INDIE
INSIDER
“GO & SHARE THIS,
BUT DO IT IN YOUR WAY”
IN CONVERSATION WITH JEREMY DUTCHER
D
uring East Coast Music
Week 2019, Canadian Mu-
sician sat down for a dy-
namic and wide-ranging
conversation with Polaris
Prize- and Juno Award-
winning Indigenous artist Jeremy Dutcher.
Excerpted here is just a small part of that
conversation. In it, Dutcher – a classically
trained operatic tenor and composer from
the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick
– also discusses the five-year journey that
resulted in his acclaimed album, Wolastoqiyik
Lintuwakonawa. In making the album, he
studied 110-year-old wax cylinder record-
ings of his ancestors and incorporated
them into his own compositions. He also
discusses the importance of representa-
tion for Indigenous and gay youth, having
a musical conversation with his ancestors,
being accountable to his community, and
a lot more.
For the full interview, listen to the May
8, 2019 episode of the Canadian Musician
Podcast.
CM: You have a tweet pinned to the
top of your page about there being an
Indigenous music renaissance right
now. Is this renaissance about the non-
Indigenous population starting to pay
attention, or has that coincided with
an uptick in the number of Indigenous
people taking on these artistic initiatives?
Jeremy Dutcher: What I will say is yes, it’s
both. I think there’s a moment right now
that we’re living in where there is a turning
and the recognition of our shared human-
ity, and that we are all sharing this history
and story together. So, yes, it is that.
For this record, for example, Wolas-
toqiyik Lintuwakonawa came as a vision
10 CANADIAN MUSICIAN
that was brought through my elders and
encouraged by them to say, “Go and share
this, but do it in your way.” Like last night
when I gave one of my speeches for the
Indigenous Artist of the Year, it was totally
in my language with no translation pro-
vided and the room sat there and listened.
This record is totally in my language with
no translation provided. For me, what’s
happening right now is we, as Indigenous
artists, are sharing our own stories on our
own terms, and we’re not creating it to get
a seat at the table and we’re not creating
it to sell records. We’re creating it to tell a
story and we’re creating it from our own
place of knowingness and we’re not trying
to translate that for anyone else. People are
welcome to come and witness all of this,
and gather around the fire and see what’s
going on, but fundamentally we’re direct-
ing our conversations elsewhere, as we
have always been. We’ve always been talk-
ing inside our communities with each other
and our artists are the ones who push those
conversations and start that dialogue.
So yeah, more people are gathering
around the fire and I think at the end of
the day, that is a good thing and will teach
an entire new generation of people in this
land to move with an understanding of
who has been here and what that history is
that allows us to sit in this hotel and allows
us to be on this paved road. All of these
conveniences of modernity – whose backs
were those built on? This, I think, is what
we’re coming to terms with as a country
and the work of the [Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commission] and all of these realities
that have been coming up.
As a kid, my father was a history
teacher and my mother is Indigenous, so
we knew our history very well. Yet, I would
go to school and we’d learn about John A.
Macdonald and the daddies of confedera-