Academic Works

“‘Songs to Soothe a Mother’: Intertextuality and Intertribalism in Kiowa War Mother Songs.” 2018. Master’s Thesis. https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/21662

War Mother songs were first composed for the women of the Kiowa War Mothers Chapter 18 organization during World War II by two main composers, Lewis Toyebo and James “Jimmy A” Anquoe. These songs initially functioned to provide encouragement for both the servicemen deploying overseas and their mothers, and later were performed to honor returning veterans. Through musical and linguistic elements, War Mother songs serve as an intertext of multiple pre-reservation songs and dances (War Journey, Scalp, and Victory), but also reflect changes in warfare and post-reservation lifestyle in the twentieth-century. After World War II into the Korean and Vietnam Wars, War Mother song performances continued to honor veterans, both returning and fallen in battle, in a mix of Kiowa contexts and intertribal spaces.

“‘People Have Courage!’: Protest Music and Indigenous Movements.” 2021. Erik D. Gooding, Max Yamane, Bret Salter. Comparative American Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2021.2008223

In recent years, a series of Indigenous protest movements have emerged across North America in response to contemporaneous settler-colonial violence, including the #NoDAPL movement and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. These movements are responses to political, societal, environmental, and philosophical incongruities with governments and their non-Indigenous citizenry. Music has been at the heart of these political causes, social protests, and cultural movements. Plains-style powwow vocal music, which emerged as the dominant intertribal performative style in the 20th century, has played a crucial role in contemporary protests as mechanisms for articulating messages of resistance through symbolic embodiments and as intertribal expressions of solidarity directed primarily towards Indigenous people for cultural and spiritual uplift. This style also has a long-standing tradition in Indigenous cultures and has been employed in relation to historic external and internal protest/movements. This paper seeks to understand how Plains-style music articulates messages of protest through the use of semiotics and how music has been employed in protest environments. We will draw upon historic and recent examples to demonstrate the long-standing tradition of Indigenous Plains-style protest music.

“‘The Stories are told by Us’/U.S.: Politics of Telling Stories about Indigenous Languages With (and Without) Music. 2022. Maxwell Yamane and Mary Phillips (Omaha/Laguna Pueblo). Journal for Multilingualism and Multicultural Development. ***Forthcoming***

Stories and storytelling about language initiatives are an important political device in constructing and perpetuating language status planning and policies. However, little attention has been given to meta-discursive practices by institutions about Indigenous language revitalization in the U.S. as well as how music can play important roles in storytelling of Indigenous language initiatives by Indigenous storytellers and performers. In this paper, we problematize congressional discursive practices about Indigenous languages and show how deficit-based storytelling attempts to normalize and justify problematic federal language status planning and policies on Indigenous language initiatives. In contrast, we highlight how Indigenous storytellers and performers creatively tell stories about themselves and their languages both with and through music at federal events that concern Indigenous language revitalization. We show how musicking in relation to or as a form of storytelling can help dispel damaging outsider misnomers, uplift Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by Indigenizing time and space, and (re)claim self-representation. We suggest that storytelling with music can be a possible strategy to affirm Indigenous storytelling sovereignty that can also disrupt damaging language status planning and policies that attempt to govern their own Indigenous language initiatives.

If you would like access to an article, please feel free to email: yamanemh (at) ou (dot) edu