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00:30:47
00:42:22
00:30:47
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Transcription: [00:30:47]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
[[??]] beginning of the film - tell them I'm singing the starting of the film
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Oh that which you just sang is the start, right?
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
No, no, no, no, no, it's another
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
So you wanna sing it?
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Yeah, yes
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Go ahead
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
But if I get quiet, you know, I'm just forgetting [[chuckling]]

[00:31:02]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
[[starts singing in native language]]

[00:31:06]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Ok, this is the beginning now, [[ping on]] there's all kinds of things that go on, there's all kinds of choruses. There's a beginning and it's started by the [[?? Koi main ??]], he starts singing and women in the background always keep chorus and then the singers themselves sing chorus.

[00:31:18]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
They sing back and forth to each other, they sing as opponents and also, you know, they tease each other [[laughter]] in the songs. Like, "you miss me, don't you know where I'm hiding?", that's what some of the verses say about the bones that they're holding in their hands.

[00:31:29]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
So what she's going to sing is the beginning of the set of verses that starts the [[?? peyon ??]] games off.


[00:31:36]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
[[singing in native language]]

[00:31:56]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
[[laughter]] I made a mistake

[[resumes singing]]

[00:32:14]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
[[continues singing]]

[00:32:27]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
And what she wanted me to tell you earlier is that we keep beat. And there's also a chorus of people who, in a way, they grunt, because they're trying to confuse their component. And they keep beat the whole time, the women that are singing the choruses.

[00:32:39]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
So, you would hear this song but you would also hear heavy, heavey, uh, it's it's would be like our version of the drum: people keeping beat but with their voice.

[00:32:48]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
[[grunting in time to a beat]]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"} [[crosstalk]]
Well --
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 3"}[[crosstalk]]
that's the way
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
yeah
But it's very distracting
{speaker 3??}
It's a cylinder noise
[[cylinder noise]]
[[laughter]]


[00:32:59]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
See, we have a, ha, yeah, really [[more cylinder noise and laughter]]


[00:33:07]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
That's what we put up with on the cylinders but we're still very very grateful to have the cylinders.

[00:33:11]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 3"}
Um, these cylinders have been used in all kinds of cultural and community education programs. And Rayna has been working with a number of --

[00:33:20]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 3"}
This is Rayna Green who's the director of the American Indian Program at The Museum of American History at The Smithsonian --

[00:33:26]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 3"}
and she's been working with a number of cultural centers and travel museums, um, in efforts to, uh, regain and educate people about their own culture. And I was wondering if you would like to talk a bit about that.

[00:33:37]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
Many of the, uh, Many of the tribal museums and tribal cultural centers and language projects depend so much now, regretfully, on many of these old cylinder recordings and museum collections. And in a way, it's ironic that these things which have really been taken away from Indian people in so many ways have now come back.

[00:34:00]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
And, what, uh, many tribal people are doing with them is, is, uh, amazing, and marvelous to see. In the Kiowa tribe, for example, we had Gus Palmer, Jr., who runs their elder center, here last week and he is using these old tape recordings, the tapes, of the federal cylinder project recordings, to replay for the Kiowa elders who then can, for the first time in years and years, hear many of the songs that have now been lost to them.

[00:34:32]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
For example, they have - many songs exist in cycles and there'll be 7 songs or 14 songs or 21 songs in a cycle. For example, "sun dance songs" or "ghost dance songs".

[00:34:45]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
Um, or some old songs where people haven't heard them in years because the behavior associated with them is gone. Courting songs, for example, and love songs, which were used in an almost "courting season".

[00:34:58]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
And he is replaying these songs for the Kiowa elders, who then remember other pieces of the song cycle. Or who remember their relatives who sang these songs and, who then are taking the songs and using them again and singing them again to reconstruct ceremonies or to recall historical memories or to recall relatives and to put the pieces back, of things that have been gone away from people.

[00:35:25]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
My own tribe, the Cherokee of Oklahoma have, we have reconstructed many songs that were lost to us a long time ago when we made the move on the Trail of Tears from North Carolina to Oklahoma. Many of these old animal dances and songs, some done with masks, which we no longer make, these are called "Booger songs".

[00:35:47]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
You've all heard of the "Booger bear" and we say these are animal spirits that, uh, had, uh, we did dances to those. And many of those dances and songs have been long gone, but, some of the old federal cylinders have some of these animal songs and dances on them from the Eastern Cherokee and our people will now be able to hear those again after they have not, not been there.

[00:36:12]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
We used these songs in language projects, uh, because many of the songs have old words: ritual words, ceremonial words, um, items of usage that now people don't use at all. And we can reconstruct old forms of language with them and hear again the way our people spoke, um, a long time ago.

[00:36:32]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
So these cylinders, and these old tape recordings and museum collections have now become very important to us. Our artists re-copy some of the old designs, people hear the songs. I think in a way, one of the things that's important to remember about reconstructing these old songs is not simply to reconstruct the past. Indians, you know, more than anyone else are a living museum.

[00:36:59]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
We are not simply repeating the past. For us, uh, I think it really is a blessing for the future. We want our children to know what our people were like. We want our children to know what we're like. And, so, to set down memories, really, is to, um, give a prayer for the present, and, as well, for the future. And, so, I think as these old things come back to us, uh, they become new things again. We reconstruct them, reshape them, and they live in the present, and then they will go toward the future.

[00:37:34]
{SPEAKER name="Rayna Green"}
So, we don't regard them only as historic artifacts that are now gone and passed forever. But, really, as a way of, of, of, um, making parts of our tribal world and our tribal vision and tribal culture live again and be usable for a longer period of time. And I think that's a use of these things that, really, is one of the most important. Not simply to freeze things in the past. But to make them live again for the present.

[00:38:07]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Not only do these old songs have, um, old cylinders have songs that have been lost and forgotten, but there are a number of songs on these cylinders that have been played on the reservations for years. These are also expressions of cultural continuity, that is, they are not just things that have been lost, they are things that help Indian people to reaffirm a certain sense of a linkage with the past.

[00:38:31]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
And Tom Vennum has been working with Chippewa, Ojibwa materials in the northlands of this country. And he's found, um, that that is especially true there.

[00:38:43]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum, Jr"}
There certainly is cylinders that I've played for the older singers on reservations that are immediately recognized, although youngers singers today, uh, would tend not to know what the purpose of the songs were. I think probably in most instances that, as Rayna pointed out, as the context in which songs were traditionally performed have diminished drastically since Indian people were first moved on reservations. And since, um, certain economic pressures on them have changed their lifestyle from what it was, there are certain ways of doing things that no longer include song, or as we know that song once accompanied a large, large variety of activities.

[00:39:25]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum, Jr"}
We find today, as Rayna said, that, uh, India culture is alive. It's not something that is simply "digging up the past" because Indian music is very very much alive. It has never died out. But it has changed and particularly in this century, and recently with the advent of inexpensive cassette recorders, Indian people have begun to document their own music. You see at Pow wows today, just as many people standing around recording their own singers at the drum, as you do see people singing and dancing.

[00:40:00]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum, Jr"}
And what has happened as a result of this is that a large pan-tribal style and repertroire has emerged as the whole dissemination process of moving a song from one particular reservation to another and even from one tribe to another. Althought borrowing from other tribes has been traditional in American Indian culture as long as we've known about it.

[00:40:26]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum, Jr"}
The early cylinders are valuable as they are historical documents of the way things were. I, uh, one thing that I did want to mention: there's certainly in the federal cylinder project has been an ethical dilemma that has faced us, those of us who have worked in it: in a lot of the early material that was recorded contains very sensitive, sacred material and frequently the people who recorded it were not aware at the time - those that were doing the collecting - were not aware of the sensitive nature of it, and the singers themselves were slightly baffled by the white man's recording device and weren't really, you know, truly aware of the implications of what it is that they were doing. A lot of songs were recorded that would never have been made public; that were secret songs that were only to be performed at certain times of years, and with certain groups and all sorts of taboos and restrictions on the use of these songs.

[00:41:29]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum, Jr"}
And the fact that these cylinders are now in the federal agencies means, in fact, that they are open to the public. And they are, in essence, Indian secrets which are right there and anyone can go in, by law, and listen to. This is a problem that we've tried to address. We've argued about it. I know a lot on staff, whether you just put red flags by all the sensitive material, we thought that was a bad idea because somebody would be coming through there could be looking only for that and would be suddenly directed to the hot items, so to speak.

[00:42:04]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennum, Jr"}
But I think that as these things are returned to the Indian communities, that they are done with the caveat that there is some sensitive material there and the hopes that tribal groups will consult with their medicine men and go through the material and place their own restrictions on how this material should be used.