Reception: Past and Present

Largely positive views on Densmore’s work circulated in white academic circles during and immediately after the height of her career. Some of her contemporaries describe taking pride in her work, specifically in the aim of “saving” Indigenous musics,¹ and even as her career ended in the latter half of the 20th century, White academics were praising her for centering fieldwork in her methods and for her revolutionary effect on the discipline. For example, Alfred Humphreys wrote in the 1970’s that Densmore was “an amazing person,” and he idolizes her for “laboring alone” in her field, demonstrating not just respect but a thoroughly uncritical reverence. ²

Yet criticisms of her methods also existed among her peers from the beginning. The anthropological community in particular seemed to take issue with her work: anthropologist Erna Gunther, for example, criticized her in a 1928 article for taking generalistic and reductive/essentialist attitudes toward some of the Indigenous groups she worked with.³ While valid criticisms, these and most other contemporary arguments failed to address the imperialist and racist attitudes embedded in Densmore’s work. However, by the 1970’s, examinations of Densmore’s racial bias and racialized harm were entering the academic dialogue. Ethnomusicologist D.P. McAllester wrote about Densmore in 1970, rightly problematizing Densmore’s methods and the cultural imperialism of her writing, but also saying that “for some of the ‘wrong’ reasons and in some of the ‘wrong’ ways, she [Densmore] did the best work that has been done, perhaps ever will be done, on American Indian music.”³ This paints a picture of a rather complicated reception for Densmore among her White peers. Some loved her passionately, and those who disliked her generally still held a begrudging respect for the prolific and revolutionary nature of her work.

Perspectives on Densmore were at least as variable among Indigenous communities as they were among her white peers. Some tribes, as Densmore herself was quick to point out in many of her texts, were eager to be recorded, wishing to have their voices and their traditions preserved somewhere other than the homeland they knew was under threat. One tribe even adopted Densmore as a surrogate daughter and granted her an honorary Sioux name, which suggests an intimacy surpassing what one would expect from an arrogant White outsider trying to “save” a BIPOC group in some way. That is to say, it’s evident that she was not exclusively received by these tribes as a rampaging colonizer. However, many Indigenous communities Densmore encountered did not embrace her in this way. As today’s scholars are quick to point out, Densmore’s intrusive behavior justifiably alienated and angered some, as did her attitudes of White-saviorism, which failed to adequately address the material harm White America was inflicting on these communities.⁴ Her affiliation with the Evangelical church is also problematized by modern Indigenous scholars.⁵ There was a deep rift created in the 19th and 20th centuries between First Nations and outside (read: white) ethnographers, and that rift remains to this day.⁶ Densmore’s racism and sometimes disregard for the wishes of those she recorded contributed to this difficult legacy.

The juxtaposition between Densmore’s perspective and Indigenous perspectives preserved in her work complicates established profiles of this early musicologist. Modern scholarship – white, Indigenous, and otherwise – seems to have coalesced around a perspective related to that of McAllester in the 70’s: Densmore’s work was revolutionary, preserving cultural history that might otherwise have been lost to academic communities, but her methods were harmful, and her attitudes were extremely racist and imperialist. She’s easily reduced to either the intrepid founding mother of ethnomusicology or the misguided white savior who took advantage of Native tribes all over the country, but in a way, she was both. There are Native voices that shine through her texts, and to discard her writing or her recordings is to discard those valuable perspectives and pieces of cultural history. However, everything Densmore wrote has to be read with a most critical eye, because her white-savior attitudes permeate every aspect of her activities. She was an extremely flawed human being who preserved some genuine aspects of cultural and Native voice (almost despite her own best efforts).