The Jesuit traveler and historian Fr. Pierre de Charlevoix included this account of an Iroquois “Fire-Dance” in his narrative, Voyage to Canada, and Travels through that vast Country (1763). His impression tells us much about the cultural incomprehension and presumed superiority that marked European encounters with Indigenous American song in the colonial era. For Charlevoix, the musical experience was simply an ordeal: “Their songs, whether of war or devotion, harvest or hunting, consisted of but few words and scanty intonations, repeated in the most monotonous way.”

How this French traveler could have distinguished between songs of “war or devotion, harvest or hunting” is perplexing, given that – as far as he could tell – Iroquois songs conveyed no meaning, only “Sounds that were but half articulate.” In the subsequent centuries, music historians and ethnomusicologists have worked hard to rectify such early Eurocentric and logocentric ignorance (not to say arrogance), and to make sense of what one historian has called “songwork,” that is, the “place and efficacy of song” in society. But this task has often been difficult, not only because of the impossibility of accurately recreating the music of Indigenous societies prior to the advent of sound recording but also because, in the colonial era, Indigenous musical expression was typically shoehorned into established European frameworks of notation and rhythm: “When it came to nondiatonic pitches, the polyrhythmic interaction of singing and drumming, and the vocal timbre of Indigenous song, colonial transcriptions floundered.”

The retrieval of song lyrics has been equally beset with difficulty. Through the violence of conquest and colonialism, Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas were uprooted, scattered, and destroyed – wholly or partially – so that previously discrete languages and practices melded and intermixed, becoming blurred. Hence the fate of many cultures reliant for millennia upon oral transmission suddenly facing the preservative of the European written record: “Indian words passed down in official and unofficial records have no doubt been garbled or twisted – inadvertently or for political reasons – by the people who translated and recorded them. Some even have been fabricated.” Indeed, there are Indigenous people today who have no access to the meaning of lyrics that they themselves have inherited through oral transmission. Even societies that have managed, through their relative isolation, to escape the more immediate or violent whirlwinds of cultural disruption have suffered through a traumatic loss of access to meaning. In 1902, a collector of Inuit songs noted that “the singers in many cases did not understand the words of the songs,” although they had been singing in “the language of their ancestors.” As late as 1991, a Paalirmiut Inuit from Nunavut lamented the diminished communicative power of her people’s tradition of “throat singing” (qiaqpaarniq): “The words … are words that were used by our remote ancestors. People have forgotten the meaning behind the words and that, I assume, adds to why people don’t have any knowledge of their meaning. … They came from the mouths of the ancients.”

The centrality of singing in Indigenous American life has long been recognized, even by those colonial commentators who could otherwise make neither head nor tail of it. Songs on either side of the Columbian invasion were “acts of world- and even self-making,” filtering a people’s existence through music “in non- (or anti-) European ways, even in the bleakest moments of conquest and early colonization.” Singing throughout Indigenous America – North, Central, and South – was (and remains) associated with rituals: rituals of hunting, of healing, of warfare; rituals of mourning, of play, of communication and communion with the gods. The instruments accompanying Indigenous vocal music are themselves “power objects,” developed from weapons of the hunt and the struggle against starvation: the earliest stringed instrument was derived from the hunter’s bow; the earliest percussion instruments being the “sticks and stones that dealt death in the chase.”

Given the importance of music and song, it can be disheartening to confront the relative inaccessibility of Indigenous songs of struggle before the twentieth century, when – in North America, at least – the interest of ethnographers and collectors culminated in the field work of Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Natalie Curtis, and Frances Densmore. Even today, the sole Smithsonian Folkways recording marketed as Indian protest music contains only contemporary songs sparked by the waves of resurgent Indian protest movements in the 1970s. And yet, we know that the Hunkpapa Lakota chief Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) was himself known as a protest song writer: “Once a famous warrior I was. It is all over and now a hard time I have.”

The accumulated caveats about the slipperiness of translation mean, of course, that these lyrics of Sitting Bull must be considered, to some extent, suspect – as must the Diné (Navajo) ode, “Hlin Biyin” (Song of the Horse), collected by Natalie Curtis in the early twentieth century and described by her as a song of “blessing and protection” for a family’s herd of horses:

The caveats must apply equally to all translations of Indigenous songs discussed in this book. Yet, such translations still help us understand the central place of struggle in the songs of the Americas before the Spanish invasion of 1492 and in the centuries that followed; for songs of struggle are everywhere in Indigenous America. Struggle is imbued in the “Song of the Horse” as an expression of the rituals, taboos, and customs surrounding the solemn (and economically necessary) quest for horses – not only by the Navajos but by the Apaches as well. For these and other North American tribes, horse raids were “sacred missions to bring home ‘the things by which men lived,’” and as such they were the subjects of holy song.

Looking southward, a leading historian of pre-Columbian music, Gary Tomlinson, has made a study of one of the earliest remaining repositories of Aztec song, the ninety-one Mexica Songs (Cantares mexicanos) initially preserved in pictographic imagery – “songs to be sung, drummed, and danced” but represented visually in fragile codices and on painted murals, monuments, sculpture, and carvings throughout Mesoamerica, with “elaborate volutes extending from the mouths of singing figures.” Various song categories, including war songs (yaocuicatl) and songs of “misery or grief” (icnocuicatl), as well as songs of implicit “ethnic pride,” are indicative of struggle against forces of both human and natural origin. But, again, the precision of meanings contained within them remains beyond our grasp. Eventually translated into an “alphabetalized Nahuatl” form sometime in the late 1500s, the Cantaras mexicanos remain, in Tomlinson’s words, “inescapably colonized,” rooted in “any number of specifics we are not in a position to recover.” However, one specific that we are in a position to recover is the importance of instrumental and vocal music in the struggles of conquest and resistance between the Indigenous Americans and the invading Europeans. This is where we will begin, with the arrival of three strange ships from beyond the horizon.