Swimming along the Mainstream

By Carolyn Kenny

This morning I spent the entire morning working with my friends down at the Musqueam Reserve. We were talking mainly about language revitalization. The name, Musqueam, means "grasses which grow beside the river". Last week I spent a whole day working with some other friends at the Sto:lo Nation. In this First Nation "Sto:lo" means "people of the river."

For several weeks I'd been laboring over the term "mainstream". I had just heard this term once too often as the criterion for significant work. It was bugging me. As a person who likes to imagine the many possibilities, the possible worlds, I truly resent the oppression caused by mainstream fundamentalists. Still, I want to be a part of things, to be a part of the primary rhythm of life.

I bet you were a little thrown off by the title of my column for this issue of Voices. Am I right? Huh? Go ahead and admit it. Didn't you find yourself scratching your head and saying "What does she mean? Let's see. This is Carolyn Kenny. She must have meant 'swimming outside the mainstream' or perhaps at best 'swimming on the edge of the mainstream".

Well, I'll have to admit that for these two weeks of reflection on the term "mainstream", that was precisely what I was imagining. O.K., I was even feeling a little sorry for myself but had to say, "You made your bed. Now you have to lay in it." However, after my meetings with the Musqueam today I understood that I am in the mainstream. I am in the midst of the River people. I am also amongst the singing grasses beside the river. There are many possibilities. That's not to say that I feel more at home with Native people. That's not the message here. The message is much more complex and ambiguous than that. I feel at home in music therapy too. And yes, I did stop feeling sorry for myself after today's meetings. I felt that I "belong" in the larger sense, beyond professions or cultures.

My liberation from the oppression of the term "mainstream" might be due to what many Native scholars call the freedom of the Native worldview. Jamake Highwater, a Blackfoot/Sioux scholar wrote in his beautiful and complex book, The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Native America:

"Primal consciousness is larger than the psychological geography by which the West knows it. It overflows linearity in dreams, imaginings, visions, intuitions and all those quintessential and amorphous experiences that must call upon metaphor in order to surface into Western mentality." (p. 96)

Metaphor has something to do with access, a bridge between different worlds, different realities. I like that.

Highwater was not an elitist or racist. He was just trying to articulate an aspect of consciousness that is available to all people but is centrally characteristic of Indigenous peoples around the world. As music therapists we are familiar with this so-called 'primal mind' when clients enter deep states of consciousness through image or improvisation.

Never being one to feign a metaphor, let's take this a little further. I like water. I live in a land that is famous for the beauty of its rain forests, fiords and moist climate. Let's imagine the mainstream in the literal sense and reverse the metaphor. Mainstream music therapy is now the metaphor and the rivers and streams are the mainstreams. Let's imagine the mighty Fraser River (named after the same explorer as my own university, Simon Fraser University), the Yangtze, the Amazon, the Mississippi. These are the real mainstreams. Though they might look the same over the years, the waters which travel these mainstreams move constantly, currents shift over time, the banks of the rivers change in small and large ways. The rivers could not exist without the shores, the boundaries that support and create the pathways of the rivers. The tributaries are essential to the health of the river and support and sustain life forms like salmon and other creatures and plants. In fact, the landscape becomes shaped by an entire system of waterways, mountains, and sea that are connected to and interact with the mainstream.

Mainstream music therapy is much the same as the "real mainstream" and also could not survive without the intricate set of waterways and banks that interact with the mainstream, without the shifting currents and constant movement with the river. Can we keep this dynamic image alive in our field without the snow that is the source of the streams, without the oceans themselves?

I worry that music therapy "marginalizes" too many, too much. Now, the current trend is to attach music therapy to biology. I'm very interested in this topic. But recently a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to do an interview with me (she's a member of the general public, of course). It was obvious that the connections between music therapy and biology were her only interest. And I said to myself, "are we still stuck in the positivistic age? Will we ever be free from the medical model, the proof of the value of music therapy being in the changing of the composition of bodily cells? Can't we ever, as Brynjulf Stige says in his article in this edition of Voices consider "the mystery?" In fact, all of the articles in this edition of Voices do challenge the mainstream and have a sense of mystery, whether that mystery is explicit or implicit. And they provide critical analysis as well.

For those of us who have lived among tribal peoples, whether we have Native blood or not, this mystery is part of our legacy and it is part of our mainstream, the stream that sustains and supports our lives. Yes, there is ecology. And we can ask ourselves the serious question about how we maintain and sustain our ecology in music therapy. Can we mirror the complexity of the real mainstream? This is a metaphor worth considering. Voices is about helping to keep the river alive.

References

Highwater, Jamake (1981). The primal mind: Vision and reality in Native American. New York: Harper and Row.