Who Was Frances Densmore?

Frances Densmore (1867-1957) was one of the pioneers of American Ethnomusicology. She was raised in Red Wing, Minnesota, where her proximity to the local Dakota community sparked what would become a lifelong interest in Indigenous musics. As a young adult she studied at Oberlin College. After her graduation, she continued to nourish her personal interest in Indigenous musics, and eventually she formed enough connections in the field of anthropology to consider moving toward more serious research. She received sponsorship from the Smithsonian Institution in 1908, paving the way for forty years of extremely prolific research. This map depicts the geographical extent of her work, as well as the breadth of Indigenous groups she encountered in her career.

Densmore’s research allowed her to create an extensive archive of Indigenous cultural expressions, American-Indian artifacts, and records of her own experiences with the over 30 different cultures she worked with. It’s clear from the breadth of this work and her determination in completing it, despite the obstacles faced by a woman in academia at this time, that Densmore was an extremely driven, tireless person who was truly personally committed to the preservation of what she understood as threatened Native cultures.

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Photo lot 33, Portraits of anthropologists, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.photolot.33

However, it is equally apparent that her work was underpinned by both cultural theft and white saviorism. We know that she used personal relationships to gain access to cultural materials that otherwise should not have been her right to hear.¹ She also openly stated that viewed her Indigenous collaborators as people she needed to “control,” assigning no value to their autonomy in the recording process.² This sort of behavior shows very clear racist, white-savior beliefs: she felt she knew what was best for the Indigenous communities she worked with, rather than considering them to be authorities on their own needs, and she believed that she was entitled to the cultural expressions she collected, rather than understanding these as gifts that were shared with her. Densmore was an important scholar, but she was an extremely flawed person.

That said, there is value in Densmore’s work—as discussed, she created an archive full of cultural information which would otherwise possibly be inaccessible to either academics, generally, or Indigenous communities. It means we as scholars and educators in a non-Indigenous (settler) school system need to be thoughtful in how we engage with Densmore’s materials. If we share and teach from Densmore’s archival materials indiscriminately, we risk perpetuating the appropriation and harm she enacted back when she recorded these cultural materials. Our job is to learn about these materials and teach respectfully. Which means we must center not Densmore, and not ourselves as teachers, but rather the voices of Indigenous peoples, both in her works themselves and in deciding how to use them.