The Indigenous musical traditions of the Americas are among the most diverse in the world, encompassing hundreds of distinct nations, languages, and ceremonial systems. They also raise the most urgent ethical questions in all of ethnomusicology.
THE SCALE OF DIVERSITY
There are approximately 370 million Indigenous people in the world, belonging to more than 5,000 distinct peoples in 90 countries. In the Americas, pre-Columbian civilizations developed musical traditions of extraordinary range: the Maya, Aztec/Mexica, and Inca empires each had sophisticated musical cultures; hundreds of smaller nations across North America, the Amazon basin, and the Southern Cone developed their own distinct systems.
Any attempt to summarize "Indigenous American music" as a single category commits a fundamental ethnomusicological error. The music of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico has almost nothing in common with the music of the Mapuche of Chile, or the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon, or the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Great Lakes region. What these traditions share is a history of colonial suppression — the systematic attempt to eradicate Indigenous music as part of broader programs of forced assimilation — and a current reality of cultural resurgence and protection.
MUSIC AND CEREMONY
In most Indigenous American musical traditions, music is inseparable from ceremony, and ceremony is inseparable from the maintenance of the world. This is not a metaphor: many Indigenous cosmologies understand certain songs and rituals as literally necessary for the sun to rise, the rain to fall, the crops to grow. The Hopi kachina ceremonies, the Lakota Sun Dance, the Navajo healing ceremonies (chantways) — in these traditions, music is not entertainment but ontological maintenance.
This understanding has profound ethical implications for ethnomusicology. When a Navajo chantway practitioner refuses to allow recording, they are not being obstructive: they are protecting knowledge that, in their understanding, should only be transmitted in specific contexts to specific people. The Society for Ethnomusicology's ethical guidelines specifically address the rights of Indigenous communities to control access to, and use of, their musical traditions.
NORTH AMERICAN TRADITIONS: SELECTED EXAMPLES
The Plains Indian tradition of powwow — intertribal gatherings centered on communal drumming and dance — is one of the most visible Indigenous musical traditions in North America, partly because it functions as an intertribal gathering that crosses national lines. The powwow drum (a large bass drum played by multiple singers simultaneously) and the characteristic powwow singing style (high falsetto, with a descending melodic contour and a pulsed vibrato technique) have become widely documented.
Northwest Coast traditions — including Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw — are deeply embedded in the potlatch ceremony and the theatrical tradition of masks, dance, and song. The songs belong to clans and families; to perform them without permission is a form of theft.
The Ghost Dance — a religious movement that spread across the Great Plains in 1889–1890 — produced a body of songs (documented by James Mooney of the Smithsonian Institution) that is a case study in how music becomes a vehicle for spiritual resistance under colonial oppression. The US Army's massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890 was, in part, a response to fear of the Ghost Dance movement.
AMAZONIAN AND ANDEAN TRADITIONS
The music of Amazonian Indigenous peoples is poorly documented by Western scholarship — a reflection of how inaccessible these communities are and how recently (tragically) many have been contacted. What research exists — primarily by Brazilian and Venezuelan ethnomusicologists, and by field researchers associated with the MPEG (Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi) in Belém — documents extraordinary diversity: songs for every activity, instrument types unknown elsewhere, vocal techniques that require years to learn.
Andean music, by contrast, has been extensively documented. The sikuri tradition — communal pan-pipe ensembles in which each performer plays a single set of pipes that must interlock with others to complete the melody — is a profound example of music as social practice: no individual can play the melody alone; it exists only in the collective performance.
ETHICS OF DOCUMENTATION AND LISTENING
The ethical challenges of studying Indigenous music are more acute than in almost any other area of ethnomusicology. Issues include: informed consent at community (not just individual) level; the ownership of recordings made without explicit permission; the use of Indigenous music in commercial contexts (sampling, "world music" albums, film scores) without compensation or acknowledgment; and the documentation of sacred or ceremonially restricted material that communities may not want publicized.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990) in the United States established a framework for the return of cultural property. Several ethnomusicologists and legal scholars have argued for analogous protections for intangible cultural heritage, including music. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) provides a broader international framework.
MESOAMERICAN MUSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
The musical archaeology of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is rich and growing. Aztec (Mexica) musical instruments — the huehuetl (upright drum), the teponaztli (slit drum), conch shell trumpets, clay flutes, and elaborate clay whistles — survive in museum collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. The Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), working with Indigenous informants, documented the role of music in pre-conquest Aztec society in the Florentine Codex. Maya stelae and ceramics depict musicians playing instruments that are still recognizable in highland Maya communities today. Archaeologist Arnd Adje Both has documented many of these instruments acoustically, providing the basis for modern reconstructions and performances.
NAVAJO CHANTWAYS AND CURING CEREMONIES
The chantways of the Navajo (Diné) people constitute one of the most elaborate liturgical-musical complexes in North America. There are at least twenty-four major chantway ceremonies, each consisting of hundreds of songs performed in specific sequence over nights and days. The Blessingway, the Mountainway, the Nightway, the Enemyway — each addresses specific spiritual conditions and follows specific protocols. The hatáłii (chanter, singer, sometimes translated as "medicine man") who can perform a complete chantway has memorized hundreds of hours of musical and ritual material. David McAllester's ethnomusicological work with Navajo communities — particularly his "Enemy Way Music" (Peabody Museum, 1954) — set methodological standards for respectful, community-collaborative research that remain influential.
THE MARIACHI AND MEXICAN HYBRID TRADITIONS
The mariachi tradition of western Mexico (Jalisco, particularly) is a Mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indigenous) tradition that emerged in the nineteenth century from earlier rural string-band music. Its instrumentation — violins, trumpets, classical guitar, vihuela (a high-pitched five-string guitar), and guitarrón (a large six-string acoustic bass) — and its associated song forms (son jalisciense, ranchera, bolero) constitute one of the most globally recognizable Latin American traditions. UNESCO inscribed mariachi on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. The son jarocho tradition of Veracruz, the marimba tradition of southern Mexico and Guatemala, and the huapango traditions of the Gulf Coast represent additional Mestizo musical complexes, each with distinct Indigenous, African, and Spanish roots.
REPATRIATION AND THE MUSEUM
Recent decades have seen substantial activism by Indigenous communities to recover control of their musical heritage. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, established in 1989 (its building on the National Mall opened in 2004), has implemented policies giving Indigenous communities access and consultation rights over collections containing their cultural materials. The return of Hopi katsina figures and ceremonial objects — including objects used to make music — has been the subject of extended negotiations, particularly with European collections and auction houses. The principle that Indigenous communities have rights over the ongoing use of their musical traditions, even when those traditions have been recorded and distributed for decades, is increasingly accepted in mainstream ethnomusicology as a baseline ethical commitment.
EXERCISE: DECOLONIZING LISTENING
Before listening to any Indigenous American music in this course, read the liner notes of the recording you intend to use. Answer: Who made the recording? When and where? Did they have community permission? Are the performers identified? Are royalties or acknowledgments going to the community? Is the recording marked as sacred or restricted? This exercise is not preliminary — it is essential. It is what distinguishes ethnomusicological listening from tourism.