Plains Indian music and certain forms of dance, while not "racially inherent," have become socially heritable signs of American Indian cultural vitality and identity, not only on the Plains but in other Indian communities as well. Since the turn of the 20th century, Plains music and dance have become symbolic of American Indian resistance to wholesale adoption of Euroamerican culture, and it is partly through these particular cultural forms that American Indian values manifest themselves. Because of the influential nature of Plains music and dance, and its association with social, political, and economic interests of many other U. S. tribes, a clearer understanding of these culturally expressive domains will enable us to better understand contemporary American Indian studies. Since music and dance occupy a preeminent position, and are at once a manifestation of technology and ideology, one would suspect that they have a potential for leading to understanding of the integration of American Indian society in very specific ways. However, their intergrative function has not been consciously studied.This perhaps is owing to the nature of American anthropology in the early days rather than to any oversight on the part of the investigators. There is still time to rectify this seeming neglect of tangible and measurable data.

The anthropological study of Plains music and dance began with the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History, the Peabody Museum, and the Bureau of American Ethnology. Perhaps the first conscious effort at a description of tribal music is Alice C. Fletcher's "A Study of Omaha Indian Music" (1893). Studies of this sort, through the 1940's, were dominated by Alice Fletcher and her collaborator, Francis LaFlesche, Natalie Curtis (1907), George Herzog (1928), Helen H. Roberts (1936), and the outstanding comparative musicologist Frances Densmore (1916 - 1944), the quantity of whose work has never been equalled.

The ethnomusicological research of this period was supplemented by a score of Boasians who collected data on the Plains Sun dance and Plains sodalities, which were published in the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Their focus was on the description of tribal traits, while secondary emphasis was laid upon the current theoretical interest in diffusion. Historical and comparative summaries were published by Lowie (1916) and Spier (1921a).

This work led beyond scientific discourse to the popularization of American Indian expressive culture. Ethnomusicologists inspired such composers as Charles Skilton, Horace Miller, Thurlow Lieurance, and Edward McDowell to compose and orchestrate popular and symphonic music based on native American themes. This particular "backwash" of Native American culture has been treated aptly by Hallowell (1957). The interpretation of Indian dancing, much of which was based on early anthropological studies, became almost the exclusive domain of Indian lorists, camp directors, and youth organizations through the writings of Ernest T. Seton (1927), Daniel Beard (1909), Ralph Hubbard (1927), Julian Saloman (1928), Julia Buttree (1930), and Bernard S. Mason (1944).Historically, approaches to music and dance have been somewhat divided between anthropology and ethnomusicology, and each respective discipline has generated a further dichotomy between scientific and popular interpretation. The distinction between scientific and popular has often been misread as professional versus amateur, but the latter category often compensates for professional deficiencies. Comprehensive study of American Indian music and dance, historically and culturally, thus requires an examination of both bodies of literature.

Despite formidable collections of musical data - Frances Densmore alone contributed 3,591 cylinders to the Library of Congress - there are still large gaps in our knowledge of Plains music and dance. In the 1950's, there was a steady decline in the number of published articles including pure description of expressive culture. Aside from Densmore's earlier monographs, ther are no musical ethnographies for the Plains equivalent to Merriam's (1967) work on the Flathead except for Nettl's four-part series on Blackfeet musical culture(1967, 1968). Conversely, no synthetic works even of a descriptive nature have been produced (although McAllester's [1949] work on Peyote music includes Plains examples). Perhaps the lack of theoretical and methodological interest is partially explained by technological achievements in recording aparatus. The 1950's saw a proliferation of commercial recording companies aimed at supplying the American Indian market. Folkways, Indian House, American Indian Soundchief, and Canyon Records, in particular, each of which maintains a large inventory of Plains music, can perhaps be regarded as the new ethnographers of music. The recordings provide a useful historical index, but most lack any synthesis for comparative analysis. They constitute,in fact, another form of raw data which is accumulating in overwhelming proportions. A few recordings are reviewed and analyzed in such journals as Ethnomusicology, but time and space limitations make it impossible to keep up with their production.

The anthroplolgical study of music and dance on the Plains, or elsewhere in Indian America, is paradoxical. Unlike most other social and cultural categories, music and dance are neatly bounded, highly visible and audible, and readily performed. In most cases, even a moderately trained anthropologistcan learn when a song or dance begins, reaches a climax, and ends. One can learn a great deal by simple observation, and some researchers have become proficient in music and dance skills. There is nothing secretive about music and dance, although associated values may be private and difficult to understand. In short, an anthropologist can easily come to know or even perform music and dance. But - here is the paradox - the more anthropologist know about music and dance, the less they seem to accomplish with accumulated data. Due to its unending emphasis on collection because of the fear that Indian cultures were dying, anthropology has reached the stage where it labors under sheer volume with little hope of achieving even such preliminary steps toward analysis as identification, classification, and distribution studies. There is little or no work on the process of composition, native terminology, the evaluation of music and dance, esthetics, performance standards, tribal classifications, native theories of instrument manufacture, musicianship, and, particularly, the relationship with other sociocultural domains:   kinship, economics, politics, and religion. Of course music and dance have been described and put into some kind of context, but analysis rarely does more than call our attention to the fact that they are unquestionably "functional."

Little has been done in understanding the structural relationships between expressive domains. And if music and dance are indeed critical indices of expressive culture, we remain hard pressed to discover just what aspects of society and culture the express. Throughout this work will be a summary of the anthropological status of Plains music and dance in the belief that knowledge about music and dance may help us comprehend other aspects of American Indian cultures, both historical and contemporary.

Typological Considerations

For an understanding of the relationships between music and dance, as well as between these categories and other sociocultural domains, the Plains culture area is best divided into northern and southern areas. This, of course, is consistent with anthropological practice but not with that of ethnomusicology. The latter discipline essentially studies such structural features of music as melody, scale, range, and tempo (Nettl 1954, 1956), musical composition, and performance. Using the criterion of "vocal tenseness," for example, ehnomusicologists have combined the Plains and Southwest culture areas into the Plains-Pueblo musical area (Herzog 1928; Roberts 1936; Nettl 1954). Here we must consider the age-old problem of "traits." Both classifications result largely from the arbitrary selection of isolated traits rather than the relationship between cultural categories. Both are useful, of course, depending on the researcher's specific interests, but I prefer to break with ethnomusicological tradition, and opt for the Northern/Southern distinction as the most useful for the understanding of music in a wider cultural context and as the distinction preferred by Native Americans themselves.

Between these two geocultural areas we should imagine a boundary line running roughly through the middle of Nebraska. Northern and Southern music and dance styles are quite disparate, but they do tend to overlap and diffuse. Diffusion occurs mainly from north to south n music style,, and from south to north in dance style, a phenomenon to which we will return. The most intensive area of diffusion, in which we find that the most rapid change in both styles occurs, is logically the reservation center of the Plains, mainly Pine Ridge and Rosebud, South Dakota. Because of their geographic centrality, much new music and dance filters through both revervations, undergoing some modification through this Siouan catalyst. Additionally, urban areas such as Bismarck, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, and Oklahoma City are centers of rapid diffusion.

The Northern and Southern Plains may be divided into regional areas which largely correspond to linguistic families and tribal affiliations. Most of these have evloved out of the removal of American Indians from earlier homelands to their present reservations and communities. Non-Plains peoples live on both the northern and Southern Plains, and are influencing and being influenced by indigenous Plains tribes. This is particularly important in understanding the current exchange of music and dance forms. At the national level, most intertribal music and dance - wherever performed - is essentially Plains in style. I will concentrate on music and dance of the Plains proper, rather than influences upon it from outside the Plains area, recognizing that the relationship of esoteric and exoteric forms of the same music and dance structures is worthy of future research.

In speaking of Plains music, I am referring to music and dance that are indigenous to the area from the establishment of the reservations up through the present. Tribal distributions are quite different in each geocultural area. In the north we find relatively large homogenous tribes or confederations, such as the Blackfeet, Crow, and Lakota. The reservations are relatively isolated compared with the Indian communities of the Southern Plains, where we find smaller Plains and Prairie tribes commingles with tribes removed from other culture areas. Most of the latter were settled in Oklahoma, and Southern Plains style is perhaps better known as "Oklahoma style."

The geographic distribution of Southern Plains communities, mainly in Oklahoma, facilitated the rapid exchange of dance, music, and material culture related to both forms. But on the Northern Plains the exchange between regions and tribes has been much slower. The essential Southern Plains style, performed at intertribal functions, is divided into Fancy Dancing and Straight Dancing. These styles are regional in nature:   Fancy Dancing is primarily associated with western Oklahoma and Straight Dancing with northern Oklahoma. On the Northern Plains are four regional styles:   (1) North Dakota, (2) Blackfeet, (3) Crow, and (4) South Dakota.

The distinctions between geocultural and regional forms of music and dance are stylistic. Within regional styles we may also speak of tradional tribal styles. Style is differentiated not on the basis of song or dance structure but on that of interrelationships between music, dance, and, inportantly, related material culture (specifically musical instruments and dance costumes). In the past, ethnomusicologists determined style solely on the basis of structural features of the song. The Plains style has been further characterized on the basis of songs being strophic, that is, containing sections or phrases which tend to become longer toward the end of the strophe. Other diagnostic features include average range of a tenth, frequency of tetratonic scales, scale intervals of major seconds and minor thirds, melodic movement of the terrace type, and rhythm dominated by four or five durational values. The majority of songs are accompanied by rhythmic instruments with only a simple pulse (Nettl 1954). Songs have been described as being of the incomplete repetition type, but essentially this is a feature of performance rather than song structure.

Ethnomusicologist find three major categories of musical instruments in both Plains areas:   membranophones, aerophones, and idiophones. There are no vibraphones such as the Apache fiddle. Musical instruments are critical to discerning regional and tribal styles, but they have not been regarded as such. The same holds for dance costumes. Any style, then, should be defined as the pattern of interrelationships between structural song features, dance (or other functional equivalent), instrument(s), and costuming for male and female singers and dancers. Such considerations immediately divorce the Pueblo style from that of the Plains while reaffirming the cultural similarities between tribes on the Plains which led to the original formulation of the Plains culture area. This reconsideration of style allows comparison among tribal and intertribal variations of music and dance, as well as other related social and cultural categories.

We may regard the distinction between Northern and Southern Plains as geocultural;   the distinction between Blackfeet, North Dakota, Crow, South Dakota, and western and northern Oklahoma as regional;   and the tribal distinctions within each regional style as traditional. In one case (the Crow) the regional and traditinal style are coterminous. These typologies of course mean nothing in themselves, but may lead to more fruitful studies of the relation between expressive culture and those aspects of society they express. The structural features of music, dance, and material culture may be seen as analogs of other structural features of society, such as kinship, marriage, and levels of group organization.

The typological approach to music and dance, of course, has the disadvantages inherent in any typology. It does not deal with the dynamics and interchange of music and dance between geocultural, regional, and traditional groups. Understanding this interchangeability is, of course, essential to understanding the notion of the burdensome concept of Pan-Indianism.