"[5][6] Her father, (Andrew) John Mathonican, was Cherokee and worked as a billiards hall manager,[3] and her mother, Marzella Carter, had Italian and Spanish ancestry.
She sang traditional operatic selections by composers including Handel, Francesco Gasparini and Gabriel Fauré, as well as Native American music arranged by Troyer, Jeancon and Cadman.
[9] Throughout the next several decades, Casella performed throughout the country at venues including the American Museum of Natural History, the National Folk Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
She expanded her repertoire over the years to add more Native American music, including songs by the Cherokee, Navajo, Zuni, Apache, Hopi, Cheyenne, Sioux, Ojibway and Chippewa people, most from the 18th and 19th centuries.
[5] She told the Newspaper Enterprise in 1966 that she wished to do for Native American music what Igor Moiseyev had done for popularizing and professionalizing Russian folk dances.