Post by Okwes on Feb 28, 2007 16:31:57 GMT -5
Tribe's marching band is a proud tradition
Some have criticized the martial music, linking it to oppression, but
most support the group
By Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times Article Last
Updated: 12/30/2006 01:22:55 AM MST
www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss
Click photo to enlarge
<http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/render_gallery.jsp?articleId\
=4924223&siteId=297&startImage=1> Michael Hills Jr., 12, and his dog
Snoop lead off the Fort Mojave... (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
* � <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
* 1 <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
* 2 <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
* � <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
NEEDLES, Calif. - As the desert sun slides behind the mountains and the
temperature dips below 90, members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band
assemble in a parking lot to rehearse. Mothers with clarinets to their
lips. Young men lugging drums. Children carrying flags and streamers. A
76-year-old trumpeter in a wheelchair.
Two stray dogs take seats in the street, ready for the evening's
parade.
''Quickly, we're losing daylight!'' someone shouts. Soon they are
parading through the bleak reservation village outside Needles to the
cadence of American marching music - an improbable scene that has been a
tradition on the California-Arizona border for 100 years.
A band apart: A century ago, dozens of Indian tribes nationwide had
bands that played John Philip Sousa music and other patriotic anthems.
The bands were an outgrowth of government-run boarding schools that
sought, brutally at times, to erase Indian cultures, religions and
languages in the name of assimilation. Only a few bands survive. The
Fort Mojave tribe's is thought to be the oldest.
Through the decades, the band has weathered forces that killed
others - poverty, an exodus of young people and opposition from Indians
who saw marches as symbols of oppression, music to which their ancestors
were slaughtered.
''A lot of tribes dropped their bands because they were symbols of
the boarding-school experience,'' said Melissa Nelson, an assistant
professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University.
''The Mojave made it their own music, and it helped them survive. . . .
It's an incredible story.''
The band has played many roles for the tribe, most of whose 1,200
members live along the Colorado River in California, Arizona and Nevada.
It's been a tool to fight bigotry. A source of pride in the face of
unemployment and poverty. A way to keep young people from drinking and
drugs.
As the noisy procession of two dozen musicians winds through the
village past modest homes, people watch the show from lawn chairs and
the beds of pickup trucks. Past an 81-year-old woman whose late husband
kept the band going for decades through force of will, like his father
before him.
''He lived for the band,'' Betty Barrackman said of her husband,
Llewellyn. ''He didn't ever want to let it die.''
Fighting racism: In 1906, Mojave elders enlisted Albert J. Eller, a
German-born music teacher at the Ft. Mojave Indian boarding school in
Arizona, to help form a band to play patriotic marches. Their goal: to
defuse racism by embracing the dominant culture's popular music.
''They believed one of the best ways they could combat this violence
was with a tuba and a saxophone,'' Nelson said. ''Music is the universal
language. Instead of being spat at by people coming through Needles, now
they were being applauded and cheered.''
The punchy marches were a sharp contrast to traditional Mojave
music, which centered on epic poems that served as the tribe's oral
encyclopedia.
Roger Barrackman, Llewellyn's father, learned these songs from his
Mojave elders. But he also learned the clarinet from Professor Eller at
the boarding school. Later, Barrackman played in the band under Mojave
musicians who succeeded Eller and directed the group during its
pre-World War II heyday.
In those years, the community band traveled widely throughout the
Southwest, playing at county fairs, rodeos and official ceremonies. It
performed at Hoover Dam's dedication and at a reception for Gov. Earl
Warren. But its regular gig was in Needles - performing every Saturday
night for more than 25 years outside the town's busy movie theater.
By the late 1950s, Needles had undergone an upheaval. The Santa Fe
Railroad's rail yard - and its jobs - were gone. Young Indians left the
deep poverty of the reservation in search of work. As the older
generation died, so too did widespread knowledge of the Mojave language
and songs.
Fight for survival: When Roger Barrackman, who had worked for the
government off the reservation, returned and became band director in
1958, there was little left - a handful of old men who performed
sporadically on thrift-store instruments. Barrackman concluded the
band's survival depended on recruiting a new generation of musicians.
''The band was dying,'' Irene McCord said. ''He had a love of music
and wanted to pass it on. He went door to door, begging for pennies and
dimes, and students.''
McCord was 8 when Barrackman got her to take up the trumpet. She
remembers Barrackman as an exacting teacher unafraid to swat a
lackadaisical student.
''His baton served many purposes,'' said Steve Lopez, among the
children Barrackman enticed into the band.
Lopez's motivation for learning the trumpet and tuba was simple: The
reservation offered few other diversions, especially after dark. ''We
didn't have much - no TVs and stuff. Our toys were sticks and rocks.''
Barrackman nursed the band back to health by the mid-1960s. Two
photos tell the story of its transformation. One from the 1930s shows 14
serious-looking older men wearing feathered headdresses. Thirty years
later, the group portrait is dominated by smiling boys and girls, a few
barely taller than the bass drum that was lugged to Yuma's Indian Pow
Wow and the Bullhead City Burro Barbecue.
''On occasion, he likes to march with the band,'' a San Bernardino
Sun-Telegram columnist wrote of Barrackman. ''A gray-haired brave, he
makes a striking appearance with the children. He loves a parade - and
the Fort Mojave Indian band, one of the most picturesque of the West.''
Lopez, 47, recalls performing in San Diego, San Francisco, Las
Vegas, Phoenix and Sacramento - exotic places to most of his peers, some
of whom were resentful.
''They'd say, 'You just want to be white, don't you?' '' Lopez said.
Barrackman preached a philosophy that transcended race: Excelling at
music could put one on the path to success.
''We were lucky to get out of high school,'' Lopez said. ''He was
constantly telling us, 'Music could take you out of here. You could go
to college - they have university bands and you might be able to get a
scholarship.' And I said, 'What's that?' ''
Picking up the baton: When Roger Barrackman died in 1968, his son,
Llewellyn, a longtime tribal council member and trombonist, asked McCord
to pick up the baton. She was 17, intensely shy, one of six children
raised by her widowed mother.
She worked cleaning motels rooms by day. At night, she taught music
to the children that now formed the band's core.
''I baked cookies, cakes, made popcorn balls, whatever they liked to
keep them there practicing. Somehow, it all worked, and the band stayed
alive,'' said McCord, who at 55 is still the director. ''When they grew
up, they sent their kids to me, and now their kids are sending their
kids. It became my life.''
Llewellyn Barrackman was the tribe's unofficial historian and, like
his father, understood that the band was integral to the Mojave's story,
an allegory of adaptability and redemption under trying circumstances.
It also was part of the tribe's social fabric.
''It's always been used as a way to keep kids from getting into
trouble,'' said Amanda McCord, Irene's cousin and a clarinet player
whose job is to distribute government surplus food to more than 10
percent of the tribe's members.
And the band plays on: Barrackman lobbied successfully in recent
years to secure the band's future with money from tribal business
ventures, including casinos in Nevada and Arizona. This year, the band
and its youth music program received $264,000 from the tribe for teacher
salaries, instruments and uniforms.
Musicians get paid - adults, $35; children, $25 - when they perform
at events such as the dedication of a hospital, the opening of a
restored train depot or parades in Laughlin, Nev., and Gallup, N.M.
In March, the band celebrated its centennial with a concert and
parade in Needles. More than 80 current and former members marched, as
did Indian bands from the Navajo and Zuni tribes and a U.S. Army band.
At 87 and in poor health, Barrackman told people he intended to hang
on to see the day - and to play his trombone one last time.
He did. Several weeks later, he died.
''When he passed away, the question on everyone's mind was: Can we
still do it without him?'' said Amanda McCord, 33, who intends to take
over from her cousin as band director and whose 12-year-old daughter is
the ensemble's youngest musician.
The answer, any Mojave band member will tell you, was never in
doubt.
''He was always there to push it. Now, we need to keep it going,''
McCord said. ''We can't disappoint him.''
Some have criticized the martial music, linking it to oppression, but
most support the group
By Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times Article Last
Updated: 12/30/2006 01:22:55 AM MST
www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss
Click photo to enlarge
<http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/render_gallery.jsp?articleId\
=4924223&siteId=297&startImage=1> Michael Hills Jr., 12, and his dog
Snoop lead off the Fort Mojave... (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
* � <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
* 1 <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
* 2 <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
* � <http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4924223?source=rss#>
NEEDLES, Calif. - As the desert sun slides behind the mountains and the
temperature dips below 90, members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band
assemble in a parking lot to rehearse. Mothers with clarinets to their
lips. Young men lugging drums. Children carrying flags and streamers. A
76-year-old trumpeter in a wheelchair.
Two stray dogs take seats in the street, ready for the evening's
parade.
''Quickly, we're losing daylight!'' someone shouts. Soon they are
parading through the bleak reservation village outside Needles to the
cadence of American marching music - an improbable scene that has been a
tradition on the California-Arizona border for 100 years.
A band apart: A century ago, dozens of Indian tribes nationwide had
bands that played John Philip Sousa music and other patriotic anthems.
The bands were an outgrowth of government-run boarding schools that
sought, brutally at times, to erase Indian cultures, religions and
languages in the name of assimilation. Only a few bands survive. The
Fort Mojave tribe's is thought to be the oldest.
Through the decades, the band has weathered forces that killed
others - poverty, an exodus of young people and opposition from Indians
who saw marches as symbols of oppression, music to which their ancestors
were slaughtered.
''A lot of tribes dropped their bands because they were symbols of
the boarding-school experience,'' said Melissa Nelson, an assistant
professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University.
''The Mojave made it their own music, and it helped them survive. . . .
It's an incredible story.''
The band has played many roles for the tribe, most of whose 1,200
members live along the Colorado River in California, Arizona and Nevada.
It's been a tool to fight bigotry. A source of pride in the face of
unemployment and poverty. A way to keep young people from drinking and
drugs.
As the noisy procession of two dozen musicians winds through the
village past modest homes, people watch the show from lawn chairs and
the beds of pickup trucks. Past an 81-year-old woman whose late husband
kept the band going for decades through force of will, like his father
before him.
''He lived for the band,'' Betty Barrackman said of her husband,
Llewellyn. ''He didn't ever want to let it die.''
Fighting racism: In 1906, Mojave elders enlisted Albert J. Eller, a
German-born music teacher at the Ft. Mojave Indian boarding school in
Arizona, to help form a band to play patriotic marches. Their goal: to
defuse racism by embracing the dominant culture's popular music.
''They believed one of the best ways they could combat this violence
was with a tuba and a saxophone,'' Nelson said. ''Music is the universal
language. Instead of being spat at by people coming through Needles, now
they were being applauded and cheered.''
The punchy marches were a sharp contrast to traditional Mojave
music, which centered on epic poems that served as the tribe's oral
encyclopedia.
Roger Barrackman, Llewellyn's father, learned these songs from his
Mojave elders. But he also learned the clarinet from Professor Eller at
the boarding school. Later, Barrackman played in the band under Mojave
musicians who succeeded Eller and directed the group during its
pre-World War II heyday.
In those years, the community band traveled widely throughout the
Southwest, playing at county fairs, rodeos and official ceremonies. It
performed at Hoover Dam's dedication and at a reception for Gov. Earl
Warren. But its regular gig was in Needles - performing every Saturday
night for more than 25 years outside the town's busy movie theater.
By the late 1950s, Needles had undergone an upheaval. The Santa Fe
Railroad's rail yard - and its jobs - were gone. Young Indians left the
deep poverty of the reservation in search of work. As the older
generation died, so too did widespread knowledge of the Mojave language
and songs.
Fight for survival: When Roger Barrackman, who had worked for the
government off the reservation, returned and became band director in
1958, there was little left - a handful of old men who performed
sporadically on thrift-store instruments. Barrackman concluded the
band's survival depended on recruiting a new generation of musicians.
''The band was dying,'' Irene McCord said. ''He had a love of music
and wanted to pass it on. He went door to door, begging for pennies and
dimes, and students.''
McCord was 8 when Barrackman got her to take up the trumpet. She
remembers Barrackman as an exacting teacher unafraid to swat a
lackadaisical student.
''His baton served many purposes,'' said Steve Lopez, among the
children Barrackman enticed into the band.
Lopez's motivation for learning the trumpet and tuba was simple: The
reservation offered few other diversions, especially after dark. ''We
didn't have much - no TVs and stuff. Our toys were sticks and rocks.''
Barrackman nursed the band back to health by the mid-1960s. Two
photos tell the story of its transformation. One from the 1930s shows 14
serious-looking older men wearing feathered headdresses. Thirty years
later, the group portrait is dominated by smiling boys and girls, a few
barely taller than the bass drum that was lugged to Yuma's Indian Pow
Wow and the Bullhead City Burro Barbecue.
''On occasion, he likes to march with the band,'' a San Bernardino
Sun-Telegram columnist wrote of Barrackman. ''A gray-haired brave, he
makes a striking appearance with the children. He loves a parade - and
the Fort Mojave Indian band, one of the most picturesque of the West.''
Lopez, 47, recalls performing in San Diego, San Francisco, Las
Vegas, Phoenix and Sacramento - exotic places to most of his peers, some
of whom were resentful.
''They'd say, 'You just want to be white, don't you?' '' Lopez said.
Barrackman preached a philosophy that transcended race: Excelling at
music could put one on the path to success.
''We were lucky to get out of high school,'' Lopez said. ''He was
constantly telling us, 'Music could take you out of here. You could go
to college - they have university bands and you might be able to get a
scholarship.' And I said, 'What's that?' ''
Picking up the baton: When Roger Barrackman died in 1968, his son,
Llewellyn, a longtime tribal council member and trombonist, asked McCord
to pick up the baton. She was 17, intensely shy, one of six children
raised by her widowed mother.
She worked cleaning motels rooms by day. At night, she taught music
to the children that now formed the band's core.
''I baked cookies, cakes, made popcorn balls, whatever they liked to
keep them there practicing. Somehow, it all worked, and the band stayed
alive,'' said McCord, who at 55 is still the director. ''When they grew
up, they sent their kids to me, and now their kids are sending their
kids. It became my life.''
Llewellyn Barrackman was the tribe's unofficial historian and, like
his father, understood that the band was integral to the Mojave's story,
an allegory of adaptability and redemption under trying circumstances.
It also was part of the tribe's social fabric.
''It's always been used as a way to keep kids from getting into
trouble,'' said Amanda McCord, Irene's cousin and a clarinet player
whose job is to distribute government surplus food to more than 10
percent of the tribe's members.
And the band plays on: Barrackman lobbied successfully in recent
years to secure the band's future with money from tribal business
ventures, including casinos in Nevada and Arizona. This year, the band
and its youth music program received $264,000 from the tribe for teacher
salaries, instruments and uniforms.
Musicians get paid - adults, $35; children, $25 - when they perform
at events such as the dedication of a hospital, the opening of a
restored train depot or parades in Laughlin, Nev., and Gallup, N.M.
In March, the band celebrated its centennial with a concert and
parade in Needles. More than 80 current and former members marched, as
did Indian bands from the Navajo and Zuni tribes and a U.S. Army band.
At 87 and in poor health, Barrackman told people he intended to hang
on to see the day - and to play his trombone one last time.
He did. Several weeks later, he died.
''When he passed away, the question on everyone's mind was: Can we
still do it without him?'' said Amanda McCord, 33, who intends to take
over from her cousin as band director and whose 12-year-old daughter is
the ensemble's youngest musician.
The answer, any Mojave band member will tell you, was never in
doubt.
''He was always there to push it. Now, we need to keep it going,''
McCord said. ''We can't disappoint him.''