Louis W. Ballard (July 8, 1931 – February 9, 2007) was a Native American composer, educator, author, artist, and journalist.

Despite the efforts of the Seneca Indian Training School in discouraging him from practicing his family's customs, Ballard continued to speak in his native language and engage in tribal dances; he was constantly persecuted for doing so.

These disciplinary tactics were commonplace at such institutions throughout the United States and resulted in a dramatic loss of language and culture.

In school, he was often forced to draw tom-toms and tomahawks by the teacher, and the other students would often taunt, harass, and throw stones at him.

While living with his grandmother, though, he attended Baptist Mission School and took part in powwows as well as other community festivals.

Taking inspiration from Bela Bartok's use of Hungarian folk themes, one of Ballard's first attempts at unifying these two musical practices was a compositional exercise in which he arranged a Ponca Indian melody in the styles of both Chopin and Rachmaninoff.

So I felt that I was in good company when I took up my pen to express the sufferings of my people, their regeneration and hopes for a better future life…" While Ballard was pursuing his undergraduate degrees, he sang with the Tulsa University Radio Choir in order to support himself.

Ballard ultimately left his music director positions and supported himself by teaching private piano lessons.

Doré came from a family with wealth, and with her personal and financial support, Ballard was able to pursue composition on a full-time basis.

Michael Udow, the principal percussionist of the Santa Fe Opera orchestra from 1968 until his retirement in 2009, personally attested to the respect that Ballard garnered among the other musicians and by the local community in general.

During this time, he worked with over three hundred and fifty schools nationwide, and was exposed to the cultures and musical traditions of many different tribes.

Throughout his career, Louis Ballard composed a large number of musical works for a variety of different instruments and ensembles.

"Scenes from Indian Life" was originally a three movement orchestral work which premiered in Rochester, New York, and was conducted by Howard Hanson in 1964.

In 1969, Ballard's Ritmo Indio, a three movement work for woodwind quintet, won the first Marion Nevins McDowell Award for American Chamber Music, and was featured as the opening work at the gala Quintet of the Americas concert, "Discovering the New World: A Quincentennial Event," at Carnegie Hall on January 9, 1992.

The first movement of Ritmo Indio, "The Soul," was also recorded on two of the Quintet of the Americas' albums: Souvenirs, and Discovering the New World.

Ballard began experimenting with other mediums and ventured outside the chamber ensemble format when he composed two works for ballet.

Another popular and critically acclaimed composition is his chamber orchestral work, Incident at Wounded Knee, inspired by a stream of daily newspaper reports that were covering the court proceedings related to the 1973 conflict that occurred between the FBI and members of the American Indian Movement on the Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, near the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of three hundred Oglala Sioux by the United States military in 1890.

While Incident at Wounded Knee is not a programmatic work, it represents the customs and emotions of the American Indian peoples.

In 1999, he was the first American composer to have a complete concert dedicated to his music at Beethovenhalle in Bonn, Germany, and he was featured as a guest artist, in 2000, at the Salzburg Mozarteum.

While working on a newly commissioned piano concerto, Louis W. Ballard died at the age of seventy-five on February 9, 2007, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a five-year-struggle against cancer.

What is needed in America is an awakening and reorienting of our total spiritual and cultural perspectives to embrace, understand, and learn from the Aboriginal American and what motivates his musical and artistic impulses.

In 1969, Ballard's Ritmo Indio, a three movement work for woodwind quintet, won the Marion Nevins McDowell Award for American Chamber Music.

In February 1997 he received a Lifetime Musical Achievement Award from the First Americans in the Arts in Beverly Hills, California.