Whereas relationships and reciprocity are ancient and integral Native concepts, the pair of terms history and tradition come from a distinctively Western way of thinking, especially if they are seen as opposites. Scholars going back to Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1851 study of the Haudenosaunee have assumed that Native music and dance was a static tradition rooted in the past and incompatible with civilization (Morgan 1851). They relegated Native people to the past while somehow also denying them a history (Smith 2012, 19–41).

In reality, Seneca Earth Songs are a living, contemporary practice that continues an ancient tradition. The deep history of Seneca songs threads all throughout this project, especially in the discussion of individual Earth Songs like Standing Quiver or Corn Dance. At the same time, our knowledge about them comes mostly from oral tradition as known and practiced by contemporary knowledge-keepers like Bill Crouse, and they are part of a vibrant contemporary Native culture. Native powwow, hip hop, and modernist music are not the only kinds of contemporary Native music; Seneca Robin Dance and Old Moccasin Dance are contemporary musical practices, too.

We can study the history of a tradition, just as the tradition can be a way of preserving historical memory and bringing it into the present. Robert Taft, a historian of Roman Catholic liturgy, spoke about the unique challenges of writing the history of a tradition, especially when people understand their rituals as transcending time and even granting access to eternity (Taft 2018): Tradition is not history, nor is it the past. Tradition is the church’s self-consciousness now of that which has been handed on to it not as an inert treasure, but as a dynamic principle of life. It is the church’s contemporary reality understood genetically, in continuity with that which produced it.

In a similar way, Seneca singers preserve ancient traditions through contemporary performance and for contemporary purposes. Earth Songs are a good example of what ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond calls Native American ways of (music) history, since for Seneca people as for many other Native nations, singing is a practice by which people remember and their history and relive it in the present (Diamond 2013). As the Creek historian Donald Fixico says about Native oral traditions, the purpose of telling stories is not to gain a scientific timeline of the past, but to use past experiences to equip people alive now to face the challenges ahead of them (Fixico 2017). Seneca music has a deep history but it is not just a historical artifact, a fossilized cultural form that failed to adapt to civilization. As Seneca singer John Block put it, these Western concepts do not work for Seneca music because it’s living (Block, Crouse, George, and Dowdy 2022).

The best image for understanding history and tradition in Seneca Earth Songs is the circle of dancers. As Andrew explored in the video essay Memory and Community in Seneca Earth Songs, Bill Crouse learned to sing by envisioning each song coming before him like dancers in a circle (video 1). Even as Seneca singers remember songs by visualizing the community, they also remember the community in the songs. Seneca singers tranform a local network of social relationships into a localized song repertoire that embodies the community’s history. A community that remembers itself through song can dance confidently into the future.

Seneca singers use social relationships to remember songs, visualizing a line of faces dancing by; the same image matches the story and structure of Standing Quiver Dance; and this approach enables singers to lay down ever new layers of New Women’s Shuffle Dance songs that are tied in their memory to relatives and teachers who sang them. This social memory enabled the preservation of thousands of songs in oral tradition and makes the songs powerful conveyers of a Haudenosaunee worldview rooted in gratitude within a circle of reciprocal relationships. Being grounded in relationships with ancestors, parents, and teachers enables them to respond creatively and inventively to the needs of the present and future.

Instead of positioning indigenous people on one side or the other of a modern rupture, we can see them moving forward, as they always have, in a long and unbroken line. As Yolanda Broyles-González says of indigenous people in Mexico, appropriation and adaptation of new elements is integral to the evolution and survival of Indigenous musical forms, heritage, and civilization (Broyles-González, Figueroa Hernández, and González 2022, 60). Or as many indigenous artists have put it, It has always been traditional to be contemporary.

These songs survive because their singers survive, within a social framework that preserves them and their cultural heritage. Recordings have been a great help, but Seneca social-dance songs live because they are actively preserved through an oral tradition in which the methods of teaching and performance embody the same social structures that are needed to keep these things alive, and in this way the line of dancers keeps moving ever forward.

Interviews with Seneca Singers Al George and Bill Crouse, Sr.

For the remainder of this section, we present two extended interviews with Seneca master singers Bill Crouse, Sr., and Al George, an elder of the Allegany Territory (figure 1). The interviews discuss genealogies and methods of teaching and learning in the oral tradition, and reflections on the meaning and importance of social-dance. As this is a multimedia project, the videos constitute the core of this section, not just a supplement, and we ask readers of the print version to follow the links to watch them online.