Sacred Musics: Traditional Ojibwe Music and Protestant Hymnody
Abstract The tradition of Ojibwe hymn singing emerged in the middle third of the nineteenth century from the conjunction of evangelical hymns, Anishinaabe attitudes toward music, and the social circumstances that set the terms of symbolic exchange. To understand how hymns came into the musical life...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | unknown |
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Oxford University PressNew York, NY
2000
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195134643.003.0002 https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52523023/isbn-9780195134643-book-part-2.pdf |
| Summary: | Abstract The tradition of Ojibwe hymn singing emerged in the middle third of the nineteenth century from the conjunction of evangelical hymns, Anishinaabe attitudes toward music, and the social circumstances that set the terms of symbolic exchange. To understand how hymns came into the musical life of Ojibwe communities, it is important to first illustrate the place of music generally in early-nineteenth-century Ojibwe culture and then to compare that with the place of hymnody in the evangelical culture that missionaries brought to the field. Neither Ojibwe nor evangelical culture came to this encounter as static wholes; both had been changing against the historical backdrop in their own right long before the missionary encounter. Notwithstanding the cultural and spiritual continuities that thread through the last four hundred years, the Ojibwe nation itself had been a product and process of post contact history. What had been a loose federation of linguistically related but highly mobile and localized bands emerged through the fur trade into a more coherent social network and set of political alliances. Ethnohistorians have reconsidered fur trade society in terms of culturally diverse, polyglot native villages to which the fur trading companies attached their posts. |
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