She played guitar, piano, flute, cello and other instruments, gave up to 200 concerts a year, and sold millions of recordings.
Joanne Shenandoah, a singer and songwriter who received worldwide acclaim for her music that drew on her heritage as a member of the Oneida Nation and made her one of the country’s most honored and popular Indigenous performers, died Nov.22 at a hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona. She was 64. The cause was internal bleeding as a result of liver failure, said her husband, Doug George-Kanentiio. She had been hospitalized with a liver infection in 2016 and recovered after several months. When she became ill this year, her husband said doctors at the Mayo Clinic could not determine the cause of her liver disease, but it was not related to alcohol abuse or hepatitis. Shenandoah, whose father was a chief in the Onandaga Nation and whose mother was from the Wolf clan of the Oneida Nation, grew up in Oneida territory in central New York. Surrounded by music as a child, she was given the name Tekaliwhakwah, which means “she sings.” Before launching her career in music, Shenandoah spent about a dozen years in the Washington area, where she had a computer consulting business and found occasional jobs singing for commercials and as a backup vocalist. “I was working very hard and was doing all the things I thought were important in life,” she told the Associated Press in 1997. “One day I was looking out my office window. This huge tree was being cut down, and something clicked: What am I doing with my life here?” In 1989, she released the first of more than a dozen albums, and the next year she moved back to Oneida territory. She sought out elders to learn more about the history and languages of the Oneida people and other groups in the Iroquois Confederacy, which also includes the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora nations. Shenandoah did not perform traditional Indigenous music but borrowed certain melodic and rhythmic motifs from it as she wrote original songs, sometimes in English and often in Mohawk or other Iroquois languages. “In the Iroquois way,” she said in 2013, “music is a healing force, and the vibration of music lifts the spirit.” Shenandoah, who played guitar, piano, flute, cello and other instruments, gave as many as 200 concerts a year, often with her sister and daughter as backup vocalists. International sales of her recordings were in the millions. She generally used modern instrumentation in her music and sometimes had an electronic, techno sound pulsing beneath her ethereal, soaring voice.
