Native American Heritage Month - Selected Resources

Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. From Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra to Jim Pepper, from Buffy Saint-Marie to Robbie Robertson, from Joy Harjo to Lila Downs, Indigenous Pop vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent. Arranged both chronologically and according to popular generic forms, the book gives Indigenous pop a broad new meaning. In addition to examining the transitive influences of popular music on Indigenous expressive forms, the contributors also show ways that various genres have been shaped by what some have called the "Red Roots" of American-originated musical styles. This recognition of mutual influence extends into the ways of understanding how music provides methodologies for living and survival. Each in-depth essay in the volume zeros in on a single genre and in so doing exposes the extraordinary whole of Native music. This book showcases the range of musical genres to which Native musicians have contributed and the unique ways in which their engagement advances the struggle for justice and continues age-old traditions of creative expression.

In this short study, we have undertaken to cover one small part of this deficiency, namely, to describe in detail the surviving dance forms among the Mississippi and Oklahoma Choctaws, especially as they have been practiced in the last seventeen years.

Indians are constantly passing songs back and forth and composing new songs. Even in Bartram's time, he said that the Cherokees had to have at least one new song for every annual presentation of the Busk (Green Corn Dance). In a contest among the Senecas, a man could make up a new song by the time the drum went around the circle and came back to him. Indians still have such contests today.