Music As Memory: Contemporary Hymn Singing and the Politics of Death in Native America

• Main Author: Mcnally, Michael D
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2000
• Subjects: anishina*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195134643.003.0006; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52523027/isbn-9780195134643-book-part-6.pdf

Abstract While hymns today are performed in a variety of contexts, the primary work of the Ojibwe singers takes place at the funeral wakes of the community. On these occasions, the political circumstances of life at White Earth are seen in their bitterest clarity. Because so many die young and die violently, each successive wake resonates with the dispossession of history and urges collective reflection on both social and existential matters. Gatherings around death have become crossroads where the community takes stock of history and where it musters the spiritual resources to continue to act in and on that history. A wake creates an unstable space, one that puts on heightened display the contradictions of contemporary native experience. That space calls into question the possibility of meaning on one level and the very possibility of Anishinaabe survival on the other. The music of the Ojibwe singers, however, can carry the possibility of transforming this space. Through the distinctive operations of music and language, Ojibwe hymn singing can create a shared experience of Anishinaabe time and can structure a process of collective remembering. This memory is socially integrative, though not unequivocally so.