I am not sure how I came across the article, but this Fall I came across an interview on The First Peoples Fund website with master traditional folk artist Kevin Locke. In the course of the conversation, Locke notes that what is widely known as the Native American flute is a pretty recent invention that wasn’t really part of the traditional cultural practices. The bolded section is the interviewer’s question. I don’t seem to see the interviewer identified.
In 1983 or 1982, a German American named Michael Graham Allen invented the Native American flute. It’s based on the Japanese wind instrument called a shakuhachi. I asked Allen why he did that. He said he made an original Indigenous flute but he didn’t know how to market it. He came upon this tuning system based on the Japanese shakuhachi and renamed it as a Native American flute….Pretty soon, everybody all over the world got interested in this instrument. But it’s not an Indigenous North American musical aesthetic. It’s basically Japanese. But the beautiful thing about it — and I’m not knocking it, I’m just saying people need to be aware where this instrument comes from…
And the instrument sounds so good! There are thousands of Native American flute music recordings that are just improvisational. I don’t want to discredit the music. I think it’s a great thing, but it has nothing to do with Indigenous tradition.
That in itself is a problem because the original genre associated with the Indigenous flute is a classic poetic or literary style that comes from the woodlands in the Great Lakes area, Northern Plains, and Southern Plains. And it existed for so many generations because the genre has characteristics that are uniform across most of North America. It’s a formulaic compositional pattern, even though the songs are diverse within themselves.
That’s so wild. First, I didn’t know the history of the Native American flute. Initially I had mixed feelings about its non-Indigenous origins. But what I’m hearing is that this musical instrument lifts your creativity. Is that accurate?
Yeah.
I don’t know exactly how to process this since it pretty much seems like a type of cultural exploitation. Though I don’t know if the article provides enough information to determine that either if it was an Indigenous instrument that had Japanese tuning and was marketed as a Native American flute. The situation is confusing and Locke frames it in a very gracious way and seems to indicate that it has been a medium through which other Native artists have found success. It seems like it might have been invented in the name of Indigenous peoples but they also have primary ownership of it.
It does, however, clarify my previous general sense that Japanese and Indigenous cultures developed a similar musical instrument independently of each other. Not so much I guess. I thought it worth following Locke’s suggestion about raising awareness of the instrument’s origins and posting about it.