Goals for the Project (Bill)
Bill Crouse introduced his goals for this project this way in an April 2024 video (video 1):
Nya:wëh sgë:nö’ gagwe:göh. Gaha’dagëya:’ ni’ gya:söh, ageswë’gai:yo’, Ohi:yo’ ni’ tnö:ge’.
I greeted you in the Seneca language and I said that I am a member of the Hawk Clan of the Seneca people of the Alligany Territory, and I said my Hawk Clan name, that I’m Flying Above the Woods, Flying Above the Forest.
I hope that this project is able to give you better insight into the importance of Native American music to the various communities that it comes from as well as our view on how we utilize song and dance for a number of different purposes in our communities. One of the hopes of this project is that I’m able to give you a better understanding of this as well as to leave a record of where we are now in the ongoing progression and evolution of our Native music.
I have been fortunate as a Native singer to grow up with a wealth of knowledge from my elders. I came up in the 1970s and 80s as a young man, learning to sing from my extended family. I was able to learn from people like my great-grandfather Richard Johnny-John as well as my uncles Avery Jimerson, Sr., and Herb Dowdy as well. I was lucky to be able to learn social songs and ceremonial songs of my people from this Allegany Territory.
I am involved in this project because it’s the kind of thing, the kind of opportunity, that I wish that my elders had done, maybe when they were my age, to be able to pass some of this on to generations yet to come. I think since we have this technology it’s a good thing for us to use it ögwe’owe:ka:’, to use it in an Indian way, a Native American way.
I’d like to take a second to define the term Seneca social dance. These social dance songs are the songs and dances that we use in social settings on the territory and we use them usually in conjunction with a big ceremony. These social gatherings would be held at the longhouse or even sometimes in a community building, in a setting where we all come together for a social event. They are not our ritual songs and dances or ceremonial songs and dances. They are not the music that would be termed in that way, but they do tell our history, and the unique part of these social songs and dances is that they do have great overtones of giving thanks and they do also align with our view of what we call Ganö:nyök. Ganö:nyök is the opening that we give at all of our social events and ceremonial occasions, where we give thanks for everything in our surrounding: we give thanks for the Earth itself, the water, all of nature, the sun, the moon, the Thunderers, the Stars. We look at it as a way to celebrate this idea that we feel as a people everyone should have, and it’s our way of reminding ourselves and our young and our community of this relationship and these great gifts that we’ve been given.
This project has utilized the recordings of contemporary Native singers as well as past recordings of singers from mostly the Allegany Territory. One of the things that I always like to point out and that as a singer I always like to share is the Allegany version or Ohi:yo’ version of songs, as that’s what I was brought up with. So the majority of these recordings are are just that. So we’re able to share mostly Iroquois or mostly Allegany versions of these songs.
This project is a collaboration between myself and Mr. Andrew Cashner, who currently works for the University of Rochester [until July 2024]. One of the unique things about this collaboration is that it gives a unique view of Native American social dance music and songs from an outsider’s perspective as well as from somebody who has grown up with this as a part of their life. And you know, it’s really posed some unique questions and it has given me also a way of looking at things from a different lens. I think that regardless of what lens you have when you view these recordings or when you study this music, hopefully it will give you something worthwhile and powerful to identify with.
Please see the introduction for more on the project’s background, goals, and methods.
About the Project Leads
Bill Crouse, Sr. (Seneca)
William Crouse, Sr., is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians of the Hawk Clan.
He is a faithkeeper, singer, and speaker of the Coldspring Longhouse.
As group leader, singer, lecturer, and dancer of the Allegany River
Seneca Dancers, Bill has traveled all over the United States and Canada.
He has performed in Rome, Italy and Wurtzburg, Germany as well.
He has worked with the American Indian Dance Theater
as a choreographer and consultant and was featured in their video Dances of a New Generation.
His music recordings of Iroquois social-dance music, smoke-dance music and re-mix
are a hit with young and old alike.
As a graphic artist his work is displayed at the Seneca Iroquois National Museum,
the Iroquois Museum, Howes Cave (New York), the Seneca Allegany Casino, and many private
collections.
He has also illustrated many designs for Native Stitches and Seneca Language Publications.
Andrew Cashner
Andrew A. Cashner, PhD, is a musician and musicologist. He grew up in Richmond, Indiana, a descendant of Anglo-German settlers, and he lives with his family on ancestral Seneca land in Rochester, New York. Winner of the 2015 Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society, he is the author of Hearing Faith: Music as Theology in the Spanish Empire (Brill, 2020), two volumes of critical editions of music from seventeenth-century Mexico and Spain, and six journal articles on topics including race in colonial Mexico and music in the history of science and computing. He earned the PhD in the history and theory of music from the University of Chicago in 2015, after studying sacred music and organ at the University of Notre Dame and piano performance at Lawrence University and the New England Conservatory of Music. He taught music at the University of Southern California and the University of Rochester. He is an active performer as a pianist, organist, ensemble director, and composer, and he teaches keyboard in the ROC Music after-school program in Rochester.
Technology and Design
This project was created and published using a digital authoring system created by Andrew Cashner and available on GitHub. The text was written in an extension of XHTML that enables automatic citation and bibliography generation as well as automatic numbering and cross-referencing for tables, examples, and diagrams. The source files were converted using XSLT to HTML for web display and PDF, via LaTeX, for the printable PDF. The system uses LaTeX's own citation and referencing systems in the print backend (BibLaTeX and Biber) but provides its own for the web backend. Custom CSS stylesheets determined the layout and style of the website and custom LaTeX classes and packages styled the print version.
Larger music examples were created in Dorico, while small, inline music clips were rendered with Lilypond. The main text font is EB Garamond, and section headings are in Venturis ADF Goth Titling and Venturis Sans ADF (all available free of license). Unless indicated otherwise, all photos and videos were created by Andrew Cashner for this project, using Final Cut Pro for editing video and Logic Pro for audio.
Acknowledgments
The project was made possible by a Fellowship for Digital Publication from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by funding and research leaves provided by the University of Rochester. For opportunities to share and discuss this research Andrew is grateful to the University of Chicago, the University of Louisville, and the Conference on Iroquois Research. Space to work and record was provided by Ganondagan State Historic Site, the Seneca Nation Library in Salamanca, NY, the Seneca Nation Education Department, the Coldspring Community Center, the Faithkeeper School, the Monroe County Public Library, and our families. For access to archival sources we thank Paul Sutherland at the American Philosophical Society, Melissa Mead at the University of Rochester, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Canadian Museum of History.
For allowing us to record songs, dances, and interviews, we thank the Allegany River Indian Singers and Dancers, including Lynn George, Jake George, Jacob Dowdy, Courtney Dowdy, and John Block; the Indigenous Spirit Dancers, led by Martin Jimerson, Jr.; along with Al George, Roslyn George, Ashlyn Crouse, and Brett Maybee, who also contributed audio engineering. Ja:no’s Bowen, director of the Allegany Language Department of the Seneca Nation, advised the project on language and protocol.
From Andrew: Thanks to Peter Jemison for intially connecting me to Bill Crouse. To Ja:no’s and to the other students in her Seneca language class, Bradley Jimerson, Michael Nephew, and Robert Mele, thank you for welcoming me, being patient with me, and providing meaningful community during the pandemic. Thanks to Brianna Theobald, Doris Aman, and James Warlick at the University of Rochester. Peyton DiSiena at Cornell University helped with proofreading and website testing. For help with the NEH grant and methodological advice, thanks to Ellen Koskoff and Robert Kendrick. Thanks to Devin Burke for asking good questions, as always.
We owe our deepest gratitude to our partners, Lynn George and Ann Cashner. Above all we acknowledge our mutual Creator for our lives on this Earth and for the gift of music.