Music of 'The Uke-Cree Fiddler'

Early tomorrow morning, I depart for the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in Mexico City! There I will give a paper on my research project “Mixed Music” - which is supported by Canadian Research Chair in Interactive Media and Performance (IMP), Dr. Charity Marsh in the University of Regina's Faculty of Fine Arts. In my research project, I am investigating a legacy of colonialism in North America - more specifically, the ways in which mixed Aboriginal-European (especially Eastern European) identities and intercultural relations are represented in music and dance in western Canada.

Much of my research over the last several months as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Performance has been focused on the music and life story of Arnie Strynadka, who bills himself as ‘The Uke-Cree Fiddler’ - and he is the focus of the paper I will present in Mexico City later this week. I met Arnie while conducting field research on Ukrainian heritage in western Canada and was compelled to investigate the ways in which he articulates this particular fusion of ethnicities and synthesis of values, symbols, and musics.

I have also written an essay about Arnie, which has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming volume about Aboriginal music in Canada. In this essay, I discuss aspects of his career as a musician, and his memories of growing up in rural northeast central Alberta, in a Ukrainian immigrant settlement of Two Lakes, near Vilna, Alberta, and reserve community of Goodfish Lake, part of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. Large-scale Ukrainian immigration to this region began in the late 1890s, and many Ukrainian immigrants settled in groups in the area - such that the modern history of this region, and official discourses in tourism and education, for example, are strongly characterized by early twentieth-century Ukrainian farming-pioneer experiences.

In the traces of encounters between Indigenous people and Ukrainian settlers that exist in records and publications - in obscure first-person accounts, or stories re-told of ancestors’ experiences - time and again, Ukrainian immigrants benefited from the life-saving aid and hospitality of Indigenous people. According to Arnie Strynadka, his Ukrainian immigrant ancestors likewise benefited from his Cree grandfather’s employment and care. Born of this encounter between a Cree family and Ukrainian immigrant one, Arnie recalls that he “grew up with bannock in one hand and kobassa [Ukrainian garlic sausage] in the other” (interview, February 2009)—speaking Cree with one grandmother, Ukrainian with the other (and English at school and with various folks on the reserve and around home).

Likewise, Arnie’s musical production represents shared experiences of these two cultural groups on the prairies, as well as musical practices specific to each individual community. For example, the bulk of Arnie’s repertoire on recordings are old-time fiddle tunes and the music of country music stars like Hank Williams. This was music Arnie heard while growing up on the prairies, while listening to country music radio stations like CFCW, which has a long broadcasting history out of Alberta's capitol city, Edmonton. CFCW has been and continues to be widely listened to in both rural and urban parts of Alberta. Arnie also learned how to play Ukrainian dance tunes such as polkas and kolomeykas for Ukrainian weddings (dances which you can learn in at the workshop I will lead on 29 January 2010, part of the IMP program of events, see my last blog post for more information) - and gospel tunes he often heard his Cree grandfather sing.

Arnie’s repertoire is evidence of musical practices on the prairies that show, as Dr. Charity Marsh has written (follow the link to CRC Research here), “the music created and produced across the prairies and in the urban centers of Western and Northern Canada represent an eclectic range of musical genres, a combination of traditional, Indigenous, folk, and immigrant sounds with popular contemporary music practices.” Studies such as this one begin to make evident the complexity of identities that are played out in the lives and music of individuals like Arnie Strynadka, ‘The Uke-Cree Fiddler.’