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Transcription: [00:36:17]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
I think.

{SILENCE}
[00:36:28]

[[Wax cylinder recording of the Passamaquoddy tribe by Noel Josephs]]
[[Static at first, then a voice]]
[00:36:32]

{SPEAKER name="J. Walter Fewkes"}
This song is directed by Noel Josephs of the Passamaquoddy tribe Calais, Maine March the 18th 1890.

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
That little voice you hear is J. Walter Fewkes.
[00:36:38]

[[Wax cylinder recording - static]]
[00:36:41]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Speaking in a Native Indian language?]]
[[??]]
[00:36:47]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
This is Noel Josephs explaining what he's going to sing

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Speaking in Native American language?]]
[[?]]
[00:36:51]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
{Speaking in Native American language?}
[[??]]
[00:37:31]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Singing in Native American language]]
[00:37:58]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
This is a Passamaquoddy Snake Song; Snake Dance song recorded in 1890.

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Singing in Native American language]]
[[??]]
[00:38:04]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Singing in Native American language]]
[[??]]
[00:38:30]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Singing in Native American language]]
[[??]]
[[Beating sound made by old cylinder]]
[00:38:34]

{SPEAKER name="Noel Josephs"}
[[Singing in Native American language]]
[[??]]

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
You can hear what happens to some of these cylinder recordings after they've been stored over time. This beating that you hear at the end is part of the problem of the storage of cylinder recordings.
[00:38:43]

[[Singing stops]]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
A number of the the people who recorded these cylinders worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian, but they also worked for the American Museum of Natural History,
[00:38:55]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
and for the Lowie Museum in California, and museums in Chicago.
[00:39:02]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
And they all thought they were recording the last of American Indian culture. They thought that after they finished their project; their study of the American Indian culture;
[00:39:13]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
that these kinds of songs would no longer be heard and that generations would forget their material; their music.
[00:39:21]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
And a number of the people who recorded for them, tribal elders and traditionalists who recorded for them, also felt they were the last ones who knew their culture,

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
and they wanted to preserve this culture, not necessarily for their children who they felt were changing too quickly,
[00:39:37]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
but for their grandchildren who they hoped would come back and take and start to take another-- a greater interest in their culture.
[00:39:45]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
And essentially, that's what happened.
[00:39:47]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
Their surprisingly the who people who recorded sought out all the the traditionalists, all of the elders,
[00:39:57]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
the tribal elders, and recorded all of the oldest traditions. They didn't really care very much about what was happening um, in contemporary Indian music in the 1890s and 1920s.
[00:40:08]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
They were only interested in the older forms of of Indian music.
[00:40:15]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
There are recorders, such as Alice Fletcher and Francis Densmore, who used this machine up until the 1940s.
[00:40:20]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
And we have examples of all of those recordings at the Library Of Congress.
[00:40:28]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
We have over um, over 7 thousand American Indian cylinders at the Library of Congress containing a lot of this music.

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
I'd like Gus to-- Gus is the director of the Kiowa-Elder Program at the Kiowa-Elder Center in Oklahoma,
[00:40:48]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
and he's been working with some of these recordings from the Library of Congress and from other institutions.
[00:40:52]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
He's been bringing them to elders at the Elders Center, and playing them for elders, and having them respond to them.
[00:41:00]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
And I'd like him to talk a little bit about what's going on and kind of reactions you've had to some of these recordings coming back.
[00:41:08]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
Okay, the um, an example of what happens when you get old music, music which people don't use anymore, songs which aren't sung anymore in the tribe. The reaction you get is, is surprise.
[00:41:25]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
The first recording I got from the Library of Congress involved love songs; courting songs.
[00:41:34]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
And recently, the only thing that was remotely related to this kind of song was, what is called a 49,
[00:41:45]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
which is a whole version of social dancing, but it involves couples. It involves young men and young women in a social gathering where they sing and dance.
[00:41:58]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
The earlier love and courting songs were very, very singular and special,
[00:42:05]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
because they involved the actual (stuttering) mystique, the actual getting together of courting,
[00:42:15]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
of young people courting, and so they are so named for the season when this actually occurs.
[00:42:23]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
It's kinda like certain times a season, birds or animals, they go through certain
[00:42:30]


{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
courting process which causes [[stuttering]] the opposite sex to come together.
[00:42:41]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
It's a mating time it's a time to bring back a lifestyle, promote life. And so the courting songs involve this particular season.
[00:42:51]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
So, the love songs and the courting songs that I got from the Library of Congress are called [[eea i dogya??]],
[00:43:01]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
which means songs which are sung during the time when the wood turns white, or is covered with white; and that's usually in the fall.
[00:43:10]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
In the Autumn, there's a fine white frost that covers all of the woodland area and all of the trees, all of the falling down bark,
[00:43:18]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
and this is a time when the Kiowa men would get on their horses and ride around, all the way around the camp. the Kiowa people camp in a round and kind of enclosed quarters in early winter.
[00:43:29]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
And so, the men would get on their horses, ride around and around the campground, singing these songs to their sweethearts.
[00:43:36]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
And so, I guess when they struck a heart, and when a young lady was turned on, as the old saying goes,
[00:43:44]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
they would come out and get on the horse with the brave and ride around,
[00:43:49]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
and she'd have her arms around his waist like this, in a grand ole fashioned way, hanging closely and tightly, and they'd ride around the teepees the encampment and they'd be singing the song together.
[00:43:58]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
Each one of these courting people had their own songs or they created their own songs. And so they were recognizable only to the couple.
[00:44:05]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
Really, really nice romantic tale about Kiowa Indians who were so notorious fighting the government.
[00:44:12]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
But when I got the first recording there, and played it to the elders in the Center, some several months ago,
[00:44:20]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
the elders looked-- They were excited. they were happy, and they said, "Well, we haven't heard this thing in years!" The recording, I think, was done in 1869.
[00:44:31]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
The lady's name was--

[[Cross Talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Dorothy Lee"}
1895.
[00:44:35]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
1895. I'm getting-- 1895. And the lady's name is Ida Hummingbird. And she lived or went to school at Carlisle Institute, in Pennsylvania,
[00:44:45]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
and I think the recording was probably done there.
[00:44:48]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
But the song tells again of this courting session. It talks of, of two lovers riding around the camp,
[00:44:57]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
and so what, what this does to people nowadays when they hear it is they remember the songs, they think about the stories, they think about people who were living then,
[00:45:07]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
and they want to sing the songs again. They want to be able to sit down and sing the songs and try to remember the songs and also to even use the songs again. Teach the youngsters the songs.
[00:45:18]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
I don't know if we'll get out and start courting again in that grand manner. You know, it sounds exciting, sounds nice, but still yet, the song and the way of producing these things and what they meant
[00:45:28]

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
is so important to the people. And so we try to preserve this.

{SPEAKER name="Gus Palmer"}
But this is an example of what you can do with these songs and how you can use them.
[00:45:36]

Transcription Notes:
NEEDS SPEAKER NAMES. and reworking of sentences. Dorothy Lee was talking at the end of the previous tape. Here, she continues. She states the voice we hear first is that of J. Walter Fewkes - an American anthropologist, archaeologist, writer and naturalist - which she identified in the previous tape.