Southeastern American Indian Stomp Dances (with a focus on similarities between the counter-clockwise circle movements & call & response chanting found in African American ring shouts)

Hugh Foley, Jan 2, 2011

The "stomp dance" is the traditional dance and song of the original people of the Southeastern United States, such as the Euchee, Cherokee, Seminole, and Muscogee (Creek). While this dance and song occurs traditionally around the fire, at night, and during the ceremonial season in the summer, some traditional people will go inside for social and demonstration dances for educational, commemorative, celebratory, or other fellowship purposes. Several types of "stomp dance" songs exist, depending on their place in the ceremonial cycle. One explanation details the songs as prayers by the leader, which are then carried up to the creator by the smoke from the sacred fire; other songs commemorate the peoples' reverence for nature and its blessings; some songs' meanings have been lost over time, but are carried on in the ceremonial context in what one Keetoowah Cherokee elder "the original language of God".

**** Edited by Azizi Powell This pancocojams post showcases two videos of Southeastern American Indian stomp dances with particular attention to that stomp dance's counter-clockwise movements and the call & response patterns of its chants. In addition, this pancocojams post presents my editorial note about the positions some commenters have given for the similarities between these stomp dances and early African American counter-clockwise dances and call & response chants. A YouTube video of an African American ring shout is also included in this post. This post also presents an excerpt of Barbara S. Tracy's 2009 University of Nebraska's dissertation entitled " Transcultural  Transformation: African American and Native American Relations."
The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, religious, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners. Thanks to all those who are featured in these videos and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post. Thanks also to the producers and publishers of these posts on YouTube. **** CONFLICTING POSITIONS ABOUT THE REASONS WHY ELEMENTS OF THESE STOMP DANCES ARE SIMILAR OR THE SAME AS SOME EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN DANCES AND CALL & RESPONSE CHANTS This post posits that these Native American stomp dances have elements that are similar or the same as some African American dances (such as the ring shout) and the African American call & response communication patterns. A few commenters in some of the discussion threads of YouTube videos on these stomp dances that I have read and/or in other YouTube discussion threads have shared conflicting positions about how and/or why these dance and chanting forms are the same or similar. One position from some self-identified Southeastern Indians is that the stomp dances and chanting for those dances are proof that Southeastern Indians are the actual originators of the music forms that are now credited to African Americans. Another position about this subject comes from individuals who -if I understand them correctly-call themselves the true (real) American Indians and who consider Native Americans to be "fake" Indians or the descendants of people who came to the Americas after their ancestors (the true American Indians) did. I believe that these people represent a population who are a very small but since the 2015 or so are an increasingly vocal online percentage of people who I would call "African Americans" but who reject that referent for themselves, (This population rejects the self-referent and group referent "African American" for themselves because on of their core positions is that their ancestors didn't come from Africa. These commenters take the opposite position that was given above, indicating that these stomp dances document and prove that their ancestors were the creators of these dances. A third position is that the way that the stomp dances and their songs were/are performed represents a blending of the cultures of Southeastern American Indian (as that referent is generally used) and African American cultures (as that term is generally used). That blending came about because of the long biological and cultural intermingling and interaction between these populations. This is the position that I accept at this point in time. That position is reflected in the dissertation that is excerpted in this post. The other two positions are reflected in a few comments that are added to the comment section of this pancocojams post. But there is also another position-one that I also believe-that the Southeastern American Indians, the Africans, and the African Americans held similar or the same religious and cultural beliefs which resulted in the formation of similar or the same cultural expressions such as counter-clockwise circle shuffling/stomping dances and call & response chanting.

**** SHOWCASE VIDEO #2 - Muscogee Creek Festival - 3 Stomp Dancing

SmithsonianNMAI, Dec 17, 2014

Mvskoke Etvlwv: Muscogee Creek Festival is a celebration by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma of its tribal history, heritage and culture. This segment has the second demonstration of the Stomp Dance for the day. The Stomp Dance is a set of traditional social and religious dances brought across the Trail of Tears from the Muscogee (Creek) ancestral homelands in Georgia and Alabama. The festival was webcast and recorded in the Potomac Atrium of the National Museum of the American Indian on November 15, 2014.

**** SHOWCASE VIDEO #3 - McIntosh County Shouters - "Jubilee" [Behind The Scenes Documentary]

Smithsonian Folkways, Feb 14, 2017

Producer Art Rosenbaum, and Freddie Palmer and Brenton Jordan of the McIntosh County Shouters talk about the triumphant meaning behind "Jubilee", a song that was sung and shouted at the Emancipation. This track is featured on 'Spirituals and Shout Songs from the Georgia Coast,' out on Smithsonian Folkways.

****

DISSERTATION EXCERPT

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=englishdiss

 "Transcultural  Transformation: African American and Native American Relations

A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska

In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Major: English

Under the Supervision of Professor Frances W. Kaye

Lincoln, Nebraska

November, 2009

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by denying one or the other something is lost. Claiming the relationship turns transcultural transformation into a powerful response. Working from Henry Gates‟ explanation of signifying combined with Houston Baker‟s description of blues literature, I examine signifying, call and response, and blues/jazz elements in the work of three writers to discover the collective lives of African Americans, Native Americans, and Black Indians. In the writing of Black Cherokee Alice Walker, I look for the call and response of both African and Native American story-ways. I find these same elements in the writing of Spokane/Coeur d‟Alene writer Sherman Alexie, in his blues writings and  his revision of Robert Johnson‟s and other stories. In the work of Creek/Cherokee Craig Womack, I examine a Creek/Cherokee perspective of Black Creeks and Freemen. In all of these works, I find that the shared African American and Native American experience plainly takes place in these works in a variety of ways in which the authors call upon oral and written story, song, and dance, and create a response that clearly signifies the combined power of these shared experiences. This is a fusion of shared traditions with differences that demonstrate the blending of voices and culture between two peoples who have been improvising together for a long time. 

[…]

Introduction

Speaking of Things Yet Unspoken: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians

“No outsider knows where Africa ends or America begins” (Silko Almanac of the Dead 421).

“Africans and Americans1 must now be studied together without their relations always having to be obscured by the separations established through the work of scholars focusing essentially upon some aspect of European expansion and colonialism” (Jack D. Forbes Africans and Native Americans 1).

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result in Black Indians and a shared culture of music, call and response, and story in forms of what Henry Louis Gates identifies as signifying. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. Two cultures become greater than their parts, representing losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, the lack of one or the other leaves

1

Forbes uses the word American for American Indian in the colonial period and African or Black African for sub-Saharan Africans to avoid the “ambiguous Indian and Negro.”

[…]

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[…]

In most of our grammar school educations, we learned a little bit about minorities and a whole lot about Euro Americans. I‟m about certain that in our grammar school years, little if anything was mentioned of Black Indians, Chinese Africans, Filipino Africans, Mexican Asians, et all, much less about any other mixed bloods. The erasure of these identities impacts everyone, especially members of these communities

[…]

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[…]

Jack Forbes, in introducing Africans and Native Americans states:
Thousand of volumes have been written about the historical and social relations existing between Europeans and the Native Peoples of the Americans and between Europeans and Africans, but relations between Native American and Africans have been sadly neglected. The entire Afro-Native American cultural exchange and contact experience is a fascinating and significant subject, but one largely obscured by a focus upon European activity and European colonial relations with „peripheral‟ subject peoples (1).

How little has been written or not written about contact between Native Americans and African American does not negate the fact that indeed contact occurred in the forms of alliances, slavery, and family. In discussing the significance of contact, Forbes writes, “In many parts of Europe, along the coasts of Africa, and throughout the Americas the slave trade and European imperialism in general produced a vast number of contacts between Black Africans and Native Americans. As a result a great deal of intermixture took place” (60). In fact the history of Black Indians, when and where their relationships may have begun and what they are today is itself a rich topic for further research.

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African Native American historical studies emerging since the early 1900s include such works as Ivan Van Sertima‟s They came before Columbus in which he argues that Native Americans and Africans had contact prior to Columbus. Berry Brewton‟s Almost White explores origins and social conditions of various mixed race peoples. Jack Forbes has written several articles and books, most notably Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, in which he carefully examines the language used to categorize African Americans, Native Americans, Black Indians, and other mixed bloods. He finds ambiguous terms, which overlap and lose specificity, such as colored and mulatto, which in one instance might mean Black, another Indian, and in some anyone of unclear ethnic identity. Daniel F. Littlefield‟s books Africans and Creeks, The Cherokee Freedmen, and Africans and Seminoles all examine the history of each tribe and their relationship with Africans, slaves, and Freedmen.

Additional studies include Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society by Theda Perdue, who examines Cherokee ownership of Black slaves, and their shared exploitation by Europeans. William Loren Katz‟s Black Indians contains historical photographs and an overview of slavery, runaway slaves, and Black/Indian marriages in early American history. Claudio Saunt, author of Black, White, and Indian discovers the connection between the Creek Graysons and their Black Creek kin. Patrick Minges wrote Black Indians in which he researched the archives of the Federal Writer‟s Project and collected twenty-seven narratives which include discussion of relations between Native Americans and African Americans. In 1998, a special edition of American Indian Quarterly featured writings from anthropologists and historians such as James Brooks Tracy

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and Circe Sturm. Many of the essays were later collected by Brooks in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Sturm has since expanded and published her study of Black Cherokees in Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Sturm examines the national identity, contradictions of race, and the Cherokee Freedmen in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Issues of identity, nationhood, even the naming of identities become foggy throughout these works, but the significance in relationships between Native Americans and African Americans grows.

Less has been written to date about African Native American writers or African American and Native American relations in literature, despite the noted presence of African Native American writers such as Paul Cuffe (African Wampanoag) whose ship logs and letters tell much about the number of Black Indians employed on his ship.

While much is written about William Apess (African Pequot), one of the earliest Native American writers, little is said of his African ancestry. Discussions of Olivia Bush-Banks (African Montauk), Langston Hughes (African Cherokee), Alice Walker (African Cherokee), Clarence Major (African Cherokee) primarily focus on their African American identity, even while their writing reveals their self identity as also Indian.

Several Native American or African American writings contain Black Indians or other evidence of the exchange of culture apparent in their novels or poetry such as that of Toni Morrison (African American), Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d‟Alene), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo/Mexican), Nettie Jones (African American), Francine Washburn (Lakota), Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek), or Craig Womack (Muskogee 

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Creek/Cherokee), yet literary criticism seldom examines these works as speaking to relationships between African Americans and Native Americans.

[…]

9

[…]

A balanced reading of African Native American literature or African American and Native American relations means looking at both tribal perspectives, which may include story-ways, call and response, music, and other shared culture. Womack‟s suggestion that we include tribally specific voices in writing about Native American literature and Brennan‟s plea to examine multi-cultured authors from all of their identities should mean that a reading of Alice Walker, for example, would examine the Cherokee and African American responses found in her work through a study of both Cherokee and African American sources. Although Alexie is not a Black Indian, the influence of Robert Johnson, Legba, and the blues on Alexie‟s writing, requires study of African/African American relationships to Native Americans and the blues. Craig Womack also is not a Black Indian; however, Black Creeks and Creek Freedmen in his writing as well as the influence of jazz and blues, requires a study of these elements of Creek culture.

[…]

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[…]

In examining traditional story-ways found in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Henry Louis Gates finds the presence of the Yoruba Esu-Elegbara (also known as Legba) and the Signifying Monkey. In these figures lie a tradition and system of interpretation that the enslaved Africans brought with them to America. No doubt given the shared lives of Africans and Indigenous Americans, we can see similar elements of this system in the story-ways of Native Americans and African Native Americans such as Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby. Gates explains: The Black tradition is double-voiced. The trope of the Talking Book, of double-voiced texts that talk to other texts, is the unifying metaphor . . . Signifyin(g) is the figure of the double-voiced, epitomized by Esu‟s depiction in sculpture as possessing two mouths” (xxv). Gates explores four types of signifying: “Tropological Revision,” “The Speakerly Text,” “Talking Texts,” and “Rewriting the Speakerly.” The first is a “manner in which a specific trope is repeated, with differences, between two or more texts” (xxv). This type of Signifyin(g) occurs in many Native American works as well, where we can see that the book (Talking Book) is a double-voiced text in which it locates the call of another text or oral story and speaks back to it in both a form of repetition and difference.

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For example, in Alice Walker‟s reading of Black Elk Speaks, she hears the call and responds not only from her experience as a Black Woman but also from her knowledge as a Cherokee of the Selu and Wild Child stories. Tropological Revision is also a means by which the colonized and the enslaved can look into each other‟s culture or take European tropes and revise them fitting one‟s own culture. In Reservation Blues Sherman Alexie answers the call of several texts, films, and songs with a response that turns the original into a difference through his blues writing. Blues are also a means of signifying. In typical twelve bar blues, the first four bars express the topic or problem, and bars five through eight repeat the first four, sometimes with some slight variation. The last four bars eight through twelve, put a twist or a difference on the topic or problem. For example: “Going to the riverside, take a chair and set down. Going to the river take a chair and set down. If I get worried I‟ll jump over board and drown” (Dorsey and Jones). The blues is also a form of signifying or call and response, and use tropological revision through mnemonics, metaphor, and irony, playing with the meaning of words. Alexie‟s writing demonstrates a deep interest in the blues, particularly in Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson. There is a history of blues singers in the Coeur d‟Alene with Mildred Bailey and Al Rinker. Because of his own and other Native American participation in the blues, he recognizes this kind of shared signifying and naturally uses it in his blues novel.”….

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