language often used in more recent ethnomusicological literature demonstrates this academic colonialism. For example, typically white, educated, and privileged ethnomusicologists travel to other countries to ‘study’ certain ‘subjects’ and conduct 'research.' These words are in quotes because, despite being widely used in many fields and seeming relatively harmless, they can be interpreted as having a hint of condescension in them. Oftentimes, these research projects or studies do little to benefit the people who are being studied. This is extraction, and this practice has become so normalized that many people have only just started to question whether or not, as privileged Americans, we have the right to explore this music and this culture, and more importantly, why we feel entitled to this knowledge or experience. The history of white saviorism and epistemic violence is still relevant and continual today, and these ideologies and habits need to continue to be looked at critically.