In
May of 1864, a large camp of newly-baptized Dogrib held "a
great dance of farewell." As the witnessing missionary Emile Petitot
explained, the families were soon going to separate until the following
fall. The people shoveled away the snow to form a vast ring, built a great
fire in the middle, and began to dance at five o'clock in the afternoon.
"They danced all the night," wrote Petitot, "a night without
darkness, crying out 'Eh! Ah! Eh!' fit to make the rocks tremble."
Ninety-eight years later, the songs of dancing Dogribs were recorded at the yearly ingathering of the Dogrib people at Rae in the Northwest Territories of Canada. The occasion was Treaty Time in early July of 1962. Treaty Time begins each year when Canadian government representatives meet with the Dene (Indian) peoples of the Northwest Territories at each fort to air Government-Indian issues and pay "Treaty money" to each Dene. The formal business of Treaty concluded, the enjoyments of Treaty Time begin for the people.
At
Rae in 1962, first there was the feast in the early evening in which all
joined. Then the dancing began and lasted until about six in the morning.
In the next three days there were two hand games lasting several hours,
followed by night-long dancing. The combination of chanting-drumming at
the hand games and the all-night singing with the dancing took its toll
on several of the enthusiastic men. They were so hoarse that they could
barely speak above a whisper by the time the celebrations were over.
The
1962 Treaty festivities were one of the last years when the Dogrib people
who gathered at Rae sang as they danced in the open air on the pink granite
rock at Rae. Soon the reverberating walls of a new community dance hall
was to blur the sound of the singing voices; the people now dance and
sing inside during their celebrations. The music in this collection is
the sound of their voices raised out in the twilight-night.
There are two styles of traditional Dogrib dancing music: one kind is sung with accompanying drums; the other kind is sung purely a cappella, no instrumental accompaniment at all. In English, the dancing to the a cappella music is called "tea dance." In the 1962 festivities, the drum dancing served only as a short starter for the tea dancing that then continued throughout the night.
In
drum dancing, a few men stand together and sing to their beat of peeled
sticks on shallow "tambourine" drums. The drum heads are covered
with caribou rawhide; strings of twisted sinew (babiche) across the head
add a distinctive buzz to the drumming. Dancers form a tight circle, front
to back, men and women mixed as one after another person breaks into the
circle. The tea dance, far
favored over the drum dance in those days, has as its only accompaniment
the voice of the dancers. 
One
Dogrib estimated that there are probably twenty-five or more separate
songs for tea dances. "Leadership" in singing is spontaneous,
the man with the loudest and clearest voice begins a new song, sometimes
drowning out an alternate choice that someone else might start, and the
rest of the dancers pick it up. When, after many minutes, the voices of
singers flag and falter, another man with renewed strength begins another
song.
In the tea dance
men and women form an inward-facing circle, crowding tightly, shoulder-to-shoulder,
as more and more dancers join the expanding circle. The tea dance circle
moves clockwise, as does the drum dance circle. Well over a hundred persons
may at times be on the tea dance circle. All the men are singing as they
dance, which accounts for the richness of the chorus.
Imbedded in the chanting and pulsations of the songs, snatches of Dogrib
words express the pleasure of singing and dancing together. "Sing
good, people, do good!"
"Good dancing, hurry-up!"
- June Helm