The Earth Songs of the Seneca Nation

Jö:yaik Oënö’ (Robin Dance)

Bill Crouse, Sr., and Andrew A. Cashner

Ferns fill the forest floor in Mendon Ponds park near Mendon, NY

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Robin Dance is sung to honor the robin, especially at the start of spring, though it can be sung throughout the year. The song acknowledges and thanks this familiar bird as a harbinger of spring after the long winter: as Bill explains (audio 1), We’re honoring the robin, so we welcome it back.

Audio 1. Bill Crouse introduces Robin Dance to students at the University of Rochester, April 11, 2023

The Robin Dance songs seem to imitate the song of the jö:yaik (American robin), while the side-to-side dance might suggest the bird’s hopping movements. The story of Robin Dance, in which a boy transformed into the robin gives his song to humankind, highlights the role of Earth Songs in maintaining reciprocal relationships with created beings and with each other.

Figure 1. Jö:yaik, an American robin, making an alarm call (in Lenape territory, Brooklyn, NY, in 2022, photograph by Wikimedia contributor Rhododendrites, used by permission)
Video 1. Jö:yaik oënö’, Bill Crouse and the Allegany Singers (John Block, lead), Coldspring Cookhouse, Allegany Territory of the Seneca Nation of Indians, September 2022

Story

According to Seneca oral tradition, the Robin Dance was a gift to the people from the robin, and the robin was originally a human boy (video 2). That boy went out into the woods with his uncle on a vision quest, and while he was fasting and waiting for a vision, he grew ill and began to waste away. His uncle found him on the point of death, with his chest painted red, but the boy begged to wait another day. When the uncle returned the last time, he found a bird who told him, I am your nephew. I am jö:yaik, the robin, and from now on he would be the sign that spring was returning. He gave the people his songs as a way of honoring him and celebrating the promise of spring.

Video 2. Bill Crouse tells the origin of Jö:yaik Oënö’, at Allegany State Park overlooking Ohi:yo’ (the Allegany Territory of the Seneca Nation)

The Seneca Robin Dance is evidence of a long, close relationship between humans and robins in this region, which Western science confirms. The American robin (Turdus migratorius) already lived all across North America when humans first arrived, but robins seem to have lived close by humans since (Vanderhoff and Pyle et al. 2020). They prefer to hunt in grassy, open areas with plenty of sunlight, and so they thrive in human-settled landscapes or at the woods’ edge. In recent times robin populations have been documented to expand following patterns of human settlement (Vanderhoff and Pyle et al. 2020). Robins show awareness of people and their habits: city robins allow people to come much closer to them than their country cousins do, and they are less frightened of people walking on paths without looking at them, possibly because they have learned the predictable pattern that people tend to stay on paths (Eason and Sherman et al. 2010). Human behavior and culture shapes robin behavior: robins sing earlier in the morning when there is more light pollution (Miller 2006), and robins are quicker to run away from people in cities where people are more aggressive toward them (Clucas and Marzluff 2012).

Because robins live in such close proximity to humans and because their return signals spring, they are widely recognized even by urban denizens of this region who do not otherwise pay much attention to birds. Their song is familiar even to those who have never taken particular note of it. Because the species is so widespread, virtually all North Americans hear, and are warmed by, the lovely melody of the robin during the spring and summer, although many people do not recognize its song as such. Those who do, however, widely regard the early migrating American robin to be a longed-for harbinger of springtime and warmer weather, because this bird often arrives at the northern parts of its range and sings while there is still snow on the ground (Freedman and Frost 2023).

The difference between the common folkloric ideas of robins and the Seneca Robin Dance is that Seneca people and their ancestors have lived side-by-side with this species of bird in this territory for thousands of years, and the song was developed and preserved through oral tradition as a sign of their close relationship. That sense of intimacy with robins may be reflected in the way the Seneca story says that the robin was originally a human boy. It is not clear whether this was the first robin, or whether the robins perhaps chose this boy as an intermediary and transformed him into one of them. Either way the story emphasizes kinship with the robin, who shares something beneficial with humankind. The Robin Dance can help us understand how Seneca people understand the relationship between Earth Songs and the Earth.

Relationship and Reciprocity

The story of Robin Dance recalls several other Seneca stories in which non-human beings share songs or dances with people. Often they come through an intermediary person who was isolated and separate from the community. Beings like the Three Sisters gave their songs to this person to take back to the people. The songs were not a human’s artistic creation, but a gift from these beings to be used for a specific purpose. The beings gave people a way to relate to them and to draw on their power for the good of the human community.

As we discuss elsewhere, this pattern recalls the way Haudenosaunee people treated Euro-Americans in the treaties of the early colonial era when they adapted their Woods’-Edge Protocols to use in treaty negotiations. Their diplomacy between ögwé’ö:weh (Original People, Natives) and Euro-Americans was built on the model of relationships between humans and their non-human relatives like corn and the robin.

Robin Dance, like other Earth Songs, provides a way for Seneca people to renew reciprocal relationships with the non-human world and with each other. The dance also provides a way for Seneca people to teach those non-Native neighbors who will listen, how to relate to them and to the natural world in a healthy way.

Songs

The Allegany Singers recorded six Robin Dance songs in 2002 (video 3). In contrast to Standing Quiver and Old Moccasin Dance, where one song can differ widely from the next, these Robin Dance songs sound more like variations on a single theme.

Video 3. Transcription of Jö:yaik Oënö’ by Andrew Cashner, as recorded by the Allegany Singers, Louis Castellano, lead (2002)

The set begins with a slow introduction in free time, started by the lead singer and continued by the whole group. This introduction lays out the basic shape of the melody that will recur in all the songs. This melody includes a smaller collection of pitches than some other songs (table 1): just do, re, mi, and sol or la (songs 5 and 6 include both). Though under Western training Andrew thinks of these pitches as belonging to a scale starting on E, the songs actually emphasize B much more strongly, both by stress and by including both the lower and higher B. When Robin Dance is sung in a reverberant space like the cookhouse used for both 2002 and 2022 Allegany Singers recordings, the repetition of only four or five notes, in short, looping phrases with brief rests between, greatly reinforces the overtones resonating in the room to where Andrew found he could clearly hear the melody an octave and sometimes even two octaves higher resounding in the space.

Table 1. Pitches included in Jö:yaik oënö’ songs, 2002 Allegany Singers version
Pitch 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
E F F G G A A B C C D D
Song 1
2
3
4
5
6

The melody in song 1 (music example 1) begins with repeated long one-beat notes (transcribed as quarter notes) on yo:ho, on sol (̂5), then moves down to a syncopated pattern on mi–re, followed by a dip down to low sol and back up to the middle register. There are three melodic phrases, and the second and third repeat the last portion of the first. This structure could be analyzed A-A-A or AB-B-B.

Songs 2 and 3 vary the melody in song 1 in different ways: song 2 shortens the first phrase and alters one pitch (going down to la instead of sol). Song 3 expands the first phrase (from vocables of 11 syllables in song 1 to 16).

Layout out the melodies graphically to show the repeating portions demonstrates that in each song the second and later phrases start by repeating the latter portion of the first phrase. Songs 4, 5, and 6 all have slightly different patterns of phrasing and repeated motives: song 4 could be labeled A-BC-BC, song 5 as A-BC-CC, and song 6 as A-B-C-B. What all the songs have in common is that the subsequent phrases repeat and vary some element of the preceding phrases. The effect of these partial repetitions and variations, especially with the frequent rests between phrases, seems to Andrew to create an effect similar to listening to repeating fragments of birdsong.

The rhythmic patterns feature increasingly complex syncopation over a steady, moderate water-drum and horn-rattle beat at 100 beats per minute. The initial eighth-quarter-eighth syncopation in songs 1 and 2 expands in songs 3 and 4 into what sounds to Andrew like mixed meter, switching between groups of 2 and 3 eighth notes. In song 4, these syncopations actually shift the sense of pulse by an eighth note, so that the vocable ya:ne sounds like it is on the beat even though it does not actually coincide with the beats played on drum and rattle. The last song is the most syncopated, and here the rattle and drum players actually shift their beat to match with the melody, by adding a third eighth-note subdivision in between beat accents.

Music example 1. Phrase structures with repeated and varied musical elements in Robin Dance songs

Imitating Robin’s Song?

Could the Robin Dance songs have been created by imitating the song of the actual bird? Andrew speculates that it might, though Bill had never thought of it. The bird’s own songs feature three or more repeated chirrups at a certain pace, about 100 beats per minute (video 4). The first two chirrups stay fairly constant in timing and pitch across the sung. When robins vary the song it is usually in the syllables after that (discrete vocalizations that are part of a larger song), so that for example there might be four vocalizations and the last one would have a different type of contour (Vanderhoff and Pyle et al. 2020, Sounds and Vocal Behavior).

Video 4. Song of an American robin in the Conewango Swamp Wildlife Management Area, between the Cattaraugus and Allegany Territories of the Seneca Nation, near Randolph, NY (recorded by Andrew Spencer, courtesy of the Cornell Ornithology Lab, Macaulay Library)

The Seneca dance songs also being with a repeated high-pitched call, Yo:hoh yo:, at a similar pace to the bird’s, and in both of the Allegany Singers’ recordings, settles into a steady beat at 100 beats per minute (video 1 and 3). The rest of the Seneca melody is built of short, repetitive phrases of just a few notes each. That these phrases come after the opening call may imitate the pattern in which the robin’s song variations happen after the first three chirrups. Moreover, the different Robin Dance songs are really variations on one song melody with different vocable lyrics; this pattern is also like bird songs. While this melody does seem to imitate the sound of the bird’s song, it could also be inspired by the robin’s way of moving, in which it will pause while listening and looking for worms, then hop and run a short distance (video 5).

Video 5. Robin hopping and pecking for worms at the Cornell Ornithology Lab in Tompkins, NY (Haudenosaunee–Cayuga territory, courtesy Macaulay Library)

Movements

In the Robin Dance participants line up with all the men first followed by the women and move in a counterclockwise circle. First dancers face the center and shuffle sideways to their right, stepping first with the right foot then in the next step bringing the left foot over next to it. At the first repeat of each song (Yo:ho: yo: ...) the dancers turn around to face outwards, and then continue the same motions but reversed: now they step to their left with their left foot and bring the right foot next to it. In the last song, when the syncopations shift the beat by an eighth note, the dancers match this by taking two quick eighth-note steps on the accented noheyah and then continuing with quarter-note steps on the beats stressed by the melody. Perhaps these motions, like the melody, were inspired by the hopping and running of the robin.

References