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.’

Encounters in many fields

This past week as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Performance, I attended the Canadian Society for Traditional Music annual conference in Montreal - a conference which, in June 2010, will come to the University of Regina (click here to see the Call for Papers)! In addition to meeting with Canada Research Chair in Interactive Media and Performance, Dr. Charity Marsh to catch up on some administrative business, and hearing her presentation on her work on Aboriginal hip hop in the IMP labs - I heard papers on ethnomusicology, traditional and children's musics, and chatted with colleagues about their research and new developments in their programs. I was also invited to give guest lectures, workshops and presentations at other universities. Conferences are wonderful ways to connect with other scholars - which, for ethnomusicologists, seems especially important given the fact that there is most often only one ethnomusicologist at a given institution. I am pleased that, through the support of Interactive Media and Performance at U Regina (reimbursement for a popular music conference I attended in Liverpool, UK this past summer recently came through), I was able to attend and participate in the CSTM conference.

Before I left for Montreal, I touched based with a research participant who was convalescing over the summer. I was relieved and gladdened to hear he is on the mend. I was also cheered that he was interested in talking about continuing our work together in the future.

This week, I met with Dr. Vic Satzewich, a sociologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, who has published a fair amount on race and ethnicity in Canada. He pointed out that my research is significant in that it addresses a major empirical gap in the literature - neither he nor I can think of any scholarship that addresses relations between Aboriginal people and Ukrainian settler and their descendants in Canada. We discussed the fact that this particular hybridity is not something that has come up in any previous scholarship, as regards histories or understandings of Metis. In western Canada especially, Metis tend to be associated with stories of the Red River Valley and relations with French and Scottish, but not other European groups. I was grateful that he took time to talk with me, and for helping me think about ways in which I might explore this topic further.

I remember that, when I began to talk with others - scholars, research participants and community members more broadly - about this research topic a couple of years ago, I would be met with initial surprise at their hearing that there actually were relations between Aboriginal people and Ukrainian settlers on the prairies. Quickly, though, the realization dawned on people that there must have been many interactions and encounters, since these groups of people would have been living in close contact, especially in rural regions of the prairies. Indeed, I am finding more and more evidence all the time of encounters and relations between Aboriginal people and Ukrainian settlers on the prairies during the early 1900s - and in many of the stories Ukrainian immigrants benefit from the hospitality, care and knowledge shared with them by their Aboriginal neighbours. I have also met with smiles of recognition - from people who then speak to me about “growing up Oji-Ukrainian” or in families of some mix of Aboriginal and Ukrainian ancestry. I hope that this internet site might offer more such opportunities for me to interact with others who might be able to share with me similar stories.