For Further Study


1			Novelist Ian Frazier offers a vivid account of the Pine Ridge Reservation in his nonfiction study of contemporary Indian life in On the Rez (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000). He writes about contemporary Oglala Sioux and the tensions between life in and outside of the reservation. One of Frazier’s heroes, the young basketball player SuAnne Big Crow, led her local high-school basketball team called the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes to a state championship in 1989, the first Native American girls’ team to achieve this. Read pages 207 through 209 for an account of how SuAnne Big Crow uses contemporary pow-wow music and dance to help her team. Later read what happens to SuAnne (pages 248-249). Discuss the way in which SuAnne Big Crow used Sioux music to ward off an imminent danger and how likely is this to happen again?




2			Frances Densmore was an active collector of Native American music for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. Much of her work has been digitally archived at The Densmore Project: Music of the Native Peoples of North America. Search the site for examples, documents, and photographs of those Native American tribes discussed in this chapter or other tribes that might be familiar to you and make a short presentation to your class about your discoveries.




3			Listen to Navajo Songs from Canyon de Chelly on New World Records CD 80406. Try your hand at making a transcription of one of the tunes. How difficult is it to use Western notation to make a score of one of these tunes?

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