ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the differential conceptions of music ownership and control among and within the world's societies. It examines musical ethnographers, in the field, often made detailed inquiries into musical control and ownership, but the early literature of our field didn't usually single it out for analysis or accounting. The chapter focuses on the Blackfoot culture, tries to identify and interpret change in the last century. The rhetoric regarding the matters in the modern Blackfoot musical culture, a culture dominated now by the powwow culture, continues to involve control in the sense of appropriateness, and ascription, more than outright ownership. Much of the attention to the complex system of music ownership and control appears in literature that notes, analyses, and criticizes what has happened in the recent past to the world's musical traditions, a result of the various processes subsumed under the term globalization. Blackfoot culture is a complex culture, with a complex history.
