Traditional Sioux of the last century û or the centuries before û would have found the entire idea of putting on their best clothes and going to a concert hall to listen û as relatively passive observers û to a musical performance extremely odd. For them, as for other native peoples of the Americas (and arguably other native peoples throughout the world before the onset of industrialization) music was something that was integrated into the fabric of ritual and everyday life. It was not something apart. Music and dancing were nearly always integrated into either ceremonial or celebrative activities of personal and communal life (Hassrick, 1964, p. 140). Such a degree of integration is hard for citizens of the almost-21st century to imagine. Even for a professional musician, for example, music is something that stands apart from the rest of his or her daily activities and is distinctly recognizable as an activity that can be isolated from other activities.
Like so many of the native peoples of this continent, the Sioux lost much of what marked their sense of cultural identity with the coming of the Europeans to what is now the United States, and because music was integral to so many other cultural activities, they lost much of it as well. However, the Sioux did not go quietly into the good night of colonization, and they used their music and dancing (in particular in the form of the Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance) to help them successfully resist cultural genocide and their music has remained a part of their identity well past the period of most severe sanctions by European settlers (Utley, 1963, p. 64). Although it now serves in some ways a different purpose than it did three hundred years ago, the music of the Sioux remains a bedrock of their culture and an active means of establishing for each individual what it means to be a Sioux and, beyond this, what it means to be an American Indian in the post-colonial world.
This paper...