Omaha Indian Music
Omaha Indian Informant and Alice Fletcher in Macy, NE. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Photograph No. 4500. In the late 19th century, American Indian music was emerging as a legitimate area of anthropological inquiry. Most fieldworkers noted only the words of ceremonial songs and found Indian music at best difficult to comprehend. In her introduction to A Study of Omaha Indian...
Reflections on the Omaha Cylinder Recordings
Omaha reservation, Thurston County, Nebraska. By the time Alice Fletcher first began her study of Omaha culture in the early 1880s, much of the original land belonging to the Dhegiha Siouan-speaking Omaha people had been ceded to the United States through treaty. The Omaha cylinder recordings at the Library of Congress were not really thought about by the Omaha during the last century. They...
Omaha Song Today
Clockwise from top: Looking Toward Macy from Pow-Wow; Baseball Game in Macy; View of Bluffs, Missouri River, and Iowa. There are no more deer hoof rattles. The moccasin game exists only in memory. All that remains of the Warrior Society is the American Legion. The medicine bundles have been stolen, sold, or destroyed. The sacred Pole is gone. The last monolingual Omaha has died....
Album Technical Note
The four-inch wax cylinders heard on this album were rerecorded onto magnetic tape using a modified Edison Home Phonograph. The machine accepted styluses varying in size to accommodate the different size and condition of each cylinder. Because the revolutions per minute at which these field recordings were made often changed from day to day, sometimes from cylinder to cylinder, the technician rerecording them decided...
Album Acknowledgments
This album could not have been produced without the cooperation and encouragement of the Omaha people. We would like especially to thank the Omaha Tribal Council and its chairmen, Elmer Blackbird (1981-83) and Wade Miller (1983-present), Dennis Hastings, director of the Omaha Tribal Research Project, and singers Charles Edwards and the late John Turner, who helped Alan Jabbour identify and document the voices of...
Selected Bibliography from Album
Francis La Flesche Green, Norma Kidd 1969 Iron Eye's Family: The Children of Joseph La Flesche. Lincoln, Nebraska: Johnson Publishing Company. La Flesche, Francis 1900 The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company. Liberty, Margot 1976 Native American 'Informants': The Contribution of Francis La Flesche. In American Anthropology: The Early Years, ed. by John V. Murra, pp. 99-110. 1974 Proceedings...