″Traditional Authenticity″ and It′s Relationship to ″Indigenous Identity″

This paper examines the concept of "tradition" for Indigenous Peoples as a construct of reality developed through the lens of Western scholarship and American Indian perspectives. The resulting notions of American Indian tradition constructed by a Western point of view, has been incorporated into the thinking of Western peoples as well as those of American Indians. Possible reasons for this include the lasting effects of colonialism and current mass media and the description of cultural "others" through the Western sciences of Anthropology and Musicology. A definition of what is valid or important in defining "traditional culture" for members of an Indigenous community may utilize significantly different measures than those of Western scholars. In order to illustrate this, the author uses two treatises focusing on the Indigenous American Indian cultures of communities in Eastern North America incorporating Indigenous points of view. One of these two books provides a focus on connections between language and culture and the other on ethnomusicology. From both of these perspectives, traditional identity is seen as continuing in the present day through persistent perceptions of reality, linked to community social performance. These perceptions and their accompanying indexes to tradition are still present despite the disappearance of or frequent changes in the surface forms of both language and manufactured cultural items. The emphasis on "legitimate" or "real" tradition is tied to performance within an ongoing cultural community rather than to Western constructions of what is real found in past descriptions of cultures. An alternative view of "valid" tradition and its relationship to Indigenous identity, needs to incorporate Indigenous perspectives rather than depend on constructions developed using non-Indigenous Western frameworks.