Makes Me Feel Glad That I'm Not Dead: Jim Pepper and Music of the Native American Church

This article identifies Jim Pepper's 1971 jazz hit “Witchi Tai To” as a contact zone in which cultures (Native and non-Native) collide. In the song, Native powwow culture and Native identities are reclaimed and reinterpreted within a jazz idiom. While Native supratribal identities are celebrated within this popular culture artefact, the song retains an opacity that resists absorption and cooptation by non-Natives. “Witchi Tai To” is a song of Native religious reorientation within a context of modernity, and its legacy reverberates in at least two genres of contemporary Native popular music: Native American Church songs and Native American electronic dance music.