Music and Dancing.
With most feasting is usually associated dancing and other merriment.
The readiness with which the Indians pick up our beautiful hymn tunes and learn to play our musical instruments has been remarked. Indeed, these people are naturally very musical, and in their heathen state were passionately fond of singing their own native melodies. Of songs they had a great variety: war songs, marriage songs, songs for feasts and public gatherings, mourning songs for the dead, songs when the fish came, dancing songs, canoe songs, and many others. When we asked the old dance-song maker where they got their music, he replied:
“We get it from the wind in the trees, from the waves on the sea-shore, from the rippling stream, from the mountain side, from the birds, and from the wild animals.”
As for musical instruments, we are all familiar with the simple Indian drum, made by stretching a deerskin tightly over a hoop. Besides this they used as a drum a big square box, painted in different colors, with figures of birds and animals upon it.
When the drummer was at work crowds would, accompany him, beating time with sticks upon boards. The sound was weird in the extreme, if heard at the dead of night, coupled with the shouts of the heathen dancers.
Besides the drums were rattles of various shapes, used by the chiefs and conjurers, and pipe whistles—indeed, whistles of many kinds, imitating birds and animals—some of which were used by the hunters in pursuit of game.
With much of their music is associated their pagan dancing. There are professional dancers among the tribes, who as a rule are identified with the clans of the medicine men. The heathen dances are very fascinating to the heathen mind, and in nothing is the “backsliding” of the Indian more noticeable than in his return to the dance.
At the dancing season certain persons become possessed, or as the An-ko-me-nums say, “the you-an, or dance-spirit, is on them.” They dream dreams and see visions, and move about in a hypnotic state, unable, or at least declining, to work, and roaring out at intervals a sort of mournful sobbing, “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.” Then they go from house to house, hunting up every kind of food they can get hold of, and gorging themselves many times a day. At night these dancers, all daubed and plastered with grease and paint, would gather in the large houses, where the people were assembled, and work themselves up into a frenzy, prancing up and down and round about, performing numerous contortions. Then they would break out in song, or in monotonous recitation relate their dreams and visions and tell many weird tales. Then round and round, and up and down again, they would prance, until they dropped from sheer exhaustion, or fell, perhaps, into the fire, and another took their place. All this time the onlookers watched and listened to the chanting and the story, or screamed and pounded in frantic accompaniment to the dancing.
The heathen dance is certainly demoralizing, and, like everything of heathenism, is of the devil.