This new anthology edited by Tara Browner is a significant contribution to Native American music scholarship for several reasons. It includes material from communities (Inuit, Dene, Passamaquoddy, Fort Sill Apache) in both Canada and the United States that have been underrepresented in other anthologies.Footnote ¹ All of the chapters are new with the exception of Draper's piece on contexts for Choctaw performance.Footnote ² Four of the eleven authors/collaborators are Native American. Perhaps most importantly, as noted by Browner in her introduction, the anthology illustrates “the many ways of doing contemporary ethnomusicology in Indian country” (2). Among these ways are detailed music analysis, dialogic interviewing, performance ethnography, reconsideration of categorization, and exploration of new interpretive questions.

Although diverse, the anthology marks a return to detailed textual analysis in more than half the chapters (Conlon, Lafferty/Keillor, Sercombe, Draper, Vander). Arguably, scholars in the last two decades have tried to avoid the Eurocentric biases of Western transcription, but these authors re-embrace music/lyric notation to explore genre categories and performance variants. Furthermore, they all use both archival resources and their own fieldwork materials, thus achieving historical depth to variable degrees. The aims of the analyses vary. Whereas Conlon and Draper are primarily concerned with describing the definitive stylistic features of Iglulik Inuit drum dance and Choctaw jump dance songs, respectively, other authors configure their objectives in broader social terms. Lafferty and Keillor explore how certain genres of Dene song reinforce the peoples’ relationship to the land. In a chapter that complements her landmark book on the Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion, Judith Vander moves toward the question of how the power of Ghost Dance songs relates to their aesthetics (revealed in her nuanced analysis of “inexact repetition”), although she stops short of an answer.Footnote ³ I found those chapters in which musical details are noted simply to illustrate the salient features of a style or to distinguish subcategories of a genre less compelling than those that explored how variant performances recreated or re-enacted some teaching or power that was socially needed at certain points in time. In this regard, Laurel Sercombe's presentation of the story of Dirty Face is an outstanding example. In a meticulous historical account of variants, she uncovers the kinds of power embodied in the narrative songs and demonstrates the role of ritual performance in bridging the mythic and everyday worlds, a bridging that often has both spiritual and practical environmental import.

The remainder of the chapters are ethnographic in nature. Franziska von Rosen's interview with Margaret Paul (Passamaquoddy), an important singer in the context of cultural revitalization in the province of New Brunswick, stands alone as both a notable instance of collaboration and a relatively unmediated encounter.Footnote ⁴ Subheadings serve to help organize the content of their conversation and orient the reader.

Chris Aplin's ethnography of the Fire Dance of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache is a rich description of this masked ceremonial dance as it relates to belief and reflects the way this group coped with resettlement, incarceration, and violence. The Fort Sill Apache were brought to Oklahoma as prisoners of war in the 1890s. The first part of his essay describes the symbolism that relates, to a large extent, to the Gahe: spirit beings of the mountains. The second part illustrates how contemporary performance reinflects those historical and mythological dimensions and facilitates adaptation to new contexts.

Editor Tara Browner contributes a piece that will have widespread importance in powwow studies. Author of Heartbeat of the People and champion dancer herself, Browner has published numerous historical, ethnographic, and analytic studies of powwow music and dance.Footnote ⁵ Here she takes on the common categorization of Northern and Southern styles, arguing that “a new taxonomy of pow-wow song” must necessarily “examine the music more rigorously than the simple binary of Northern and Southern, but less specifically than the level of individual tribal cultures” (132). A number of studies of regional powwow traditions (e.g., Hoefnagels, Tulk, and Goertzen) have similarly demonstrated the varied histories of how powwow reached certain communities—particularly in eastern North America—as well as the complexity of repertoire sharing and local modes of indigenization, all of which similarly challenge the Northern–Southern style binary.Footnote ⁶ Browner's keen attention to modeling the big picture, however, is a welcome addition to this literature.

Finally, another ethnographic gem in this anthology is David Samuels's chapter on country music on the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona. Complementing his book Putting a Song on Top of It, this chapter poses a fundamental question: What counts as culture?Footnote ⁷ Samuels advocates a shift from asking “How is it possible” to “What does it accomplish?” More specifically, he queries “What kinds of participation and expression does the choice of country music style make possible for Native people?” (147). He makes an elegant case for the way cover versions re-enact listening experiences, for the resonance between narratives of loss in country music and Apache life, and for the way listeners connect repertoire to land and place or indigenize songs (through the translation of the texts or the incorporation of local instruments) to make them locally meaningful. Country, he contends, is the “sound of memory” (155).

This book is elegantly produced with particularly clear musical transcriptions. Regrettably, there are few photos. One could quibble over a few details: the fact that the “First Nations” in the anthology title does not, in Canada, include the Inuit or the fact that some of the reference lists were not updated in the course of the editorial process. Overall, the diversity of approaches in Music of the First Nations, as well as the different decades in which various authors worked (a number of the chapters have a 1980s feel about them), create a certain unevenness. Certainly a sharp divide is evident between the textualist and ethnographic contributions. Browner has cleverly turned this diversity, however, into the anthology's raison d'être: an illustration of the many ways to approach the study of Native American and Inuit music. This new anthology, then, is a welcome addition to the literature on Native American music.