Finding the “Frontier” in a Page of Music: Imperial Evidence and the Legacy of Settler Colonialism

A page with music printed on both sides is inserted between two pages of a 1722 book published in Paris about Native Americans in North America.1 The songs are likely from the Illinois people, possibly part of a Calumet ceremony.2 There are seven staff lines per page in treble clef with no bar lines, representing two songs, divided from one another by an unobtrusive double bar line on the first page. The first song features a predominantly quarter-note melody with a repeating descending contour set to what seem to be vocables (ni na ha). The second song is longer and more melodically and rhythmically elaborate with lyrics. The page offers no titles or attribution. Features that would be of great consequence for identifying the songs or how to perform them are left out. There is no indication of tempo and no translation.The page is unusual for its time because it has music printed from engraved plates on both sides. The volume contains numerous engraved inserts—elaborate maps, detailed illustrations of dwellings, representations of cooking practices and dress—but those are only printed on one side. Printing from an engraving entailed pressing an inked metal plate into a piece of paper. This left an indentation on the page; it was messy to print on both sides. And because it is printed on recto and verso, the notation would have been difficult to read or practice this music straight through without pausing for a quick page turn. When bound in its duodecimo format, the book does not lie open on its own; it must be held open with both hands or weighted props. Did it not matter if the two songs were legible, singable, or playable? If not, why print it?This American music became entangled with American settler colonialism and American academic scholarship. The page was printed during a period when France's North American empire and commercial fur trading networks with Indigenous communities were extensive. The French and other European powers knew that Native allies were imperative for advancing their political and economic aims; knowledge about specific tribal customs was essential. Different versions of the same 1722 notation were reprinted in scholarly books for three hundred years in France, Canada, and the United States.3 The notated music was fodder for an insatiable imperial appetite for information.Our focus is not on the practice of transcribing music on the spot by ear but rather on the printed artifact. Numerous music sources like the 1722 engraved notation exist. You've likely seen one yourself—a few lines of music sandwiched on a printed page of a primary source—allegedly capturing a song sung by someone who has long since passed. If you are lucky, there is an attribution. Maybe you are a member of the community who created it and immediately recognized the song and its meaning or even mistakes in the transcription. If not, you could talk with descendants of the originator or their community who sang the song; perhaps they still do. Musical evidence can be invaluable to communities today. Scholars of American music, culture, and Native American history are familiar with this kind of source. Maybe you use transcription yourself in ethnographic fieldwork. Often, with such sources, the music sits quietly, dormant, disembodied, and unplayed, wedged between the pages of a colonialist book with little to no contextualizing information.As Americanists grapple with the violent legacy of settler colonialism and the demographic and cultural damage it does, these sources deserve culturally and historically sensitive consideration. But such consideration is complicated when little is known about what a song is, whose it is, or when it came from. As two settler scholars—a musicologist and a cultural historian, whose work intersects in book history—we propose a way to engage with this source: as a material artifact, as a printed book, as a page pressed on both sides by an engraved plate. When we trace this source as a material artifact, it reveals the layers of settler-colonial destructive power in American history and helps us reckon with that power in American music studies.4This printed page is part of a larger story about American music history and the so-called frontier, that vast and roving region historians call the American West. We start from three premises. First, the notation failed to capture the Illinois singers’ musical grace and nuance (a limitation that the transcriber noted). Second, rather than tangle with the relative veracity of these printed songs, we set aside, here, questions about the music's “authenticity” and accuracy. Third, doing so brings an auxiliary purpose of printed music notation: to propagate information that advanced French and later U.S. imperial aims. Making music was not the primary goal of printing these songs. Print turned musical culture, and the people who created it, into reproducible and interpretable segments of consumable data. That data was instrumental in conceptualizing and “conquering” what settlers called the “frontier.”Claude-Charles Le Roy de La Potherie's Histoire de l'Amerique Septentrionale or History of North America (Paris, 1722) is the first publication to include the duo of printed songs. La Potherie was a French colonial official and chronicler of New France, and he filled the four volumes of his Histoire with observations he made while helping the French fight the English in the Hudson Bay in the late seventeenth century. The Histoire is politically and ideologically imperialist, which its publication history reflects: La Potherie originally submitted the manuscript to the French royal censor for approval in 1702, but publication was delayed twenty years out of fear that printing the book would make critical information available to their British enemies. The French guarded the printed songs as a part of their arsenal of protected diplomatic intelligence.The songs appear in volume two, chapter two of La Potherie's Histoire, which describes the mock battles, dances, drumming, and songs performed in the multistage Calumet ceremony.5 La Potherie introduces the songs this way: Here are a couple of the songs that they are accustomed to singing: they give them a certain turn that we cannot express well enough with notes, and which however, gives it all its elegance. All these lyrics do not for the most part, have any meaning, like saying la, la, la. From time to time, they say fanciful things, which make little sense, like Kauabannogué, which means “that which is white,” and Maintigomitadé, meaning an organ.6Notation's shortcomings are front and center here: “[W]e cannot express well enough with notes.” It is not just the sound of the specific songs that cannot be expressed well enough. The full context of the ceremony and its tremendous and multifarious meanings cannot be captured in a book. Calumet ceremonies held many sacred meanings, but they also could promote peace and trade, rendering them fundamental to multiple Native intertribal networks and alliances.7 French traders and missionaries understood this knowledge was essential for safe passage across and through Indigenous lands and carried calumet pipes with them as a visual representation of their alliances. When Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette approached a Michigamea (Illinois) village holding up a calumet pipe in 1673, the villagers prepared to attack. They only stood down when they recognized the pipe by sight as one made by their Peoria allies.8The printed page failed to document how, in face-to-face encounters, singing telegraphed meaning and intention and was an invaluable source of information in intercultural encounters. The songs’ removal from their context was multiplied: first, they were transcribed, then communicated to La Potherie, then marked and engraved on a plate and printed in a book, the publication of which was delayed by two decades. These multiple severings alienated the songs from their original context until they could scarcely serve their intended purpose and were set adrift on the printed page.Nearly two centuries later, Wisconsinite Emma Helen Blair reproduced a facsimile of the two songs in her edited collection of primary sources, The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes (1911). Blair's publication places the music in a narrative from French explorer Nicholas Perrot, even though The Indian Tribes also contains excerpts from La Potherie. A further difference is that two music pages are printed side by side without space between, visible all at once, but in a smaller format than La Potherie's original.9 This placement was no accident: the music appears in a section that describes a specific performance of the Calumet ceremony from the 1660s. By including the songs as a representation of the type of music the ceremony could entail, Blair further alienated the songs from their original context. Doing so turned the music into a form of symbolic evidence that represented the archival sources that she was making accessible to a scholarly public.Blair was an experienced historical editor, bibliographer, and translator. She oversaw the Wisconsin State Historical Society's map and manuscripts collections and was an assistant to Rueben Gold Thwaites, helping him complete the monumental and still widely cited Jesuit Relations. Like many white women historians of her time, Blair was educated and experienced but had few professional options outside of helping to create the compendiums that comprise the printed historical record still used today. She was a meticulous researcher and would not have chosen the “wrong” place for the songs unwittingly; their new location shows that the songs functioned as an excerpt-able example of visual evidence rather than a rendering of a specific or replicable musical performance.Blair worked in an age in which the field of history was expansion oriented. Her mentors (and employers) were the men who promoted the “frontier” and its cultural history as we know and understand it in historiography. She studied under the revered historian Frederick Jackson Turner at the University of Wisconsin from 1892 to 1894. In 1893 Turner garnered international acclaim for presenting his thesis about the American frontier. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that the American frontier—which he largely portrayed as an ever-westward moving line of territorial expansion attracting industrious white colonial-settler families with an economic vision to cultivate empty wilderness free for the taking—was central to forming American capitalism, individualism, democracy, violence, and what he called American character, distinct from Europe, which was largely bound up in a determination to overcome adversity through westering. What Turner did not mention were Civil War-era federal programs like the Homestead Act (1862) and the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), which aided in this process by giving away millions of acres of Indigenous peoples’ land to families and American universities, including the University of Wisconsin.10The frontier was never a physical place but an idea. It is significant that the idea took root so firmly with Wisconsinite scholars, Turner and Blair. Blair and Turner worked in Madison, Wisconsin, the northern edge of Illinois Indian country, where the two engraved songs likely originated, a region once considered a “frontier.” This region was not always a “frontier,” however, nor did it remain one in the popular imagination. Today, it is jokingly called “flyover country,” while politicians and commercials nostalgically refer to it as America's heartland. Colonial Frenchmen called the vast, fertile terrain of the Mississippi River Valley the Pays de Illinois, acknowledging that the heartland was the ancestral homeland of the Illinois peoples. It still is; for the members of today's Peoria Tribe of Indians, this was never a homestead, wilderness, or frontier.The printed pages of music made the “frontier” something one could hold in one's hand, transforming it from a fantasy to a tactile object, it makes another culture theoretically learnable, while compressed into a soundbite—a term historian Philip J. Deloria used to describe stereotypes bound up in cultural expectation—and in this instance, it was theoretically audible as well, although the material format did not easily afford re-sounding the music.11The “frontier's” power rests in its ability to stoke the imagination. But we must also understand how the “frontier” was central to the formation of modern academic institutions that claimed to promote empiricism and fact-based knowledge rather than fantasy. The study of American music lives in the world inherited from the late-nineteenth century and its cultural interests, especially predominantly white U.S. cultural and scholarly institutions. In a moment of retrospection, marrying musicology and cultural history through the tools of bibliography can help us evaluate the colonial inheritances of the so-called frontier, its real-world legacy of violence, and how a simple, unattributed set of songs on the printed page were bound up in that transatlantic process.

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