Listen to a playlist curated from a life of music appreciation and performance.
“In the Cherokee culture, we believe that birds connect to the Creator and carry messages. When we’re growing up, we’re encouraged to sing because birds sing,” says Tammy Lynn Pertillar, a faculty member in Walden University’s School of Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Studies.
With roots in rural Georgia and Connecticut, Pertillar grew up in a household filled with music, with a cappella singing as a principal form of expression from generation to generation.
Her mother was a classically trained pianist, also skilled at Hammond electric organ and pipe organ, playing in her family church. There, she served as choral director, infusing the repertoire with Cherokee culture as well as African American traditions, including gospel music.
Her father was a World War II navy veteran, a Mason, and professional jazz clarinetist who had more records in his personal collection than any other collector on their side of town. Both of her parents worked with artists who came to Hartford on tour: Her mother accompanied Della Reese; her father accompanied The Prince Rogers Trio. Her parents led by example, balancing artistic pursuits with job responsibilities as full-time factory workers.
As undergraduates at Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges, respectively, Pertillar and her sister, Dr. Lisa Pertillar-Brevard, lead fellow and director of the Walden Center for Social Change, toured rural Massachusetts with Mohawk Trails Concerts, singing standards in support of education programs. During her early graduate school years in Washington, D.C., Pertillar sang Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” a cappella at the National Park Service Dedication Ceremony for The Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, and even performed on Earth Day for a crowd of 250,000.
At 19, she worked in the marketing and promotions department at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a research center and record label at The Smithsonian Institution, which documents music from around the world. One of her first projects was the Peabody Award-winning “Wade in the Water,” a 4 -compact disc (CD) compilation of 20th century sacred African American music. Her sister served as researcher and co-author of the liner notes for the project, which is housed permanently in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library. Since the 1990s, Pertillar has led her own musical groups, touring alongside diverse artists including Ulali, an award-winning Indigenous women’s a cappella singing group.
Sharing Native American/First Nations Culture
Over the last decade, in the spirit of lifelong learning that Walden promotes, she has taught online undergraduate courses at Walden, including Indigenous Peoples in the Modern World and Multicultural Dimensions of Society. To that role, she brings lived experience and three earned master’s degrees: African American and Caribbean History from Howard University; History of Medicine and History of Brazil from The Johns Hopkins University; and Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies from The Catholic University of America.
This year, she contributed a chapter on teaching Native American/First Nations music to the book Promoting Inclusion and Justice in University Teaching: A Transformative-Emancipatory Toolkit for Educators. It offers instructions for a music appreciation workshop that she created and has led for participants ages 18 to 85. The artists featured in the workshop are from diverse Native American cultures in the United States, as well as diverse First Nations cultures in Canada.
Music and Wellness
Music and wellness go hand in hand, according to Pertillar. They form connections at the level of a song, an individual, and groups. Music provides and carries cultural beliefs, values, norms, and customs.
“We already know that some songs are healing,” she says. “Songs have lyrics or a turn of phrase or chord changes that help to regulate everything from breathing to thought processes.
Pertillar recognizes common themes that are shared across many Native American and First Nations contemporary songs, including:
- Affirming life and acknowledging life cycles
- Garnering strength to endure hardships
- Maintaining hope for a wholesome future for this and forthcoming generations
- Appreciating supportive family and friendship circles
- Holding fast to a belief in the body’s ability to become well again
- Confronting stigma surrounding mental health issues
- Expressing gratitude for connections to ancestors and the natural world
- Harnessing collectivity as a wellspring for social and emotional wellbeing
Native American and First Nations Music Playlist
When Pertillar was at Folkways in the era of music CDs, much of the mission was to preserve music and give it to new audiences. The age of streaming, she thinks, is further broadening access to traditional music.
Here she shares a playlist that introduces a variety of Native American and First Nations music. Her choices challenge people’s assumptions that this music is composed only of percussion or vocals that are sounds and not words, or that it is only ceremonial or spiritual.
"There is music that is sacred and music that is secular," Pertillar shares. "The artists featured in the workshops and in this playlist do not publish nor tour songs that are restricted as ancestral or reserved solely for spiritual purposes; thus, ceremonial sacred music is not exposed to the general public. These artists record songs that they have written or arranged of their own accord, that they themselves have chosen to perform, and that they want people worldwide to hear."
Fawn Wood (Plains Cree/Salish): Hope
Joanne Shenandoah (Oneida): Kahawi’tha
Robert Mirabal A.K.A. Johnny Whitehorse (Taos Pueblo/Apache): Heal The Bones
Lawrence “Happy” Laughing (Mohawk): I Wish You Peace
Mary Youngblood (Seminole/Aleut): Reach For The Sky
Northern Cree (Saddle Lake Cree Nation): Thank You, Singers
R. Carlos Nakai Quartet (Navajo/Ute): Big Medicine
Tony Duncan (Apache-Arikara/Hidatsa): Medicine Woman
Ulali (Tuscarora/Yaqui/Maya/Apache): Mother
Young Spirit (Plains Cree/Assiniboine): Best Friend
“Native Americans and Online Education”, a presentation by Tammy Lynn Pertillar, also includes a secondary presentation within it entitled “Seven Strategies for Engaging Native American Students in the Online Classroom.”
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