Musical Space at a Native American Catholic Church

Since January, I've been doing some fieldwork at a Native American Catholic Church: the Kateri Center of Chicago. I first visited the Kateri Center because I was interested in what kind of music I might find there. More specifically, especially after having read the collaborative monograph The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns, I was curious to see whether any of the hymns were identifiably Native American. When I first came to Kateri all of the hymns were sung along to pre-recorded accompaniment and singing. Both the hymns and the call and response sections of the service were sung in English and sounded typically Euro-western. Also, part of the sonic landscape, though, was the Native American flute music of musician Bill Buchholz, a regular member of the congregation. Bill generally played during the prayer to the four directions that usually began church services. (The prayer, incidentally, was the most identifiable marker in the service of Native American tradition). However, he stressed that he played whenever he was moved to or when it felt appropriate, which meant that his flute playing could be heard at various points during the service. At first I thought about the flute playing as something different in kind from the hymns and calls and responses (read Native American vs. Euro-Western), and I wondered if Native American voices were being silenced in the soundscape of the church, especially since all of the vocal music was in English. I knew that a commonly held view (which the members at the Kateri Center are well aware of) was that Catholicism was the religion of colonizers (though I think it's much more complicated than this, and that the Native American leaders at Kateri know exactly what they're doing, and don't need "rescuing"!). Would it make sense, I asked originally, to look at the musical space at Kateri as also being colonized? Would a musical act of social justice be needed for decolonization? What would musical decolonization look like? And, most importantly, how were people at Kateri thinking about it? Did anyone want to start singing hymns in Ojibwe as I am told they used to? (The director of Kateri, Georgina Roy, is a fluent speaker, apparently one of only five in Chicago).

During the next weeks and months of fieldwork, my questions changed. "Decolonization" seemed to be a blanket term that I was imposing from the outside. A few weeks into my fieldwork, a member of the congregation introduced me to the Kateri Song, a hymn to St. Kateri (the only Native American Catholic Saint who was canonized in October 2012, and for whom the Kateri Center is names). Written by Myles Donnelly Goddard, a historian who was once a member of the congregation, the hymn, like the others sung at the Kateri Center, uses a simple Euro-sounding harmonic framework, in this case I-IV-V-I. Insert PDF. The text, too, which tells the story of Kateri's life, has a Euro-western foundations: in a phone interview, Myles told me that he had constructed the hymn text from what he had read in several books about Kateri. Though he couldn't remember what the books were, all of the source materials for all of the scholarship on St. Kateri come from two Jesuit missionaries: fathers Cholenec and Chauchetiere. But, uniquely, the hymn is addressed to a Native American woman. What I then wanted to know was how often the hymn was sung, where in the service it was sung, and what it did for the musical space at Kateri. Was it a vehicle through which congregants connected with their Native American identities?

Before I could answer this question, however, the intern at Kateri, realizing that I had a singing background, put me to work: ten minutes before services, he would hand me music and ask me to sing during communion, or to lead the call and response. Though I had offered my services to the congregation at Kateri before, expressing my willingness to share the photos I took, to create write-ups for their bulletin, etc., it was my singing that was immediately and enthusiastically taken up. Soon, I was contributing significantly to the aural space at Kateri. In fact, I've only ever heard the Kateri Song performed when I have been asked to lead it (Bill Buchholtz always generously agreeing to play piano). This was a situation that I hadn't imagined: I am not seen as taking away space from Native American voices. I am being asked (strongly) to participate, and to give voice to the Kateri Song. (I assume, though I will have to clarify this, that having an experienced singer makes it easier for the congregation to sing hymns for which they don't have recordings, allowing them to sing this particular Native American inflected hymn more often). The questions about decolonization begin to seem a bit strange in this context. Even the questions of Native Americanness become more difficult. This, incidentally, became so clear to me when one of my primary interlocutors, Lisa, came around after church with the signup sheet for a sweat lodge that the congregation was participating in the next week. Lisa encouraged me to sign up. I filled in the form, but hesitated at the line on the form that said “tribe.” “What should I put,” I asked Lisa, “Indo-Canadian?” At the same time she said, “Put musician.” And on second thought, “Put Kateri musician.” So to Lisa, the "taxonomy" might be more fluid: it’s not Navaho, Ojibwe, Indo-Canadian or South Asian; it’s Navaho, Objibwe, musician.

But I think the key is to acknowledge that questions and answers about Native Americanness (in this case, as they are represented through musical or aural space) are always in flux, and cannot be painted in broad, unchanging strokes. Writing in a context much more overtly structured by inequality, Araujo and Cambria write that researchers "should be humbly conscious that socio-economic and cultural processes, conditioning, and products are permanently mediated and re-signified by power relations, and demand constant action and reflection upon them, not allowing much space for static or reified theorizations, whose more palpable effects are the almost invariably ephemeral consecration of authorities, and tautological forms of stereotyping and oppression” (Araujo and Cambria 35). Araujo takes this concept yet further in his collaborative article "Conflict and Violence as Conceptual Tools in Present-Day Ethnomusicology; Notes from a Dialogical Experience in Rio de Janeiro" by invoking the idea of symbolic violence, something that I try to resist in my own work: “Symbolic violence, however, appears more often in the form of concepts made up from outside perceptions that ‘freeze,’ so to speak, social practices," in this case the musical practices at the Kateri Center, "failing to recognize…practical strategies as categories that make no sense in the real world” (Araujo et al, 304). As Klisala Harrison suggests, I try to develop "different analytical frames of approach that emerge through different epistemologically engaged actors, disciplines, and interests..." (519). And as the musical space, frameworks, and actors at the Kateri Center shift, I hope to shift with them.

Sources

Araujo, Samuel et al. 2006 “Conflict and Violence as Conceptual Tools in Present-Day Ethnomusicology; Notes from a Dialogical Experience in Rio de Janeiro.” Ethnomusicology 50 (2):287- 313.

Araujo, Samuel, and Vincenzo Cambria. 2013. “Sound Praxis, Poverty, and Social Participation: Perspectives from a Collaborative Study in Rio de Janeiro." Yearbook for Traditional Music 45: 28-42. 

Harrison, Klisala. 2012. “Epistemologies of Applied Ethnomusicology." Ethnomusicology 56 (3): 505-529.

Lassiter, Luke Eric, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay. 2002. The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.