In 1907, Densmore began to record Native American music as part of the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) working with many tribes, including the Chippewa, the Mandan, the Sioux, the Winnebago, and the Seminoles. She spent more than 50 years studying American Indian music and collected thousands of recordings, originally often on wax cylinders, although many of them have been reproduced on other media. Many of them are in the Library of Congress and some are in other archives as well.
Source: (Reddit/colorized).
In 1926, she wrote The Indians and Their Music, and between 1910 and 1957, she published 14 book-length pamphlets for the Smithsonian. These works each described the music of a different Native American group; although she at first believed that the music of the Plains Indians was representative of all Indians, over time, and through exposure to tribes across North America, she began to recognize the diversity of Native American music and culture.
Preservation In A Time Of Attempted Assimilation
She completed her work during a time when there was a series of efforts in the United States to assimilate American Indians into the mainstream. With the mass European immigration, the public supported a standard set of cultural values and practices. These Americanization policies arose from the idea that when Native Americans learned the customs and values, they would merge their traditions and peacefully join American society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government outlawed traditional religious ceremonies, including the Sun Dance. The government also sent children to Native American boarding schools; at the schools, they had to abandon tribal traditions, speak English, and attend church.
How She Got Her Start
Source: (Library of Congress/colorized).
Frances Densmore was born on May 21, 1867, in Red Wing, Minnesota. When she was a child, she listened to the songs of the Sioux Indians in her home near the Mississippi River; she could hear the sounds of the Indians, who were camped on a nearby island. Densmore later studied music at Oberlin College, learning piano, organ, and harmony. In her twenties, she taught music and lived with her parents in Red Wing. In 1893, at the Chicago World’s Fair, in the Colombian Exposition, she heard the Indians sing, and then started to read books about them. After this, in 1895, she began to lecture throughout Minnesota, in Chicago, and in New York. She took notes on the songs Good Bear Woman sang in 1903 at the Prairie Island Dakota Reserve near Red Wing. She wrote down a song she heard Apache Chief Geronimo hum while he whittled arrows and sold his autograph in 1904 at the St. Louis Exposition. In 1905, when she met the Ojibwe, she completed her first thorough study, akin to a field study.
Collecting Sounds And Artifacts
Source: (Library of Congress).
She and her sister, two unmarried white women, traveled with an Ojibwe man to reach the Ojibwe village near Grand Portage. On July 4. 1907, she watched the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe celebrate Independence Day, and, using a borrowed Edison home phonograph recording machine, recorded an Ojibwe singer named Kitchimakwa (Big Bear). After this, she asked William Holmes of the BAE for money to continue her work, including the recordings. She was granted $350, which she used to buy a cylinder machine with a “morning glory” horn. This horn acted as both a microphone and a speaker. She used this machine and ones like it for the next 30 years. She traveled during the summers to reservations, carrying her phonograph, typewriter, camera, and essential supplies, where she sought out reputable singers to record. She often paid the singer 25 cents per song. In addition to collecting songs, she took pictures and collected artifacts such as tribal clothing and musical instruments.
Her Work Continues To Be Significant Today
Source: (Pinterest/colorized).
In 1911, Densmore interviewed Red Weasel at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Red Weasel did not wish to share the secrets of the Sun Dance with Densmore. However, he eventually did, and Densmore went with some of her other informants to the site of the last Sun Dance, which had been held 29 years earlier. All told, she spent three years working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, preserving the rituals of the Sun Dance and collecting artifacts. Her findings were published in a volume called Teton Sioux published in 1918. However, because she was an amateur, when she asked for a staff position at the BAE, she was denied because of her lack of formal training. For the last 15 years of her life (she died in 1957), she worked to ensure that her 2,500 wax recordings were preserved in the Library of Congress. Her work is still used by scholars and Indian singers still use the recordings to reclaim traditional songs today.
