4. ‘Hideous Acclamations’: Captive Colonists, Forced Singing, and the Incorporation Imperatives of Mohawk Listeners

Music and sound mediated all manner of interactions between European colonists and Haudenosaunee Indians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from diplomacy to trade to sacred worship to warfare. This chapter focuses on scenarios in which Mohawk Indians took colonists captive and forced them to sing. Forced singing was frequently accompanied by acts of physical violence performed by the captors. Unlike European torture rationales, the Mohawks’ aim was not merely to inflict pain nor to extract information or confession. Rather, the ritual practices were aimed at aiding the incorporation of captives into Indigenous society and thus were a necessary part of their survivance. Drawing on captivity narratives, proto-ethnographic descriptions, and descriptions warfare, this chapter considers the implications of instances of forced singing both for how they illuminate the importance of vocal music for Haudenosaunee peoples and how we might reconsider the discourse on music, torture, and warfare by focusing on such musical encounters in extremis.

Contributors

Glenda Goodman

(author)

Assistant Professor of Music at University of Pennsylvania

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-3084-2400

Glenda Goodman is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on the history of early American music. Her first book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (2020), considers the material and social practice of amateur music-making. She also researches music, Indigeneity, and colonial encounter, and is currently working on a new book about sacred music and Native American Christian conversion in colonial New England and New York. She is also working on a collaborative project, American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, which will result in a volume and digital project. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the William and Mary Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.