WASHINGTON – A dormant but highly praised music project is springing back
to life with the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian on
the National Mall.

As part of the festivities, the NMAI is releasing the third CD in its
series of Native music anthologies. Produced in association with
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the CD “Beautiful Beyond” presents
Christian songs in Native languages. It revives a project begun in 1994 by
the noted ethnomusicologist Charlotte Heth, former NMAI assistant director
for Public Programs, but sidelined by a tight budget and Heth’s retirement
from the NMAI.

In addition to the 1994 release “Creation’s Journey”, an anthology of
Native music from the arctic to the Andes, Heth supervised the 1997 CD
“Wood that Sings”, a collection of Indian fiddle music. Both were released
on the Smithsonian Folkways label. The NMAI asked Heth to interrupt her
retirement to help prepare “Beautiful Beyond.”

“When we lost Charlotte,” said Terence Winch, head of NMAI publications and
executive producer of the CD, “we lost a tremendous resource. She is really
the leading Native ethnomusicologist in the country.” A Cherokee, Heth was
noted for her broad knowledge of Native music and musicians throughout the
Americas.

Winch said that “Beautiful Beyond”, already winning praise for its melodic
beauty, grew out of the earlier recordings. “I had five or six cuts in the
can for several years,” he said. He said NMAI was able to complete the
project when it brought Howard Bass on board as cultural arts manager.
Formerly with the American History Museum, Bass produced several acclaimed
Native music anthologies of his own, notably two albums called “Heartbeat”
featuring female voices.

“Beautiful Beyond” focuses on the irony that Christian missionaries, often
accused of destroying Native cultures, also helped preserve Native
languages. They wrote dictionaries and translations and gave Indian
congregations a way of synthesizing traditions with the new religion.
Gerald L. Hill, Oneida of Wisconsin and president of the Indigenous
Language Institute, writes in one of the album’s essays, “The way Native
languages were used to accompany European Christian melodies was, of
course, one of the techniques by which disparate ideologies were braided
together.”

The 33 cuts on the CD range from Comanche and Kiowa hymns, Orthodox Church
liturgy from Alaska in Yup’ik, Native Hawaiian, to Cherokee, Navajo and
Lakota. One of the Lakota selections, actually from a Dakota-language
hymnal written by 19th century Congregational missionaries, first appeared
on a self-produced album issued by Steve Emery, tribal lawyer for the
Cheyenne River Sioux.

Winch said that so many similar songs were available that he hoped to issue
a second “Beautiful Beyond” album. “We could do 10 albums and not run out
of material,” he said.

The series now looks as if it will have high-level support. NMAI Director
W. Richard West Jr., praised the project as an “exhibition in sound” in an
introduction to the extensive liner notes. In an interview with Indian
Country Today, he said, “I’m interested in what is often referred to,
although unfortunately nobody ever knows what you’re talking about, as
intangible culture.

“I don’t want our art, which is so crucial to the evolution of our culture,
to be frozen in time. I want to be sure that we’re as interested in good
contemporary music that involves Native people who have taken contemporary
musical forms and made them their own as I am in the traditional dance that
I grew up with.”

He repeated his promise in the liner notes, writing, “We hope that after we
settle into our new abode, we can return to this kind of music and bring
more of it to public attention.”