Indigenous music instruction with youth

This is a sharing from six Indigenous musicians about their own musical journeys and how they would ideally like to see youth learn musics going forward. Three Cree musicians and three Blackfoot musicians share their personal experiences, their cautions, and their hopes for how musics can be instructed with youth. An approach of excellence is expressed in different ways by each musician. This means a focus on preparing oneself before, during, and after musicking instead of focusing on mastery or perfection of a particular song or instrument for one performance. Prominent learnings that came from the visits with these musicians are the importance of relationality, experiential learning, and choice. Intertwined within the musicians’ sharings are also stories about deceit, disrespect, elitism, and jealousies. These musicians have learned musics from family, from classical music instructors, from schoolteachers, and from Elders. They have each chosen to instruct youth in musics in various ways including—but not limited to—within Ceremony, within school or community settings, within their work, and within their own homes. This thesis shares their recommendations and points to next steps. Above all, the most important sharing that every musician expressed was the role of respect in both learning and instructing of musics, and that music learning begins before birth and carries on after death. They share that musics are kin and need to be cared for as family; this is our sacred responsibility.

Authors

• Brooks, Angela Dawn
• University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Fine Arts

• Indigenous music instruction
• youth
• wholistic practice
• Indigenous musics
• Indigenous approaches to musics
• Indigenous approaches to music learning

Identifier

hdl:10133/7283

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:opus.uleth.ca:10133/7283