People make Ë:sgä:nye:’ about everyday life experiences, elements of the natural world like water or strawberries, traditional teachings, and many other topics. Many of the words and melodies came to the makers’ minds all at once, sometimes in dreams, while other songs were more deliberately constructed. Many Women’s Dance songs use vocables like other social-dance songs, especially the ending phrase gai:nawea:h he:ah. But many more songs of this type use Seneca language.

Some of the lyrics are reminiscent of a haiku: a pithy expression of a specific concept or image in just a few lines. Songmakers take full advantage of the capacity of the Seneca language to pack a sentence worth of meaning into a few words. For example, in the anonymous older song introduced in our discussion of Relationship and Reciprocity (table 1), the maker conveys one of the core purposes of Earth Songs with the one word deyögwada’nigöëwë:nye:h, literally we are stirring our own minds or perhaps better translated we are occupying our minds.

In September 2022 members of the Allegany Singers recorded a set of Ë:sgä:nye:’ at the cookhouse next to the Coldspring Longhouse (video 3), and shared about the meaning and stories of the songs (video 4). Together they painted a picture of the Allegany Territory as a site of intense creativity over many decades, as singers competed to present the best set of Women’s Dance songs at Sings while learning and preserving each others’ songs. They have continued making new songs while still singing ones from their teachers and even older, now anonymous, songs they call Used-to-Be Songs. The Allegany community was notable for passing the drum and allowing the younger men to contribute their own songs to the sets, as the Allegany Singers did in the set we recorded, whereas on other territories there tends to be one main singer who makes or selects the songs for the group.

In July 2024 John Block, Seneca singer and language teacher at the Seneca Nation’s Faithkeeper School in Steamburg, New York, sang three Ë:sgä:nye:’ for Bill and Andrew and explained their words and the stories behind them (video 5). The songs he selected are a song made by Arthur Johnny-John in the 1950s about the looming Kinzua Dam tragedy (Hauptman 2014, xvii–xxi), an anonymous older song about Handsome Lake’s prophecies of the end of the world, and a song John himself made for the close of a Sing. For John, remembering each song pulled up a wealth of knowledge both about Seneca history, religion, and values. Where many Women’s Dance songs are good fun and emphasize enjoying life, the first two songs John chose show a deeper, darker, and more philosophical side. The Kinzua Dam Song is a snapshot of a community in crisis, dealing with the trauma before its full force had even hit; the first line says, They are abusing us, or John suggests a better translation might be, They are raping us.

The songs John shared also called to mind the people who taught them to him, when they used to sing them, and the stories they told about them. John told a story about someone else singing a song for him that they heard sung at a Sing and were impressed with, and the other person did not know it was actually a song John had made (Block 2024). Likewise Bill told a story about singing an Ë:sgä:nye:’ for his teacher, and asking if he had heard it before, when it turned out that the song had actually been made by his teacher.

The last song John shared also highlighted the creative relationship with tradition that is cultivated in Women’s Dance songs: for a song he designed to be sung at the end of a Sing as a kind of festive recessional, he borrowed a portion of a Ga’da:šot, song, the centuries-old marching dance that traditionally starts a social. John says that his own preferences have always tended toward the older songs and styles, and he worries that essential information about the old songs is being lost as fewer people know the language. He cited a recent experience where a singing group was singing garbled versions of songs that they learned phonetically from recordings without knowing the actual words or their meaning. At the same time, he remains hopeful about the future of Seneca music and praises the enthusiasm of the younger generation that is adapting Ë:sgä:nye:’ in its own new ways.

Women and Men in the Women’s Dance

In a dance presentation of Ë:sgä:nye:’ by the Indigenous Spirit Dancers at Caneadea in 2024, leader Marty Jimerson, Jr., introduced the dance by highlighting the importance of women in Haudenosaunee culture:

In our traditional ways, we hold all our females in high regard. Within the longhouses we have the clan mothers, our title holders. They are the life givers.

He then connected the dance back to the Creation story and stressed that the women never let their feet leave the earth.

It may be surprising to outsiders that New Women’s Shuffle Dance songs are primarily made and sung by men. Traditional Seneca society before colonization was organized according to a duality but not a hierarchy of gender (Hill 2017, 53–78). In other words, men and women had distinct roles, but one was not elevated above the other. Yes, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was governed by male chiefs, but those chiefs derived their authority from the clan mothers who selected them and could depose them at any time. Haudenosaunee communities were both matrilineal (family and clan membership was traced through the mother’s line) and matrilocal (a man moved to live with his wife’s family, not the reverse). In the Seneca language, if the speaker is referring to something or someone of unknown gender, they use the female as a default. The woods domain of hunting and warfare was reserved for men, and the clearing domain of agriculture and child rearing was reserved for women, but that did not mean that one domain was viewed as superior to the other. Likewise women danced Ë:sgä:nye:’, while men sang it. The key value, as in other aspects of Native societies, was balance, as ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff puts it in a comparative analysis of women’s musical roles in ritual (Koskoff 2014, 55):

When we compare the social and ritual position of Iroquois women to their Jewish and Korean counterparts described above, what is most apparent is the acknowledgment in Iroquois society---but not in traditional Judaism or Confucianism---of the value and beneficial power inherent in both the women and their music, a power that is perhaps feaured, but ultimately acknowledged and respected. [...] Here, combining the power of women with that of music is not threatening but rather seen as a necessary balance to male ritual activity.

Since colonization, the gender situation is a complicated mix of traditional Haudenosaunee and Euro-American values and practices. Traditionalists nevertheless maintain the gender distinction in social dance, though as an integral part of the tradition. Bill Crouse always takes a moment in his shows to educate listeners about his dancers’ traditional regalia; since the regalia differs by gender, he introduces his dancers by gender and explains some of the cultural significance of what they are wearing. Bill Crouse plays with the gender distinction a bit in his shows by creating competition between male and female smoke dancers. Bill tells how Smoke Dance developed from men trying to make War Dance into a showy competition dance, and then says that women wanted an opportunity to dance Smoke Dance as well. He often invites the crowd to judge who danced better, the women or the men, and invariably he says the women won.

Bill Crouse’s daughters Ashlyn Crouse and Roslyn Dowdy spoke about gender in terms of the ways dancing connected them to other women (Crouse and Dowdy 2023). Each dances in regalia made for her by her mother. When Andrew asked Ashlyn about the traditional gender roles, Ashlyn highlighted her grandmother’s authority on the matter: It’s just the way it is. My grandma’s old school, so I just don’t do some things but I still support people who do. The girls singled out lacrosse as an example of something she and her sister don’t do because as Roslyn said, women don’t play lacrosse.

Just because Seneca traditionalists preserve gender dualities in cultural presentations that are rooted in an older way of life, though, does not mean that they endorse those same concepts in other areas of life. There are all-female singing societies like the Six Nations Women Singers, as well as prominent Haudenosaunee women singers like Sadie Buck and Joanne Shenandoah. Haudenosaunee powwows have even welcomed transgender dancers.

I (Andrew) would be remiss not to acknowledge, though, that the world of Seneca singing I have observed is largely male-dominated. I hope that future studies of Seneca song will integrate more women’s voices than I have been able to do.

Musical Structure (Andrew)

Analyzing the many variations of formal patterns, melodic contours and pitch collections, and rhythms of Ë:sgä:nye:’ across the years, would require a separate study, as would understanding the many ways the makers of these songs have incorporated references to other Earth Songs and even non-Seneca music. But as we have done with other Earth Songs, we hope that it is helpful as a starting point to include some of Andrew’s analytical observations, while acknowledging their Western-influenced approach. Most Women’s Dance songs I (Andrew) have heard use a major diatonic pitch collection. Four Ë:sgä:nye:’ recorded by Jake George, Bill Crouse, and the Allegany Singers all used six-note collections, same as the major scale without the leading tone ̂7 (table 2).

Table 2. Pitches included in the Ë:sgä:nye:’ Gëöya’ge:h, Jake George’s version, and three other Ë:sgä:nye:’ recorded by the Allegany Singers (transposed to the same pitch level)

	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	■		■		■	■		■		■

In formal pattern, I hear most of these songs starting with a lead phrase, sung by the leader solo, and then repeated by the whole group. A contrasting phrase follows, often emphasizing different pitches than the lead phrase. This phrase often concludes with an echo of the ending of the lead phrase, making an ab cb or ab cb′ pattern.

This melodic and phrasing pattern are exemplified in the Ë:sgä:nye:’ made by Herb Dowdy, as sung by Jacob Dowdy at Caneadea (video 1, music example 1). The lead phrase has two parts (labeled A and B), where the first descends from the highest pitch down to the lowest, emphasizing the tones of the major triad (̂8, ̂5, ̂3, ̂1), and the second part leaps back up to ̂5 before settling back down to ̂1 for the final vocable words gai:naweaheah. The first part of the contrast phrase (C) moves up to ̂6 for the first time in the song, and emphasizes ̂6, ̂4, and ̂2 more than the other phrases. (To Western-trained ears like mine, the contrast phrase might sound like it is implying a subdominant harmony.) Then the phrase ends by repeating the B subphrase from the lead.

Another, possibly older, anonymous song demonstrates the same patterns, though with a distinct, livelier style. In the song starting Gëöya’ge:h (In the Sky World) (video 3, song 1; music example 2), the lead phrase starts at the top of the range and then descends, emphasizing the pitches of the major triad on the way down. The first part of the lead phrase (A) ends on ̂2, then the second part steps down from ̂3 to ̂1 and ends with the vocable gai:naweah heah on ̂1. The contrast phrase jumps back up to emphasize ̂5 (C), and then descends again to a last subphrase (B′) that echoes and extends the end of the lead phrase.

Rhythmically this song is highly syncopated. I hear a symmetrical pattern in each phrase where on-beat gestures at the beginning and end of the phrase frame more complex syncopated figures in the middle (a chiastic or ring structure). In each phrase, on-beat quarter- and eighth-note gestures set up the beat pattern and then give way to more quickly moving syncopated figures. Those figures finally resolve again to on-beat gestures with a clear downbeat landing when the melody finally arrives at ̂1.

Versions

For other Earth Songs, there is a huge repertoire of songs for each, and individual singers will choose a different selection or ordering of songs. But singers are always selecting from the same pool of all the known songs for that particular dance, and that repertoire does not change. With New Women’s Shuffle Dance, by contrast, there is no one set of songs that everyone sings. Ë:sgä:nye:’ is more like a genre of songs to which singers are expected make new contributions. Some of their new songs get picked up and passed along until they become established parts of singing societies’ local repertoires; others exist for a moment and may be forgotten, even by their makers. The Old Moccasin Dance songs that the Allegany Singers recorded in 2002 were largely the same as those they recorded in 2022; but the Women’s Dance sets they recorded in the same sessions were completely different, as they were chosen by the specific people involved in each session, expressive of their own interests, history, and present cirucmstances.

That means there are hundreds or thousands of Ë:sgä:nye:’ currently in circulation across Iroquoia, and even more that have been laid aside and are known only from recordings or not at all. Hence Bill Crouse had never heard any of the Songs of 1947 that Ed Curry sang for William Fenton until we listened to Fenton’s recording together in July 2024 (APS Mss. Rec. 138.07/01.03). Many Women’s Dance recordings probably survive in cassette tapes gathering dust in the back of Seneca people’s drawers and cabinets: Bill tells how in earlier decades, whenever a singing group would finish their set at a Sing, their voices would be followed by a prolonged click-click-click of everyone pressing Stop on their handheld tape recorders.

Makers of Ë:sgä:nye:’ have often incorporated elements they heard from the contemporary world, like the songs Bill’s relatives sang for anthropologist William Sturtevant in the 1950s that drew on older white-American popular songs (Conklin and Sturtevant 1953). The influence flowed the other way when Joanne Shenandoah adapted Ë:sgä:nye:’ in several of her recordings, most notably the 1996 album Matriarch: Iroquois Women’s Songs. She opened this album of gentle Ë:sgä:nye:’ remixes with a song made on the Allegany Territory by Bill’s teacher Herb Dowdy (video 6). The original song is still sung today by the Allegany Singers; Jacob Dowdy chose it for the Women’s Dance presentation at the historic first Seneca-Caneadea Field Day in 2023 (video 1). Shenandoah brings out the diatonic and triadic elements of the song by arranging it as a European-style round, something with no precedent in traditional Haudenosaunee music but with a result sure to please the ears of listeners more used to Euro-American music.

Indeed, this was the first Haudenosaunee song I (Andrew) ever heard: when I was sixteen and traveling with my family from Indiana to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, I found this track on one of those CD samplers with headphones in a gas station or rest stop, where you could listen to a few minutes of a CD before deciding to buy it. I was so taken with it that, while my family attended to the call of nature, I listened to it over and over again until I was able to go back in the car and write it down (and yes, at sixteen I carried staff paper with me for just this sort of emergency). Hearing the song again at Caneadea brought me full circle, even more so when Bill told me it had been made by his teacher.

Coming full circle, after all, is what Seneca dances do. Like Niagara Falls and the many other waterfalls in ancestral Seneca territory, Women’s Dance is both ancient and continually renewed. Perhaps more than any other Earth Song, Ë:sgä:nye:’ links people together in a circle of dance that stretches all the way back to Sky Woman and reaches forward to the next generations. As the circle expands to include new people, even settler guests on Seneca land, the chains of friendship grow stronger as we learn to move forward together, with respect for what came before and hope for the future.