I have incomplete and evolving knowledge about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, so I am writing this post more to express my interest and ask questions, than to claim any expertise.
From diverse sources I have encountered mention of song exchanges by Chinookan and other indigenous groups of the region. I have not learned the details of the process, or how they might have differed among different tribes or villages, but the general idea seems to be that songs are revered and not generally shared without permission, but they can be exchanged. If you know a song from your people and I know one (from a different tradition), we might exchange – you can learn my song, I can learn yours.
From what I gather this was not a casual process but something negotiated, perhaps between respected leaders or at least eminent song practitioners. One source that’s wonderful to listen to is from the Haida people, who are from further north than my area (I’m on the lower Columbia River, which the native Chinookan peoples called Wimahl). However the Haida region was within the far-ranging coastal trading zone. The Smithsonian Folkways album Haida: Indian Music of the Pacific Northwest features not only exquisite songs but also interview and liner-notes discussion of some of the aspects of cultural preservation and transmission, including the practice of song exchange. There is even a song given in Chinook (that is, Chinuk Wawa), which was presumably learned by exchange, and the singer explains that it can’t be easily sung in Haida because the syllables would not fit — it was definitely composed as a Chinook song. I have not found a native community that is sharing songs like those I hear on this recording; I hope to one day.
My culture (post-industrial consumerism) taught me that a song is a thing to be endlessly replicated, as far and wide as possible. The value of a song was not in how closely or reverently it was held, but in how cheaply it could be bought by more and more people, the more the better. In fact, a song that did not get mass-produced and sold was treated as a quaint curiosity but not something to be honored by our dominant song-valuation mechanisms (Billboard Charts, Grammy awards, etc.) I grew up hearing many songs promoted ad nauseam by my culture that to me had no resonance, no soul. They were like empty advertising jingles, only there was no product being sold other than the song itself.
I wonder what song exchange can look like today, even if only in a sub-culture of our consumerist-dominated world. How many people making songs think about the way we exchange them, the value we place on them, how we create and learn and transmit them? I know many excellent songwriters and continually meet new ones. There is general dissatisfaction with the Spotify model of massively-online streaming of songs for next to no compensation, but that dissatisfaction seems often to be primarily considered in contrast with by-gone times of commercial, physical models of mass-duplication of songs — CDs, LPs, 45s, curated radio play, etc. Those mechanisms began a little over a hundred years ago at most, and had many ups and downs with disruptive technology changes and consumer habits. It’s strange how quickly people can adopt a notion that something mass-market consumer-related is a timeless paradigm, when it has only existed for a couple of generations.
I want to keep considering and learning from this idea of song exchange. Can we create paradigms that establish similar reverence for our creative utterances? Could song exchange, creative exchange, community exchange, and soul-exchange be the future?