Music therapist. Professor. Musician. Researcher. Native American scholar. These were some of Dr. Carolyn Bereznak Kenny’s professional titles. For those who knew her personally, however, there was little doubt that she was warm, generous, strong, and opinionated. Like a true Elder, she was full of wisdom and power, never afraid to say what she thought, holding us accountable and challenging the boundaries of our field. Though Carolyn was prolific, most of her writings were not in music therapy. They were in Indigenous Studies. Born to a Choctaw mother who abandoned her heritage until the end of her life, for Carolyn, connecting to her Indigenous heritage was an integral part of her search for personal identity and wholeness. After her mother died, Carolyn was adopted into the Haida Eagle clan and became actively involved in other Indigenous communities. Indigenous knowledge and research became a major part of her professional life as well, in her role as First Nations Education/Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University and Professor of Indigenous Studies and Human Development at Antioch University. The breadth and depth of her scholarly work was extraordinary.
However, for many of us, including countless music therapists who had never met her,
Carolyn was so much more than a distinguished scholar. Through her presence, energy, and
words, she was a powerful role model, muse, and mentor. From the beginning of my music
therapy training in the 1990s, I remember feeling an immediate connection to Carolyn
through her cornerstone books, which were the only spiritual and cultural pieces of
literature in our field at the time. As a graduate student, I did not fully understand the
concepts she wrote about or how to embody them in my therapeutic work at the time. However,
I was completely mesmerized by the mystery, poetry, and depth of her writing, the
intangible and invisible mystery she evoked through her presence. Carolyn was a powerful
storyteller. She often interspersed poetry and stories in her academic writings as a way to
stay connected to beauty and indigenous ways of being. “Stories, especially in the oral
tradition,” she wrote, “provide powerful bridges that connect our histories, our legends,
our senses, our practices, our values, and fundamentally, our sustainability as peoples”
(
I first met Carolyn in person around the time that
She was a true leader, not afraid to challenge her colleagues about cultural
appropriation and the true origins of ecological and community music therapy. “Much has
been said about ecological music therapy. But very little of this work considers the
forces of nature the way Yupiak scholar Oscar Kawagley intends. [ … ] Ecology, to the
Native person is a grounded concept — one which invokes spirit and connection and Earth”
(
Of course, community music therapy is a very old idea. […] Now being Native American
I always try to point that out to these folks, that this was the way music functioned
and
She also protested the dangers of positivist and oppressive research designs, pointing to studies that abused the needs of Indigenous people and were conducted without their consent.
I have seen statistics and demographics used in unethical ways to shape policy and
funding. Methods that reduce peoples’ lives to algorhythmic formula[s] are obviously
offensive to people who have experienced the taking away of their names, their
stories, their languages, their religions, even their children. (
As a result, Carolyn was committed to participatory action research and research methods that directly benefited communities. She advocated approaches that incorporated Indigenous values within the research methods, analyses, interpretation and dissemination processes themselves. Lastly, Carolyn’s activism was not limited to Indigenous causes, but to intersectional identities as well. For example, she felt that feminist theories disregarded Native women’s struggles.
Most Native women have an ambivalent relationship with feminist theories. The
romanticizing and commercializing of Native beliefs and practices is apparent in the
women’s movement. [ … ] White women’s use of Native ritual structures has been a
source of discomfort for Native peoples who are in a struggle to save their own
languages and customs and who are reluctant to allow the marketplace to co-opt the
very foundations of their cultures and societies. (
About 10 years ago during my doctoral studies, Carolyn agreed to serve on my
dissertation committee. As someone who never quite fit into traditional music therapy
communities or models myself, I was drawn to Carolyn’s renegade ideas. She particularly
inspired me as someone who was outside the box and as someone who “broke all the rules”
(
It is from this shamanic context that I wanted to share the powerful dreams that I had
about Carolyn near the end of her life. In May 2017, I sent her drafts from a recent interview for an upcoming publication. She told me that she was ill, but that she “planned on recovering
completely” and was determined to finish the edits and transcripts. However, in
September 2017, I had a series of emotional dreams that she had died. In the dreams, she
had an important message for me and her music therapy colleagues. “Don’t forget the
transpersonal! That’s most important,” she said. She told me that she relied on us to
continue her legacy, to help other music therapists understand the work she started in
shamanism,
Since that time, I have continued to deeply study her work and ideas. In reality, the
ritual, beauty, nature, aesthetics and consciousness that Carolyn wrote about are not
new. They have been practiced for centuries and form the foundation of Indigenous values
and ways of life. However, in many academic, medical, and music therapy settings, these
were, and in many ways still are, radical ideas. While Carolyn often used terms that
were accessible and universal, at its core, her philosophy is shamanic and Indigenous.
In fact, she saw the music therapist as a “modern-day shaman” (
One core Indigenous value of Carolyn’s was an emphasis on the spirit world. She often spoke of Helen Bonny, expressing a deep sense of gratitude for her focus on beauty, aesthetics, music-centered and transpersonal approaches. “Helen had such a deep appreciation for the unique beauty that music could offer -- the depth, the transformational opportunities. [ … ] I miss her so for her belief in the coherence between our aesthetic being, spirit, and the music” (Summer & Kenny, 2010, para. 4-5).
Carolyn was also a very vocal critic of behavioral approaches that denied the whole
person and excluded the spiritual. She questioned what had been sacrificed in order
to neatly organize human behavior into categories. She wondered what had been left
out as a result of an overemphasis on positivist approaches. She felt that such
approaches contributed to “alienation, a deprivation from essential resources needed
for our own survival” (
Carolyn’s legacy around the spiritual dimension of music therapy is perhaps one of her greatest contributions, and yet still remains hidden in standard music therapy textbooks, literature and curricula. In contemporary dialogue in music therapy, for instance, spiritual or transpersonal approaches are still often considered marginal. Experiences in the Bonny Method, for example, are commonly explained in Jungian psychological terms, seen primarily as travels to the inner psychological world. However, Carolyn’s description of spirit was much more than psychological.
Often we find ourselves traveling backward and forward through time, searching for something beyond the time-bound moment — some source, some meaning, some reason, direction, purpose. We search for the origins, the beginnings to resource and renew, seeking some sense of the primordial, a connection to the original creative act, our roots. Then we seek the ultimate, the absolute, a designation of path, some raison d’etre, a guiding light. When we are lost in doubt, or dried up, or weary, or seized by pain, we reach backward and forward for strength and reassurance, to stretch beyond the present to some Greater Reality, some transcendental dimension. (2016, p. 294-295)
Despite her critiques, Carolyn understood that the scientific and the spiritual were
seeking to comprehend the same phenomenon, just from different angles. “The good
scientists that I talk to, they talk like Native elders because they say that all
things are connected” (personal communication,
August 16, 2016). In particular, a connection to the Earth and nature is
primary in Indigenous value systems. This theme is present throughout much of
Carolyn’s writings, in
The Navaho religion provides the ritual for healing through a profound meditation
on nature and its curative powers. [ … ] And healing is not directed toward
specific symptoms or bodily organs, but toward bringing the psyche into harmony
with the whole gamut of natural and supernatural forces around it. (
However, Carolyn did not see nature as only external. She explained that nature is an
extension of the inner world and that our inner processes mimic the processes of
nature. “Natural places became resource pools of images that I carried around with me
into the world. They were always available internally. The social world was an
extension of these rich landscapes.” (
Carolyn also emphasized the importance of learning about ritual from the natural
world. As opposed to viewing ritual as simply a repeated structure, she focused on
the religious, tribal, and shamanic associations surrounding ritual. For her, ritual
added a sacred element to the music therapy relationship. “Music therapy and music
are related to tribal systems that use ritual at the core of their healing systems”
(
Finally, Carolyn saw the role of sound and music as the link between the everyday world and the spirit world, the human and the cosmic. Through its language of myth, symbolism and metaphor, she considered music a bridge between the inner and outer, past and present, the natural and supernatural world.
We need to go away and be quiet together on the Earth in order to hear the quiet
sound, the sound of the heart, the sound of the soul, the sound of the mind, the
sense sounds of the Earth herself. Then we will find peace. (
These intricate art patterns and songs weave the relationship between the people,
the land, and the creatures on the land into a fabric of resilience and strength,
one that has stood the test of time in the face of tremendous challenges
throughout history. (
For her, music and art were not special activities separate from everyday life, but forms of beauty and a vehicle for health and well-being.
There is an immediacy to Haida art, song, dance, carving, weaving, any form.Art is
for life. Art is to support human beings in their efforts to live a good life, to
survive, and thrive. In the Navajo world, art is not divorced from everyday life,
for the creation of beauty. [ … ] Beauty is not separated from good, from health,
from happiness, or from harmony. (
Although Carolyn cautioned music therapists against focusing too much on bureaucracy and positivism, she was “thrilled” about recent developments in music therapy and expressed hope and optimism that any lack of understanding or division in our field will all pass away. She had a reassuring way of seeing the big picture.
It will come and it will go and that’s the way it’s just always going to be. That’s the nature of energy, it moves, it’s always fluid and dynamic, we aren’t stuck in this. Through our conversations, through our work and working together, we move through the waves together (Personal communication, August 16, 2016).