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Doc Tate Nevaquaya, the Comanche flutist, has reconstructed a nearly extinct music for wooden flute -- one of the few solo instruments in American Indian music -- through musicological research. And Lawrence (Teddy Boy) Houle, the Ojibway fiddler, plays tunes that reflect the French and Scottish music brought by colonists; what has survived is an Ojibway approach to tone, phrasing and ornament. 

The songs and dances offer glimpses of nations far more venerable than the United States. The Iroquois confederation, an alliance of the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Senecas, the Onondagas and later the Tuscaroras, "was the first United Nations, united for peace," Mr. Bonaparte said. He added that the form of government of the United States was influenced by the Great Law of the Iroquois, whose system of delegates and representatives was studied by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The Iroquois confederation, which at its peak controlled territory from what is now Maine to Michigan and from the St. Lawrence River to Tennessee, was not insular. One dance for couples, the alligator dance, has been in Iroquois lore for generations despite the fact that upstate New York isn't alligator country; the song was learned from the Seminoles of the South.

Nor is the singers' repertory a fixed body of music and words. One women's dance, Mr. Bonaparte said, can stretch to 300 verses. "We can keep the girls dancing for 45 minutes, though they get kind of angry at us," he said. And new verses are continually added to old songs; one recent Mohawk verse mentions casinos, warriors, gamblers, smugglers and AK-47's, alluding to the current disputes over whether casinos will be built on Mohawk land. Traditions From the West.

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