Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 5.02 Ethnicity and Race
Presentation #1 Title
Cosmopolitan Voices: Women’s Native American Powwow Drum Groups in Northern Appalachia
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper addresses the significance of women’s Native American powwow drum groups in Northern Appalachia, specifically their positive influence on Native women’s identity. The majority of Native American powwow drum groups are comprised of male singers. Sometimes these groups have women “backup singers” who stand behind the men but who do not play the drum. While women’s drum groups are rare in Indian country, a surprisingly large number of such groups are found in Northern Appalachia. In fact, at some powwows in this region, the number of women’s groups matches or even exceeds the number of men’s groups. What’s more, although powwows were not held regularly in Northern Appalachia until the late 1980s, which was later than many areas in the United States, women’s drum groups in this area started forming in the early 1990s, making them some of the earliest women’s groups on the East Coast. Through ethnographic interviews and my auto-ethnographic experiences as a powwow dancer since childhood, I build on work by ethnomusicologists such as Hoefnagels and Diamond that addresses Native American women’s musical performance. In this paper, I discuss the obstacles that women singers overcame in order to perform at powwows, the shift in opinion regarding women singers over time, and the current perception of women’s drums from data collected through interviews with powwow singers and dancers. I argue that women’s drum groups have played a significant role in energizing Native women’s identity in Northern Appalachia. Understanding this aspect of powwows is an important part of our understanding Native American modernity more broadly; likewise, it is significant in our comprehension of Appalachia as a place of dynamic, diverse traditions.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Susan Taffe Reed holds a M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in Musicology and American Indian Studies. She has taught at Cornell University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Bowdoin College in Maine.
Cosmopolitan Voices: Women’s Native American Powwow Drum Groups in Northern Appalachia
This paper addresses the significance of women’s Native American powwow drum groups in Northern Appalachia, specifically their positive influence on Native women’s identity. The majority of Native American powwow drum groups are comprised of male singers. Sometimes these groups have women “backup singers” who stand behind the men but who do not play the drum. While women’s drum groups are rare in Indian country, a surprisingly large number of such groups are found in Northern Appalachia. In fact, at some powwows in this region, the number of women’s groups matches or even exceeds the number of men’s groups. What’s more, although powwows were not held regularly in Northern Appalachia until the late 1980s, which was later than many areas in the United States, women’s drum groups in this area started forming in the early 1990s, making them some of the earliest women’s groups on the East Coast. Through ethnographic interviews and my auto-ethnographic experiences as a powwow dancer since childhood, I build on work by ethnomusicologists such as Hoefnagels and Diamond that addresses Native American women’s musical performance. In this paper, I discuss the obstacles that women singers overcame in order to perform at powwows, the shift in opinion regarding women singers over time, and the current perception of women’s drums from data collected through interviews with powwow singers and dancers. I argue that women’s drum groups have played a significant role in energizing Native women’s identity in Northern Appalachia. Understanding this aspect of powwows is an important part of our understanding Native American modernity more broadly; likewise, it is significant in our comprehension of Appalachia as a place of dynamic, diverse traditions.
