Songs at the Woods’ Edge: The Earth Songs of the Seneca Nation is a digital-humanities project on the traditional social-dance songs of the Onöndowa’ga:’ people. This digital book was created by Seneca master singer and faithkeeper Bill Crouse, Sr., and musicologist Andrew A. Cashner, PhD.
Significance and Contribution
The original inhabitants of the land now occupied by western New York, the Senecas are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Traditional Seneca music is primarily vocal, supported by water drum and rattle, and usually combined with dance. The songs are divided into ceremonial and social functions. Ceremonial songs hold sacred power as part of longhouse ceremonies including healing rituals; they are closed to non-Senecas and many are even kept private within the Seneca community, reserved only for those who need them. Social songs, by contrast, are used for recreation and are shared openly.
Known as Earth Songs (yöëdza’ge:ka:’ gaë:nö’shö’), these songs have been used for centuries to build reciprocal relationships within the Seneca community and with outsiders. The earliest European interlopers in Seneca country report being greeted at the woods’ edge with songs. At Ganondagan, the Seneca Arts and Culture Center near Victor, New York, visitors pass through an entryway designed around the traditional woods’-edge greeting to hear regular presentations of Earth Songs by Seneca singers like Bill Crouse. These presentations create a space like the woods’-edge clearing of earlier days in which to share Seneca teachings and values with outsiders. To sing at the woods’ edge means to stand at the boundary between indigenous traditional knowledge and modern experience under colonization, and between Seneca communities and Euro-American ones. As an ancient oral tradition that practitioners are constantly finding new ways to employ to meet present needs, the Earth Songs sung in that space connect history and tradition, memory and creativity.
With the collaboration of Bill Crouse and other Seneca practitioners, this project presents Seneca Earth Songs to the general public and the academic community for the first time accurately, sensitively, and on Seneca terms. Through a digital book of public scholarship, the project presents new videos of the songs and dances with information about the songs’ origins, structure, and significance. It draws on Bill Crouse’s expertise as a practitioner of the oral tradition, and Andrew Cashner’s archival research into historic accounts of Seneca song and dance from the Jesuit Relations through Lewis Henry Morgan and William Fenton. The project benefits from the dialogue between Bill’s traditional knowledge and Andrew’s Western-influenced analytical approach, while prioritizing indigenous ways of thinking. The project is available in the non-linear, multimedia format of a website, and in a more traditional print book format.
Relationship to Existing Studies
This study aims to address a lack of trustworthy, in-depth resources for learning
about this type of Native American music.
According to G. Peter Jemison, recently retired director of Ganondagan State Historic
Site near Victor, New York, the cultural center staff were flooded after 2020 with
requests from educators for information on how to include Native culture in their
curricula
(Jemison 2021).
For Haudenosaunee and Seneca music, though, there are few reliable sources available.
In the first scholarly description of Haudenosaunee dance (based on Seneca sources),
Lewis Henry Morgan wrote in 1851 that the dances contain within themselves a picture and a realization of Indian life,
to the extent that when the dance loses its attractions, they will cease to be Indians
(Morgan 1851, 262, 263).
Morgan viewed the dances as static relics of a traditional past that Native people
would have to surrender in the face of progressive civilization.
Twentieth-century ethnographers William Fenton and Gertrude Kurath made no distinction
between privileged ceremonial songs and social-dance songs, and as a result their
books are full of information that Seneca faithkeepers today do not want to share
with the public—not to mention the inaccuracies and non-indigenous categories of their
analyses
(Fenton 1998; Fenton and Kurath 1953; Kurath 1964; Caldwell 2008; McCarthy 2008).
The proposed project differs from these previous studies because it focuses on music that Seneca people are actually willing to share, and builds on the way they are already using this music to build intercultural relationships. The methodology follows the model of recent collaborative work between non-Native scholars and Native experts, such as Beverley Diamond’s excellent though brief introduction to Haudenosaunee music (Diamond 2008) and with a growing literature that emphasizes the modernity and creativity of Native music as a contemporary practice (Browner 2002; Browner 2009; Levine and Robinson 2019; Woodland Cultural Centre 1990). This project has a somewhat more historical focus than those, however, as it combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research, including seeking out indigenous perspectives on the archival documents. Even the best historical studies of early American music that include Native peoples focus primarily on archival documents from Euro-American colonial communities rather than drawing from traditional indigenous knowledge and oral tradition (Goodman 2012; Eyerly 2020). No history of American music can claim coherence without including the music of indigenous Americans, and no attempt at inclusion can succeed without the collaboration of practitioners of the oral traditions.
Benefit to Scholars and the Public
This project will benefit humanities scholars, educators, and members of the public by providing them with reliable information on Native American music. The knowledge shared through this project will help all of us to gain a deeper understanding of the land we share. Some indigenous people may deepen their connection to their own traditions; non-indigenous people will be better equipped to build relationships with Native American communities. The interlinked nature of a website is well suited to the relational and participatory character of the Earth Songs and the way they are shared in Seneca communities. The digital format makes the book/website to be freely accessible to a wide public audience. The accompanying YouTube channel enables users to find and share Seneca songs through social media, and as of July 2021 has already attracted over 370 subscribers and 60,000 views.
Concepts, Organization, and Methods
The key concepts in this project are three pairs of terms: Earth/land, relationship/reciprocity, and tradition/history. Seneca social songs celebrate and enact a relationship with the Earth in both ecological and spiritual terms, while also connecting Seneca people to the land of their ancestry (Mohawk et al. 2005; Deloria, Jr. 1985; Hill 2017). Relationship and reciprocity are widely acknowledged core values for Native North Americans, and they define the way Haudenosaunee people teach and present songs. The concept of the Covenant Chain—linking the first European ship to the Haudenosaunee longhouse—recurs throughout colonial treaty negotiations (Richter 1992). Both sides had an obligation to keep it free from rust. For Andrew as a descendant of white settlers, this project provides a way to take up the long-overdue work of polishing the chain of friendship, working toward restoring mutually beneficial relationships between indigenous and settler Americans. Exploring the complex relationship between history and tradition in both indigenous and Western conceptions, this project demonstrates that Native song is neither stuck in a primitive present tense nor lost to the past. At the same time, the goal is not simply to fit Native music into a Western historical framework; for indigenous North Americans, singing itself constitutes a form of historical knowledge and provides its own ways of connecting past, present, and future (Diamond 2013).
The website features new videos of Bill Crouse and others singing Earth Songs in significant locations across ancestral Seneca territory, alongside archival recordings from as early as 1911. The project also provides users with information about issues of cultural sensitivity, appropriation, and ethical use. Sources include contemporary performances, interviews, and fieldwork observations; ethnographic recordings at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, and the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa; and archival documents at the University of Rochester (Lewis Henry Morgan papers). One of the chief benefits of the site to Seneca people, according to Bill Crouse, is to make accessible a library of historic recordings, effectively repatriating the ethnographers’ materials (Fox 2013; Christen 2018). The bibliographic citations prioritize Native writers and are not limited to peer-reviewed academic literature when other kinds of sources are better sources of Native knowledge.
The project first introduces the Seneca Nation and their Earth Songs and helps readers understand these traditional social-dance songs within a worldview grounded in reciprocal relationships with the Earth, its beings, and other people, including between Natives and settlers. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation, the project shows that Seneca people preserve their dance traditions not as static customs of the past but as dynamic, creative adaptations that enabled their survival and ongoing revitalization. The second part looks at five individual Seneca dances in depth, examining their origins, history, and structure through a combination of traditional knowledge and Western scholarship. Readers may engage with the different sections in any order.
The project focuses on Seneca song and dance traditions as practiced on the Allegany Territory of the Seneca Nation, and shares information about them according to the protocols of the faithkeepers of Coldspring Longhouse. We have tried to resist the temptation to generalize too much from this local tradition about Senecas or Haudenosaunee people everywhere, as some previous scholars have done. We recognize that protocols differ, for example on the question of whether Corn Dance is a social or ceremonial song (it is social at Allegany). With respect for others whose practice or understanding differs, we hope people will receive this project with a generous spirit. This project can only be starting point for the study of Seneca and Haudenosaunee song, and indeed, we hope there will be many future studies that will flesh out all the rich continuity and variations in song and dance across Iroquoia.
Andrew wrote the text of this project with the full collaboration of Bill Crouse. The traditional knowledge contributed by Bill Crouse comes from many sources and is in many ways the collective property of the Seneca Nation. Certain portions of the project represent Andrew’s views alone, such as the detailed and admittedly speculative music analysis of some of the individual songs. All of the videos created for this project were made with the permission of the participants, who were paid for their time and expertise. We have experimented with different modes of presentation, including interviews and a video essay. Readers of the PDF version should remember that this is a multimedia project, and the videos, which center Seneca voices, are integral parts of the project, not just supplements. Marginal links in the PDF version lead to a web page containing all the media examples in the book.
We prioritize Seneca terms and titles throughout, and with only a few simple rules readers should be able to pronounce them. The vowels are the same as in Spanish or Italian, except for the following: ä is similar to English back; ö is a nasalized o like French non; and ë is a flat, nasalized e somewhat like English meant but more nasal. Consonants are the same as in English, except that g is always hard like good, dz sounds like English measure or French je (though for some Seneca speakers it is the same as j as in jot), š or sy sounds like English sh, and tš sounds like English ch. A colon after a vowel (as in Ohi:yo’) marks it as long, meaning that it is held an extra beat relative to the unmarked syllables. An apostrophe indicates a glottal stop, a sudden stop of air like in English uh-oh. Some words are pronounced with a rising or falling pitch indicated by acute or grave accents (á or à). As we discuss elsewhere, we do use the spelling Haudenosaunee instead of the Seneca Hodínöhšö:ni:h because it has become more familiar and is used more widely across the Six Nations, each of which has its own language with a different version of that term (though we still pronounce it the Seneca way).
The musical transcriptions only represent the way one person with Western-trained
ear hears them.
The real version of the song is when it is sung live by practitioners of the oral
tradition.
When that is not available, video and audio recordings give the best access to the
traditional material.
The notated scores, however, are interpretations made with specific analytical goals.
They intentionally simplify some aspects of the music to clarify its structure, focusing
on pitch and rhythm as they can be notated in the Western system.
Since the pitch level of Seneca songs is variable, based on the preference of the
lead singer, the transcriptions approximate the pitch level used most consistently
throughout a particular recording.
Most Earth Songs do not convey a regular pattern of metrical groupings, so the transcriptions
only use barlines where necessary to indicate repeats and endings.
When the lyrics are Seneca language, the transcriptions use the correct spellings
for the words as they would be spoken according to the writing system created by Wallace
Chafe
(Chafe 2015).
When the lyrics are vocables without linguistic meanings, the transcriptions spell
them phonetically according to Chafe’s system, using long-syllable markings (where
a: is long and a is normal) according to the musical rhythms.
The term haënögweni:yo’ indicates the part sung by the lead singer, and hadigwe:göh means everyone.
We do not give authorization for the written transcriptions to be used as the basis for performance in any context. Any attempt to present Seneca music must involve Seneca people, on their own terms. Our list of presenters and other resources can provide a starting point for beginning your own relationships.
We invite readers, especially members of the Seneca Nation, to contact us (crouse@senecasongs.earth or cashner@senecasongs.earth) to report mistakes or technical problems, discuss concerns, or ask questions.