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Transcription: [01:01:13]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Thank you.
[01:01:14]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
[[Background voices]]
One of the the important things about the recordings is that through these recordings we're also able to recover--
[01:01:23]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
A number of groups are able to recover songs that were lost in their ritual.
[01:01:27]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
For example, there was a a Sun Dance leader who had part of the repertoire that he needed to complete the Sun Dance cycle,
[01:01:35]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
[[Background voice]]
and because of some of these early recordings, he was able to get the rest of the songs that he needed to complete the cycle.
[01:01:41]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Tom Vennum has worked with some of these early recordings, too. Tom, would you like to talk a bit about--
[01:01:49]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Well, I was interested principally in the songs of the Chippewa Indians from Minnesota/Wisconsin, where I'm from originally.
[01:01:58]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And when I was doing my work in graduate school, I first heard these old recordings from copies that were in the Library of Congress,
[01:02:07]


{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and my interest was piqued, and wondered whether there still were any of these songs left among these people
[01:02:13]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
that I had been shooting pool with, and roller-skating, and hanging out with in the summer time.
[01:02:16]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And gradually, I got to know some of the older people, and as I built up some confidence in our relationship, they opened up quite a bit,
[01:02:29]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and indeed recognized a lot of the songs that I was able to play for them on tape, that were copies from the Library of Congress cylinders.
[01:02:37]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
The Cylinder Project, for those of you who've come on here since we started, is a-- taking place at the Library of Congress.
[01:02:44]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
It has all the old wax cylinders in Federal hands and is duplicating them for preservation onto tape before they disintegrate and can't be listened to anymore.
[01:02:54]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And one of the important aspects of the project, is to return this music to the people from whom it was originally taken.
[01:03:02]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
It's ironic that the Federal government has come full circle in playing this role.
[01:03:07]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
At the time that the cylinder recording was first available for collectors to go out,

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
as Dorothy said earlier, everybody thought that the Indians were a vanishing race,
[01:03:17]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and it was for scientific purposes only that most people went out and recorded as many of the songs and spoken word as they could at the time.
[01:03:25]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And, I'm sure that they didn't realize at that point that Indian culture was going to survive, and is indeed very viable today.
[01:03:33]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And it's-- we're now able to use this material that they collected in a way that can help strengthen Indian culture and be used in some of the educational ways that have been spoken about with the Luiseño.
[01:03:44]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
I can give an example of one way in which this is working in-- among the Chippewa. Moccasin Game songs were always used for Moccasin Game, which was a principal Chippewa form of gambling.
[01:03:59]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Most western woodlands tribes practiced the Moccasin Game, and hand game songs of all sorts are almost universal among people in North America,
[01:04:09]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
so that the tradition is widely known, but among the people who made moccasins, they used those and would hide bullets under them,
[01:04:17]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and the game, particularly during periods of time when people got settled on reservation,
[01:04:23]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
began to take up more and more time, and the gambling stakes got higher and higher,
[01:04:27]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and the Federal government, finally, and several reservations, outlawed the game because people were losing more than their shirts.
[01:04:36]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And, they felt that this was going to reinforce poverty, and for whatever reasons, I'm sure, there were moralistic reasons imposed too.
[01:04:46]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Uh, the government, just by decree, removed a context, which for centuries had been used for providing a context for song,
[01:04:57]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
because the Chippewa people believed that when you sing game songs, that you are, in fact, petitioning the Great Spirit for help in winning the game.
[01:05:06]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
So uh, the game died out beginning the 1920s because the government put a cancellation on it,
[01:05:14]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
but a number of the-- Well, many, many Chippewa Moccasin Game songs were recorded before that time,
[01:05:21]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and I guess up in Northern Minnesota, maybe about 10 years ago, there's been a renaissance of the game. The game's no longer forbidden,
[01:05:29]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
so that younger people are starting to pick it up and play it, but they've now got a chance to learn the songs that once went with it,
[01:05:38]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and they're starting to add the music back again. And when they've listened to these recordings of these older game songs, they've got something to go on.
[01:05:47]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Many of the melodies for those Moccasin Game songs are still very much alive as Pow-Wow melodies,
[01:05:54]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
that simply drop the words that dealt with, "I'm going home to get some more clothes to bet in the next game."
[01:06:02]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
That'd be a typical text in the Moccasin Game songs.
[01:06:06]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
We had a man here from White Earth Reservation recently, who said he remembered when he was a kid seeing people going home barefoot at 5 in the morning.
[01:06:15]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
He said they had lost their moccasins. That was the last article that went.
[01:06:20]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
But, I know for singers in Wisconsin I played these for, they are very, very anxious to learn these songs, and it doesn't take that long to learn them.
[01:06:27]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
They still have some knowledge of the language, and can pick up-- A lot of those Indian songs are made up of real words in the language,
[01:06:36]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
also filled out with what we call "vocables", or meaningless syllables, like "E-I-E-I-O." We have an Old MacDonald is a non-Indian example of it.
[01:06:44]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
But, uh, the songs have proven useful. I would mention one other thing in following up on what was said by--
[01:06:55]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
what was most important for Villiana to be able listen to these Luiseño recordings and recover their texts, and be able to tell her people what is going on in them.
[01:07:05]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
A lot of the people that collected these; made these recordings, frequently recorded songs which were very sacred.
[01:07:13]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and at the time, the Indian people simply were not aware of the ramifications of what they were doing.
[01:07:22]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And you see in this photograph behind us-- These are what? Two Omaha?
[01:07:28]

{Unknown Speaker 1"}
Omaha.

[[Cross talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Omaha Indians recording, for Gilmore, I guess, back around 19-- 1895, or--?
[01:07:35]

{Unknown Speaker 1"
1905.
[01:07:36]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
1905. This was one of the white man's contraptions. Funny machine that one Chippewa looked at it and called it "a machine that blows feathers."
[01:07:45]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
What she was talking about, was the wax that kept coming off the needle as it went around.
[01:07:49]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
And their reactions to the machine was astonishment.
[01:07:54]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
One woman recorded the song and heard it; and you could play it back immediately.
[01:07:58]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Edison's invention was just as -- These are what the wax cylinders look like. All you had to do was switch the heads on the machine,
[01:08:07]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and you could listen instantaneously to what you just recorded. It's like our cassette recorders today. So there was a whole century earlier of technology that was thought of.
[01:08:15]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
But the woman heard the song she just recorded, and said, "How did that machine learn that song so fast? That a real hard one. It took me years to learn," you know.
[01:08:24]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
So, they didn't-- A lot of them weren't really aware of what they were doing, which was recording material which is now useful for posterity,
[01:08:34]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
for Indian people, but some of it is very sensitive material; very sacred material; and a lot of very traditional people who still practice the religion,
[01:08:43]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
when they hear these songs, are in fact, very angry that people recorded them. They feel that they were duped, or they may have done it for money, or done it in secret, or something like that.
[01:08:53]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
So, returning the material to Indian people has with it the problem that, I guess they are going to face,
[01:09:02]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
of trying to decide exactly how they want to use it, and how they want to protect it. 'Cause it is sensitive material, and the Indian religions have not died out,
[01:09:10]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and many people still remember these old songs that their grandfathers had recorded.
[01:09:16]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
It is important, too, I think, for the Indian peoples to go back and listen to the songs and correct errors that anthropologists added at the time they were collecting the songs.
[01:09:29]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
An example of this is-- Dorothy and I ran into were some Winnebago songs recorded in the 1930s.
[01:09:36]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
[[Backgound music]]
And there was a manuscript that this scholar had prepared, talking about one song. And she gave the words for it in English.
[01:09:43]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
It said, "The crowds all around me," was the words in Winnebago, in the song.
[01:09:49]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
She said the Medicine man sings this and points at all the crowd sitting at his feet.
[01:09:54]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
Well, this recording was played recently for a Winnebago speaker, and he said, "It's not crowds." He said, "Those are clouds, in there."
[01:10:04]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
He said, "The song text is 'There are clouds all around me.'" Now Winnebago speakers have a flip, linguistically, between the r's and the l's.
[01:10:13]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
You play the 'frute', for instance, not the 'flute'. You play the 'frute'.
[01:10:17]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
So somebody back in the 30s had translated and was meant-- was saying 'clouds', and she heard it as 'crowds', and then made up this story about what was happening in the ritual,
[01:10:26]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
to suit what she had heard, as a mistake in translation. So, those kind of errors really need to be corrected by Indian people who are still Native speakers of the language,
[01:10:37]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
so the misinformation two generations from now, isn't passed down. And this again, is the value of having these cylinders
[01:10:47]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum"}
and having the Indian people have them back.
[01:10:49]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Do you have any questions?
[01:10:51]

Transcription Notes:
I believe the speaker which is heard for about a second at the beginning is Patricia Duros who had been speaking at the end of the last tape. Tom Vennum - this is how it is spelled in the Program of 1965, for the American Folklife Festival. Dorothy Sara Lee - talked about by Tom. vocables—sounds without translatable meaning