Drum Culture
Posted in Bioregional Overviews by: sipsis
From one end of this country to the other, the reasons Aboriginal people use the drum varies greatly from one cultural group to another and sometimes even within a cultural group itself.
Drumming events can be roughly placed into four main categories, but again, as in all things dealing with First Peoples’ music and culture, the specific instance of the drumming must be understood within its cultural context.
Social occasions
Social events are designed to bring the community together. Their purpose is to create solidarity and strengthen family, clan and community bonds. These events may be part of ceremonial and sacred activities or just pure entertainment. This includes hand or stick games or contests. Other social events are simply to dance and socialize. All serve to bring the people closer together and to foster a stronger sense of community solidarity.
Some social events bring young men and women together so that they get to know each other better. A prime example is the round dance in parts of Alberta. At this social function, the drummers and singer stand in the circle’s centre using hand drums. The people dance around them shuffling to the left. Everyone gets to dance and has a wonderful time.
In traditional cultures where men and women did not dance with each other, social events allowed them to gather together and socialize. The Inuit drum dances are among the better examples. This division of the sexes is still evident in the way the modern powwow is set up with the men and women dancing separately at most times. In societies where a more egalitarian approach is used, like the Iroquois, most of the social dances are mixed but there are still special dances for each gender.
Personal
Personal drumming events are much more difficult to describe. They vary from individual to individual, not just culture to culture. For some, drumming can be a way to calm oneself, using drumming as a focus to prepare for difficult times and situations, to find solace in times of loss, and for prayer For some, private drumming is the preferred way to communicate with the “spirit helpers” that are part of their healing work. I, Rohahes, can speak from personal experience that drumming has been a comfort for me in times of loss, a source of strength and inspiration when I was preparing for a particularly difficult task or event.
Healing
From historical and contemporary records, we know that healing was and is still practised among First Peoples. Depending on the culture involved, the drum or other percussive instrument such as the rattle usually plays a major role.
Ceremonial
Ceremonial drumming is also difficult to cover. Cultures within Canada are vast and complex. People drum ceremonially in two different ways. The first stream is religious and covers a culture’s many spiritual aspects. The second stream is social, political and civic drumming. The religious stream would cover important events in the annual cycle, important mythological events and any other religious activities that specific cultures would consider significant. The social, political, and civic streams would deal with events such as installing new chiefs or officials. Events also include political visits from other Aboriginal groups and other events that are not specifically religious.
No two drums are the same – each has its own distinctive structure, spirit, and life based on both the culture in which it was made and the hands of the one who made it. The drum is not just a music-maker, but a voice for the soul within the music.
Aboriginal cultures intertwine drumming, singing and dancing into their societies’ political and social fabric. To unfamiliar ears, native drumming and singing might sound similar. This could be because Native people across the country use many of the same musical resources, such as one person or group singing the same melody accompanied by percussive instruments. However, if people listen carefully they will discover that Iroquois social dance songs sound different than Innu drum dance songs. Likewise, Coast Salish songs are different than Cree or Siksika. These musical expressions are as varied as are Italian, Irish and Russian folk music.
Differences in geography and landscape have produced a rich variety of cultures. Each community used uniquely local materials to construct drums, rattles and other sound-producing instruments. The people also keenly understood their environment’s soundscape. Replicating those natural sounds was an important aesthetic consideration when making a drum or other instrument.
The most common drums First Peoples use today are the frame drum - a small, single-person, hand drum, and the large powwow drum that group members play together. Most regions and cultures across the country had frame drums. Some exceptions included certain people of the West Coast – boreal rain forest, the Northern Arctic and the Iroquoian nations of Eastern Canada. Each group had its own distinct drums and other percussion instruments.
Some West Coast boreal rain forest cultures did not have the frame drum until quite recently. The reason may be purely practical; hide or leather objects do not endure or hold their tension well in the constantly humid boreal rain forest. Instead, they used red cedar to make plank, log or box drums. Cedar not only is plentiful, but Northwest Coast cultures consider it spiritually significant. Thus, drummers wrap their hands in cedar bark in order to drum. The drums were valued cultural objects, but people most highly prized certain rattles, shakers and whistles for use in elaborate ceremonial cycles.
Plains
On the Plains, hand-held drums came in many sizes, ranging from 12 to 30 inches in diameter. These usually had just one skinhead stretched across the wooden frame, with a height of two to three inches. Occasionally, drum makers also crafted two-headed drums. Additionally, certain cultures such as the Nehiyaw/Cree produced drums with tonal-adjusting snares stretched across the skinhead.
Before people used wooden frames, the drum consisted of a piece of rawhide thrown on the ground over a small depression. People might have stretched a hide along vertical poles. In either case, no resonator existed. Male singers and drummers would sit around this hide beating it with long drumsticks.
Today, the most widely recognized large drum is the powwow drum. These drums generally have two-heads and are suspended on poles or placed on a blanket. The drums can be up to a hundred inches across. Originally, Plains people hollowed out a large log to make these drums and then stretched a deer hide over it.
Several stories exist about how this type of drum originated. Usually, people say it was given by a woman. One story of the Ojibwe refers to a Lakota grandmother who hid with the water sprites for four days to save herself from American soldiers. The sprites taught her protective songs and showed her how to make this large drum. They told her to search for her people so she could teach them these songs. She did so, and the next time soldiers attacked her community, the sound of drum and the songs made them put down their guns and dance.
Central
The Ojibwe and Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) traditionally use water drums in some of their ceremonial practices. The teachings and stories connected with the “Little Boy” and the “Grandfather” drums are at the heart of the Ojibwe Midewiwin religion and worldview. The Ojibwe and Iroquois people often hollowed out logs to craft these water drums. In certain instances, they also used clay pots or iron kettles. Additionally, these cultures used many types of rattles. For example, the turtle rattle is among the Haudenosaunee’s most sacred ceremonial instruments.
The book, the Jesuit Relations of 1634, has described a Wendat drum.
[Le Jeune says the drum] . . . is the size of the Basque tambour. It is composed of a circle three or four finger lengths in diameter and of two skins stretched tightly over it on both sides; in order to make more noise, they put inside it some little pebbles or stones. The diameter of the largest tambourine rattle is the size of two palms or thereabouts. They call it chichgouan, and the verb nipagahiman means, “I make this drum sound.” They do not beat it as the Europeans do but they turn it and shake it, to make the stones rattle inside; they strike it on the ground, now on the side, now almost flat. (Sometimes a drum is made with a skin being stretched tightly over a cooking pot or kettle. Often only a dry beaver skin suffices as an instrument for the performer) [Thwaites 1959: VII, 187. While the Innu (Naskapu/Montagnais) use a large drum with snares, their southern neighbours, the ancient myths of the Maritime Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples do not mention an instrument with a rawhide head. Instead, they refer to the end-blown flute and beating upon a plank or a large piece of folded birch bark: The dji.gemayen is a piece of birch bark folded once, held in the hand and beaten with a stick. Neither the birch bark nor the stick is carefully made or decorated in any way; both are discarded after being used” [Johnson 1943: 63].
Arctic
The Arctic people’s drums have large, light frames, which they play by striking the rim rather than the hide. Their drums use a variety of materials such as deer skin, caribou and mountain sheep. They also use whale or walrus intestines. Originally, they made much smaller frames from baleen (whale material). Today, the drums are larger and use wooden frames, a material that has become readily available. Drumsticks are antler, bone or wood.
In 1860-1862, Captain Charles Francis Hall searched for survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition. He revisited the Arctic in 1864-1869 and described an Inuit drum:
The drum is made from the skin of the deer or seal, which is stretched over a hoop made of wood or of bone from the fin of a whale by the use of a strong braided cord of sinew passed around a groove on the outside. The hoop is about 2½ inches wide, 1½ inches thick, and three feet in diameter, the whole instrument weighing about four pounds. The wooden drumstick, 10 inches in length and three inches in diameter, is called a kentun. . . .
The instrument’s head is a deerskin, which is to be the instrument’s head is kept frozen when not in use. It is then thoroughly saturated with water, drawn over the hoop and temporarily fastened in its place by a piece of sinew. A line of heavy, twisted sinew, about 50 feet long, is now wound tightly on the groove on the outside of the hoop, binding down the skin. This cord is fastened to the handle of the kilaut [drum] which is made to turn by the force of several men (while its other end is held firmly), and the line eased out as required. To do this, a man sits on the platform (of the igloo) having one or two turns of the line about his body, which is encased in furred deerskin and impaled by four upright pieces of wood. Tension is secured by using a round stick of wood as a lever on the edge of the skin, drawing it from beneath the cord. When any whirring sound is heard, little whisps of reindeer hair are tucked in between the skin and the hoop until the head is as tight as a drum.
When the drum is played, the drum handle is held in the left hand of the performer, who strikes the edge of the rim opposite that over which the skin is stretched. He holds the drum in different positions, but keeps it in a constant fan-like motion by his hand and by the blows of the kentun struck alternately on the opposite sides of the edge. Skillfully keeping the drum vibrating on the handle, he accompanies this with . . . motions of the body, and at intervals with a song, while the women keep up their own Inuit songs, one after another, through the whole performance (Hall 1879: II 96).
During the past century, cloth and nylon have replaced hide as Inuit drum-head materials. In the eastern and central Arctic, the beater can be padded or not padded. Sometimes, drummers even use their fists in lieu of a beater. Among the Mackenzie Delta Inuvialuit, several drummers customarily perform in unison while dancers present story-telling actions. The drummers use a wooden unpadded beater that is longer than the diameter of the drum head. Consequently, the beater hits the wooden rim on both sides from underneath when striking regularly and makes contact with the skin on forceful beats.
Certain Canadian cultural groups make drums that have one or more snares. The Innu construct a one- or two-headed drum, the teueikan, which helps bring a hunter a dream about where game can be found. The Innu attach a snare on the outside of each head. On this, they fasten small pieces of bone or wood to make a unique rattling sound. Usually the drum makers fasten another snare under the skinhead at right angles to the exposed snare. These snares assist the sound in going out to the four directions.
The performer-hunter listens carefully to the sound while using a beater made of birch wood, a disc rattle, or, in earlier times, possibly an animal’s femur bone. During this time, the hunter hopes that his dream will come with the song.
Many communities in the Northwest Territories and the Prairies have single-headed frame drums with one to four snares over or under the membranophone head (Keillor 1985-86: .46).
Antonia Curtze Mills described a dunne-za (beaver) frame drum with snares under the head:
Often the period of preparation for the dance includes the refitting or repair of the hand drums which are used by each singer. A hand adzed plank of wood is made approximately one-half inch by approximately three inches by 24 inches. Holes are drilled in the ends, the wood is steamed and bent in a circle and the holes tied together. The frame is fitted with thongs with bird quills in them which act as snares against the drum head. The drum head itself is made of the wet hide stretched over the frame and secured, dried and tempered by holding near the fire. A good drum form is passed from generation to generation, but new ones are made if one is damaged or by a new singer, a youth who has not inherited a drum (Mills 1981: 77).
The communities have always considered this kind of drum to be very important.
The peoples’ [Dunne-za] dancing . . . is a form of praying. . . . Each time a person dances once around the fire, they say he shortens the route to heaven by that much. . . . The dancing is a prayer because the songs themselves, the Prophet Songs, are symbolic chants depicting the path to heaven, sent from the ‘seven grandfathers in heaven’ who look after the spiritual welfare of the Beaver, so that they may find their way to heaven after death” (Mills 1981: 80).
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