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On the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona, popular music circulates as a means of constructing statements of indigenous Apache identity in the community. The sense of Apache identity depends at least as much on engagement with, and revoicing of, "dominant" cultural expressions as it does on the persistence of the traditional forms associated with cultural heritage. In this article I trace out some of the aesthetic tropes that recur in these contemporary expressions of identity, arguing that it is a sense of shared history, rather than one of shared culture, that informs identity in this community. I also argue that the theoretical productivity of the concept of hybridity, if anything, is its potential for guiding researchers to foreground the strategic creation of utterances rather than assuming the explanatory power of cultural provenance in a philological sense.
ON SAN CARLOS APACHE VETERANS DAY, 1995, the Pacers got a gig playing for the tribal cattle association outside their office building after the big parade.1 We spent the afternoon and evening switching off, five songs at a time, with an all-veteran chicken scratch band from Sells, a punk band from San Carlos, and a man from Sacaton who sang country songs to a karaoke accompaniment. As we played, I noticed Big Bell, who had been the lead singer of a group called the Dominoes 30 years ago, dancing across the parking lot. After every song, people in the crowd shouted for "Mathilda," as they had all afternoon, as they did every time we played. Most of the band members had grown tired of the song. I, on the other hand, had developed an intellectual curiosity about and attachment to "Mathilda," this 35-year-old song that has retained so much evocative power in the San Carlos Reservation community.
The impetus for the analysis that follows grows out of this distinction between my intellectual distance from "Mathilda" and Big Bell's feelingful, embodied response-a response that was repeated, with variation, over and over by different actors in different contexts during the course of my stay in San Carlos. "Mathilda" has circulated through San Carlos and Bylas for more than three decades, and people's responses to it are steeped in those communities' histories and the multiple ways in which the...