Small Wonders--Brother Frank

Francis La Flesche


Click here to hear the recording.

The indigenous singers in this bit of song were born at the time of the Civil War. I'm not making this up. Their voices come to us miraculously from a "wax cylinder," an invention created for both recording and play back, and marketed just a few years before Frank La Flesche, son of Joseph Iron Eye La Flesche, had it spinning among his people, the Omahas.  Today, those wax cylinders are kept in the Library of Congress.

Imagine yourself among the elderly singers who performed it for the young man who asked for them. Then, astonishingly, imagine yourself listening to your own voices rise from that huge black horn. 

That we have that recording--you heard it yourself!--is flat-out dumbfounding, as is the life story of Frank La Flesche, the Omaha anthropologist who recorded it in 1895. As a boy, he never quite got over killing his first buffalo on a summer hunt with the tribe. He told himself--he was just a kid--that he could never do any better than to be a great buffalo hunter for his people.

All of that changed. When the white man came, the buffalo disappeared, and Frank La Flesche, a young man, traveled out east on a long trip with his sister Susette and a very famous cousin, the Ponca headman Standing Bear, to argue for the Ponca's return to their homeland. During those six months, Francis met Alice Fletcher, a Harvard anthropologist whose professional interests were in preserving Native cultures in danger of disappearing as so many were.  

Soon after, Frank left Nebraska for Washington D. C., to become a clerk in the Office of Indian Affairs, and so began a long professional relationship with Professor Fletcher. Her scholarly expertise teamed with his own beloved experience among the Omaha people. He knew the men and women she wanted to understand. He was versed in the unique culture she wanted to document. He knew what she needed to. 

So when, one sunny afternoon, somewhere on the Omaha reservation, Frank La Flesche had set up his recording machine, when those elderly singers were finally persuaded to offer him songs they'd known since they were kids, Prof. Fletcher was there too.

In his book, The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, a collection of stories from his boarding school experience on the Omaha reservation, Francis La Flesche remembers the day school officials came to measure student learning. "Do your people like to sing?" one of them asks the boys. Yes, they tell him, and he asks them to do so. Here's what happens. 

A loud clear voice closer to me broke into a Victory song; before a bar was sung another voice took up the song from the beginning, as is the custom among the Indians, then the whole school fell in, and we made the room ring. We understood the song, and knew the motion of which it was the expression. We felt, as we sang, the patriotic thrill of a victorious  people who had vanquished their enemies.

But the school officials, white men, heard something different. "That's savage," they said, "that's savage." They turned to the teacher. "They must be taught music."

So every afternoon, Francis says, with some resignation, they were taught, well, music.

Francis La Flesche accumulated graduate degrees himself later on, and picked up more than his share of honorary doctorates elsewhere, including one from the University of Nebraska. Francis La Flesche, who once wanted to be the greatest Omaha buffalo hunter ever, became instead the Omaha's greatest historian.

You can't help but wonder whether during a music lesson one morning in school, little Francis LaFlesche, maybe ten years old, didn't pick up the scent of a trail he wanted to follow and began to see, in outline, what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do for his people. 

Really, that story too is what's recorded on the wax cylinders still there at the Library of Congress. Listen to them yourself sometime. They're on-line. For them and so much more, we have Francis to thank.