Saturday 8th October

I first heard snatches of North American Indian Music on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s records.  Buffy herself was half Indian and strangely enough loved Country  and Western music, but did write songs about the Indians such as ‘Now That The Buffalo’s Gone’.  And during the Seventies I read a few books about the almost total annihilation of the Redskins by wave after wave of American Settlers, the most famous being ‘Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee’, incidentally the title of a much later Buffy song too.  But the music seemed pretty uninspiring, a lot of ‘whey, hey a whey’s’ and simple tribal drumming; I couldn’t really see much melody in there.   And maybe there wasn’t much – why should there be?  I bought a cassette purporting to be Native American Music in the early eighties but I suspect it was white-man’s interpretations though it did feature Indian choirs (if such a thing really ever existed, or is just another European import).  And in the late Seventies were films such as ‘A Man Called Horse’ where again a white man attempts to understand the Red Indians, and Soldier Blue, for which again Buffy wrote the title song about another Indian Massacre.

And in our superior way we have romanticized the Noble Savage yet again.  At least it makes an improvement from just treating them as Savages, but what exactly is noble about their continued treatment as even their tiny Reservations are taken for mineral extraction or logging I struggle to understand.  We have all bought dream-catchers too, as the hippies absorbed some sweet ideas from the native Americans too.

Then in the mid-eighties I bought a record by Robbie Robertson, who was lead guitarist in the Band.  It was called ‘Music for the Native Americans’ and although the songs were written and sung mostly by Robbie he seemed to incorporate Indian drumming and chanting into the songs too.  Then a few years later he released ‘Contact From The Underworld of Redboy’, and this was a much more political and modern sounding record, with beats and scratching and great tunes.  But one track called ‘Sacrifice’ was outstanding.  It has spoken words by Leonard Peltier, a Native American who was involved in a shootout on a reservation with State Troopers and Local Sherrif’s where one Indian and two white officers were killed.  At his trial the prosecution stated that although there was no evidence that Leonard Peltier had shot either of the dead white men someone had to pay for the crime.  That was in 1976 and he has been in jail ever since.  As he will not admit his ‘guilt’ he will not be released.  So he continues what he considers his Sacrifice.  It is an amazing and moving song.