The First Angelinos

Song was an integral element of Gabrielino rituals, and although songs could be performed independently of dance or ceremony, the latter activities could not be performed without song. Some songs were associated with specific ceremonies, while others could be adapted to virtually any performance. In addition, songs were commonly linked together to create a "song series."

Songs were inherited along family lines and were rarely disclosed to outsiders. Lineages owned songs, as did individuals, and these could not be sung by others without permission. The tomyaar was responsible for the songs owned by the lineage, just as the head of each family was responsible for family-owned songs. (179)

William McCawley
The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles (1996)

Given my lack of depth on this topic and the reductive nature of the source, all speculation is tenuous. With that disclaimer, here's what sticks out to me.

Songs COULD be performed independently of their necessary function? You would not think this had ever been the case in any tribal culture if you listened to the pre-packaged narratives of undergraduate education; or perhaps I am guilty of absolutizing on this question without realizing it. In any case, it never made sense to me that any culture could have (and value) music without inevitably coming to have (and value) it for its own sake. Whether this impulse rises to the level of post-industrial Decadence or is closely regulated and/or circumscribed (e.g. like casual sex, which WMC finds was strictly discouraged yet allowed during a certain festival) really is rather irrelevant. The degree to which a human need is regulated by a society can probably be explained by the constellation of other social, technological, environmental forces, etc. True needs, if that's what they are, cannot productively be bottled up completely; and of course sex is again the ultimate illustration, pointing to an age-old debate vis-a-vis the relative merits of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and the incessant violence which has followed them everywhere vs. "primitive" tribal societies which, it must be said, we have been too quick to idealize in this way, and yet DO seem to have had surprisingly nuanced, well-developed, time-tested ways of managing conflicts between individual and collective needs. And so it's a mistake to view what seems to us like excessively strict rationing of recreational/leisure/pleasurable activities as evidence that these people conceived of these things vastly differently than we do. Is it possible that the full constellation of socially/historically contingent factors simply yielded a somewhat different recipe for survival which nonetheless reflects very clearly the understanding that you cannot survive under conditions of total deprivation?

That this was, in addition, a Permission Culture vis-a-vis family-owned songs certainly is interesting. WMC remarks several times elsewhere that the individual profit motive and the law of supply and demand were the Gabrielinos' operative economic principles. Yet here he never says that songs were proprietary in the economic sense, just that they were "owned." It is hard to say more without greater depth of study, but certainly that distinction could be important, i.e. it seems that respect for ownership was based on intrinsic and not economic value.

Conversely, Shamans owned their own "power songs" (179) and did profit from their activities.

[from a notebook, 2017]