This is the Sound of Survivance: Nez Perce Indians Playing Jazz
Nez Perce Indian bands played sophisticated jazz in the 1930’s and 40’s? Wearing
eagle feather headdresses and buckskin pants? In fancy white clubs where they
sometimes had to eat in the kitchen or leave town as soon as their last set
ended? Yes, yes, and yes.
Music has always been a central form of power and identity for Native peoples,
and it was challenged and complicated when European newcomers introduced their
musical traditions to indigenous North Americans, often through the setting of
the compulsory boarding school. Boarding schools emphasized Western music
education in specifically in order to “civilize” Indians, yet cross-cultural
forms of indigenous musical performance soon began to take shape. The bicultural
productions and identities that grew from this musical attempt to “Kill the
Indian and Save the Man” are many and diverse.
During this oppressive era of Indian-white relations, Indian
musicians found ways to “re-present” American Indian history, culture, and
contemporary issues, and to imagine and construct liberatory identities,
communities, and nations through a musical performative cultural politics. A
musical education that began in U.S. government schools often as martial music
such as Sousa marches, was transformed by Indian musicians into one of the most
liberatory of all musical genres:
jazz. This is an example of Anishinabe (Ojibway)
scholar Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance: survival + resistance and the
repudiation of dominance. Learning about Nez Perce Indian jazz performance
history helps us understand that tradition is not static, that identities are
emergent, and that Native people make things their own in the interest of the
continuance of the people and nation.
This presentation will illustrate what results when one spoke in the wheel
dominates and oppresses another.
But in that oppression there can also arise and be created a new spoke of
resistance, in the form of Nez Perce Jazz.
It is through this musical expression that Nez Perce musicians found a
way to transcend and bridge what can divide and create schisms: speaking in the
universal language of music.
BIO
Jan Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the English Department, teaching Native
American literature and film, African-American literature and ethnic studies.
She is also the Acting Coordinator of
the American Indian Studies Program, which offers a Minor and an
Interdisciplinary Masters degree. Her research on Nez Perce jazz bands (during
the early to mid part of the twentieth century) was conducted by Jan in
2007-2009 with Nez Perce tribal members and archival sources.
Her research was inspired by the
stories Nez Perce friends and acquaintances shared with Jan about their family
members’ musical careers, and also by Philip Deloria’s argument in
Indians in Unexpected Places.
Deloria maintains that American Indian people took advantage of the
opportunities that arose from colonization, participating actively in the making
of American modernity and popular culture (2004: 231-32). With two colleagues,
Jan is currently working on a critical collection of essays on contemporary
Native music (Big Band to Hip Hop), tentatively entitled,
Indigenous Pop: Contemporary Native
American Music.