Music Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2796
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Item "These Songs will Save our Language": Reclaiming Kiowa Language and Music through Kiowa Sound Resurgence(2023) Yamane, Maxwell Hiroshi; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the intersection of Indigenous language reclamation and music, primarily among the Kiowa Tribe. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, music/language analysis, and participatory action research, I show how music plays a key role in the resurgence of Kiowa language and identity. I begin in Washington, D.C. by revealing how Kiowas (and other Indigenous Peoples) strategically use their own modes of storytelling and music making to resist the imposition of settler colonial narratives. Indigenous performers reclaim stories about their language initiatives and challenge problematic congressional language planning and policy. The dissertation then moves towards Oklahoma and examines the language efforts of a community-based institution: the Kiowa Language and Culture Revitalization Program (KLCRP). I show how KLCRP used Kiowa Christian hymns—which are performed in the Kiowa language and musical style— as a pedagogical approach to revive and strengthen forms of Kiowa sound and audibility, including speech, music making, storytelling, and listening. I frame the recovery of these practices as Kiowa sound resurgence. I explore the multiple ways in which Kiowas engaged in Kiowa sound resurgence through traditional and non-traditional pedagogies before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This dissertation contributes to interdisciplinary dialogues in ethnomusicology, Native American and Indigenous studies, and linguistic anthropology on Indigenous language reclamation and music scholarship. The case study of Kiowa sound resurgence illuminates how Kiowas creatively reclaim, revive, and resurge sound through Kiowa ways of knowing, doing, and being. The findings of this dissertation have relevance to both academia and Indigenous communities who are actively engaging in efforts of cultural reclamation and resurgence.Item "Songs to Soothe a Mother": Intertextuality and Intertribalism in Kiowa War Mother Songs(2018) Yamane, Maxwell Hiroshi; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)War Mother songs were first composed for the women of the Kiowa War Mothers Chapter 18 organization during World War II by two main composers, Lewis Toyebo and James “Jimmy A” Anquoe. These songs initially functioned to provide encouragement for both the servicemen deploying overseas and their mothers, and later were performed to honor returning veterans. Through musical and linguistic elements, War Mother songs serve as an intertext of multiple pre-reservation songs and dances (War Journey, Scalp, and Victory), but also reflect changes in warfare and post-reservation lifestyle in the twentieth-century. After World War II into the Korean and Vietnam Wars, War Mother song performances continued to honor veterans, both returning and fallen in battle, in a mix of Kiowa contexts and intertribal spaces.Item NATIVE CLASSICAL: MUSICAL MODERNITIES, INDIGENOUS RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES, AND A KANIENKÉHA (MOHAWK) CONCEPT OF NON:WA (NOW)(2014) Avery, Dawn; Witzleben, John Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I explore how Indigenous methodologies that foreground cultural advocacy, revitalization, and education can be articulated using Indigenous language and cultural metaphor in research on North American Indian composers. Toward this end, I apply the Kanienkéha (Mohawk) concept of "non:wa" or "now" that also refers to three modes of perception--the now of the past, the present, and the future--toward understanding the intersection of innovation and tradition in classical Native music. This research joins the existing discourse that critiques binary oppositions separating Indigenous tradition (as past) and innovation (as present and future). Through interviews, fieldwork, and musical analysis, I illustrate Native values of interconnectedness, relationality, continuity, politics, and soundscapes in the processes of Native composition as well as the resultant works, I explore how these, in turn, may be understood through the application of Indigenous research techniques. In collaboration with a cohort of contemporary musicians, I look primarily at two Navajo composers--Raven Chacon and Juantio Becenti--and examine my own work as a composer, performer, and ethnomusicologist of Kanienkéha descent to explore the following questions: How can the topic of classical Native music best be served by using Indigenous methodologies in fieldwork, research, and representation and What is classical Native Music and is it different from other contemporary classical music styles? Drawing on the teachings of Indigenous dotahs (elders/teachers), the scholarship of ethnomusicologists, and examining oral and written tradition while using language and cosmology as cultural metaphors, I present a variety of possibilities for looking at Indigenous music through Indigenous eyes. Rather than offering a set of conclusions, I offer a set of tools for discussion and reflection: 1) how we might understand a definition of classical Native music; 2) how we are part of a modern movement of artistry; 3) how our creative processes reflect Indigenous sensibilities; 4) how specific composers are contributing to that movement; and 5) how Indigenous language, metaphor and worldview are a powerful and applicable epistemology for research.