Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1997)

Canadian Women Making Music

Andra McCartney

Craig Mishler. The Crooked Stovepipe: Athapaskan Fiddle Music and Square Dancing in Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 234 pp. $29.95 hardcover. ISBN 0-252-01996-2

Named for a popular local fiddle tune, The Crooked Stovepipe studies the indigenous fiddle music and social dancing of the Athapaskan people. Craig Mishler taped and interviewed Gwich'in fiddlers and dancers, whose territory spans the border between Alaska and Canada along the Yukon River. His work is based on a series of twelve visits, each about a week, from 1972 to 1992.

Mishler stresses that little of the music is pure and stable; rather it is a meeting of indigenous and "exotic" forms. Using the concept of convergence, he accounts for invention and innovation as well as contact and borrowing involving diffusion (form is transferred intact), juxtaposition (forms brought together side by side, without being integrated), and finally fusion (true syncretism or invention: forms are mutually distorted in the way they are joined):

Outsiders may simply look at Athapaskan fiddlers as Indians playing the white man's music, but they couldn't be further from the mark. Although initially learned from whites, Athapaskan fiddle music has been. cultivated in relative isolation from main-stream American country music. Playing strictly by ear and within a strong conservative tradition that is over 140 years old, Athapaskan men have developed a powerful, beautiful sound and a repertoire that is different from any other style of fiddle music (p. 5).

After a rather heavy introduction, Mishler changes gears and offers a series of snapshots [brief excerpts from? of] early accounts of the fiddle in this area, based on records and letters of the Hudsoni's?] Bay Company, missionaries, trappers, traders, and settlers. By 1902, Lt. J. C. Cantwell, who journeyed up the Yukon on the government steamboat, noted that "dances of native origin have been almost entirely discontinued and superseded by those learned by the younger generation at the white settlements" (p. 25).

Profiles of Athapaskan fiddlers provide a glimpse of the extent to which fiddling has been adopted. into the Indian identity. The leading Gwich'in fiddler of Canada today, Charlie Peter Charlie Sr. (b. 1919) is admired not only by his Indian peers but by many of Alaska's white old-time fiddlers. Elected chief of the Old Crow band from 1956 to 1968, Charlie went on to receive the Order of Canada in 1988 for his community service to the Yukon Native community and his assistance to the academic community. A consultant to biologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists, Charlie has helped document and preserve the Gwich'in language. He also [performed?] in the 1988 Athapaskan Old-Time Fiddling Festival held in Fairbanks.

Mishler discusses a number of fiddling tunes, noting the tendency to press the bow hairs very hard on the string:

This squeaking and scraping is ... a conscious attempt to replicate the traditional sound. of elder fiddlers, a sound aesthetically marked as being Indian.... It's fair to say that among Gwich'in fiddlers, there is a decidedly greater reverence for tradition than for innovation (p. 58).

Certain tunes and dances are favoured in each village, although "Red River Jig" is the all-out favourite across the North. Mishler notates some of the more popular dances using diagrams and verbal descriptions. Jigs, reels, contradances, square dances and closed couple dances gradually replaced the indigenous dances, with the recent addition of open, rock and roll couple dances. "The net result has been a very diverse dance repertoire developed by accretion and attrition constantly reshaping itself through time" (p. 115).

Included in appendices are the transcript of an interview with Athapaskan fiddler Bergman Esmailka Sr., fiddle-tune lists with annotations, and 20 fiddle-tune transcriptions with annotations by Pamela Swing and Shonti Elder. The transcriptions and references in the text whet one's appetite for a CD at the back of the book, but you have to purchase a commercial recording to hear the players: Music of the Alaskan Kutchin Indians (Folkways FE 4070).

Mishler concludes with a plea for folkiorists and ethnomusicologists to take up the task of mapping, documenting and interpreting the Native North American fiddling tradition. He presents a strong case to consider this music a valid expression of the Athapaskan people.

Paula Conlon