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A personal account is given of the treatment of Canadian Aborigines (North American Indians) and Aboriginal land. Despite some achievements in the recognition and affirmation of Aboriginal rights, indigenous citizenship with the land is becoming increasingly tenuous. The author advocates Aboriginal control of Canadian affairs (as well as Aboriginal affairs), in the light of the increasing participation of Aboriginals at all levels in Canadian society. He does not advocate assimilation, but argues that citizenship under Aboriginal influence may generate a greater attentiveness to the land uses and cultural practices that are preferred by Aborigines.

This chapter examines the influence of anthropological and ethnological studies on musical representation of North American Indians. It discusses efforts to dispel the noble savage idea of American Indians and suggests that many of the attitudes formed in popular culture about Indians were created indirectly in the nineteenth century by government agencies. It highlights the influence of anthropology and popular middlebrow culture on the iconographic and indexical representation of Indian music in American culture.

This chapter examines the representation of Native American resistance in European theater and music during the period from 1710 to 1808. It explains that American subjects in ballets and operas during this period were based principally on Spanish and French encounters with Indians in South and Central America and the dominant themes were the ruthlessness of conquest and the heroism of the Native Americans who resisted. It also describes the specific depictions of North American Indians in eighteenth-century British music.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the musical representation of Native America. This volume examines the music to evoke North and South American Indians and American national identity. It also investigates the pale-faced imitations of Native American music and ritual as rendered in the royal courts, the opera house, the theater, the salon, and the exhibition hall. This volume also traces the musical roots of America's Indian.

This chapter looks at the more complex and interesting task of exploring the works of writers who have been perceived as advocates of positive interpretations of “savage” life, with emphasis on writers on the North American Indian, who continues to represent the paradigm case of the “savage,” moving into the eighteenth century and the period known as the Enlightenment. Among the eighteenth-century writers on the American Indians, those who have attracted the most attention are Lahontan and Lafitau, the latter of whom is perhaps almost stereotypically an Enlightenment scholar in the Foucauldian sense of his tendency toward the “mathesis.” Lahontan, by contrast, continues and expands on the skeptical and critical tendencies that we see so strikingly present in Lescarbot.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the musical representation of Native America and North American Indians. It suggests that despite the stereotype depictions of American Indians, representation brought about a greater awareness of ancient values in human civilization which could still be part of the modern world. It also highlights the role of music in engaging the ideologies of its time in a fascinating discourse.

This chapter examines how, in a variety of contemporary musical styles, aboriginal musicians from the western Canadian province of Manitoba move away from rigorously metricalised rhythmic frameworks and towards freer, more minimally metrical ones. It proposes that (variously) metricalised performances can be understood to enact subtle forms of role recruitment and hail listeners to particular kinds of rhythmic subjecthood. As it shows, not all listeners respond in the same way to these summons, and consequently rhythmic organisation is implicated in not only establishing and extending socio-musical groups, but delimiting them as well. Consequently, in the Manitoban context, variation in temporal regulation is one practice that distinguishes aboriginal and non-aboriginal publics from one another.

During the twentieth century, within only a moment of evolutionary time, human ingenuity has produced an unprecedented vast increase in the destructive power of the human species. It is now possible to inflict immense damage on almost all countries everywhere and pose the threat of annihilation of the entire world. Shortly, there will be no part of the earth so remote that a committed group cannot do immense damage to itself and others far away. The events of September 11, 2001, in New York,Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania have made this clear. Like it or not, conflicts have become everyone’s business. The idea that countries and people should be free to conduct their quarrels on their own terms, no matter how deadly, is outmoded in the nuclear age and in a global world where local hostilities can rapidly become international ones with devastating consequences. Similarly, the notion that tyrants are free to commit atrocities on their own peoples is becoming obsolete, albeit with plenty of resistance. Today, the human species is engaged in an increasingly dangerous proliferation of lethal weaponry, including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction, as well as the worldwide, wall-to-wall spread of deadly small arms. At the same time, in all parts of the world, we also see evidence of abundant prejudice, hatred, and threats of mass violence. Sadly, the historical record is full of every sort of slaughter based on invidious distinctions of religion, ethnicity, nationality, and other perceived group differences. This record confirms a part of our unique human heritage, one that we will address in more depth in the pages to follow as we seek to learn lessons from our past and search to find ways of overcoming human predispositions to violence in a technological and global era. In a contemporary world full of hatred and violence, widespread knowledge and understanding of deadly conflicts past and present, as well as paths to conflict resolution and prevention of deadly conflict, are an urgent agenda. Such an agenda deserves major educational efforts–not only in schools and universities, but also in community organizations, religious institutions, the media, and the public health system.