For a myriad of reasons, I’ve fallen out of the loop when it came to the contemporary Canadian music landscape. Nothing was more representative of this than my failure to keep up on the Polaris Music Prize. There are several facets why this happened, but, ultimately, I had this growing sense that the scene simply wasn’t vibing with what I was into at the moment. The various strains of music available to us at any given moment are immense and it just seemed as though every pull that intrigued me was away from Canada. I went from seeking out Canadian artists and, instead, began to be shocked when, after listening, I found out that they were Canadian. U.S. Girls and Tomb Mold come to mind as examples.
As I said, there are a lot of reasons for this, but what I think are the main culprits are the drying up of wells that I would always go to in order to find new Canadian music, either drying up or vanishing completely. The R3-30 podcast by CBC Radio 3, though its significance dwindled for me towards its end, was always there for me to check back in whenever… Until it wasn’t, of course. And there was also the Polaris Prize, which hasn’t vanished, but, at one point, felt like it was drying up. A repetitiveness was beginning to emerge where either the same artist would get nominated or new artists sounding like those old artists would get nominated. I lost faith.
But, upon reflection, what led to a significant drop in the esteem I had towards the Polaris Prize was it’s nominating of Indigenous artists.
A lot of background context needs to be provided here and it can really be summed up in one event that occurred during my time as an undergraduate student, an event that made me, albeit irrationally, but significantly skeptical of any institution that I saw as White and Canadian including Indigenous peoples.
I forget the specific year, but Halifax was holding the national Reconciliation summit. Inspired by the reconciliation efforts in post-genocide Rwanda and post-apartheid South Africa, Canada began an effort of reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples. Canada was beginning to recognize their role in forcefully dislocating children from their families (which then led to massive abusing of children by priests and nuns, both of a violent and sexual nature), breaking treaties, knowing deprivation of resources through massive pollution or economically motivated ‘land grabbing’, and just an overall general racism that was rooted into every institution that most Canadian take for granted, from the banks to the police.
Anyways, at the Reconciliation summit, a professor of mine was ‘leading’ (as much as he would say otherwise) a talking circle that was meant to create bridges between the academy and the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet and Métis communities upon whose lands Dalhousie is located. I don’t know how other’s saw this meeting, but, for me, it was a goddamn disaster that showed just how fucking inept science is at understanding tragedy, e-fucking-specially if the science, from the get-go, is trying to remedy these wrongdoings through its methods. This is the arrogance of science at its most overt, and it persists. Science has this tendency to think that it can solve the problems that it creates, objectively. Science can certainly, as can all social institutions, solve the problems it has created for itself, but it cannot solve the problems that result from its actions when it comes to the areas surrounding it. I don’t know, this is complex stuff. But what I do know is that my skepticism grew immensely when it came to white institutions and their ‘inclusion’ of Indigenous people. Through their sobs, the victims of child abuse described their distrust of a suddenly altruistic scientific community full of ‘well to do’ white folk. Even now, I find it hard not to reach similar conclusions.
Suddenly, the Polaris Prize was short listing albums by Indigenous folk. And then, even quicker, these albums were beginning to win the prize. In 2014, Tanya Tagaq won the prize for her album Animism, and in 2015, Buffy Sainte-Marie won the prize for her Power in the Blood album. When I heard news of these wins, I couldn’t dispel the feeling I just described after that reconciliation meeting. I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what my grievances were, but there was nevertheless a skepticism, a feeling that this was an attempt by an, up until now, a very White-Canadian community extending a helping hand without really understanding the situation in the first place. It felt phony.
That was a while ago though. Through time, I’ve come to understand things like this is in far less black and white terms. I still reserve a healthy dose of skepticism when something happens that triggers my “White man’s burden” radar, but I try to quickly dismiss that knee-jerk reaction and try to get to a deeper, nuanced understanding of it that is appreciative of the complexity of these situations.
But the damage was done, the Polaris Prize continued to float along the periphery of my musical explorations. This wasn’t an effort of mine. It just kind of happened. Though my feelings toward it were certainly of my doing, there was nothing it did that forced itself back into my life, even if my opinions of it had changed, even if my opinions of it had changed.
Then, last year, a classmate of mine during my time at Dalhousie, won the Polaris Prize. Jeremy Dutcher and I shared a couple classes together throughout my time at Dalhousie, but I grew particularly fond of him during our time together in our Honours class, where students discussed their respective projects. We were both from New Brunswick (a surprisingly rare occurrence at Dalhousie despite it being a university in Nova Scotia) and we both had similar interests, particularly art and politics. I had been in a couple film courses with his then boyfriend, and Jeremy himself was studying music. There was a lot there for me to admire in him and, though our interactions were almost exclusively on campus, I always looked forward to seeing him.
Jeremy’s honours project was my favourite of the lot. My work, at the time, felt unfocused because of how desperately it wanted to be both high minded, yet concerned with the salt of the earth. Such an endeavour isn’t impossible, but it takes a certain deftness that I don’t think any undergraduate student can achieve. Jeremy’s project, on the other hand, felt focused. Jeremy did what he knew, and that was music and his people, the Maliseet. I forget the particulars, but I don’t forget the shared sense of accomplishment that everyone in the room felt when this young man explained the intricate similarities and differences between the styles of Canadian Indigenous music and Western music. Using recordings of Indigenous chants captured by scavenger anthropologists who believed these people were going extinct, Jeremy fucking flipped that shit. This was a Maliseet person taking the scavenger anthropological tradition and using it for comparative analysis. Okay, he may not have flipped it on its head, but there was nevertheless a latent sense of rebellion in his project.
This sense of rebellion and the admiration I felt during that presentation were reintroduced to me when I finally got around to listening to Jeremy’s Polaris Prize winning album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. I could probably go another page or two about this album and how it goes about doing what it does, but I’m getting tired of typing and need to walk the dogs. Hell, I could probably go another couple of pages on the album’s final track alone, titled “Koselwintuwakon”. I do have to say something about this track though.
This final track takes a Gregorian approach, and contrasts significantly with the rest of the album. Keep in mind I’m only going off of hear say and have done very little research into this subject, but from what I understand the Gregorian method of music typical of Christian monasteries, has two things going for it; it has a continuous drone framing the chants, whose continuity was understood to be the purest of musical expressions and incredibly appealing to God, and that the chants were similarly meant to please God and display the monks’ devotion. Obviously, there is a very Christian history behind the Gregorian method of music
To take a Gregorian approach to reimagine an old recording of an Indigenous song, given the history of Western religion amongst Canadian Indigenous peoples, Jeremy displays a maturity that is in total contrast to how I once understood the relationship between White Canadians and Indigenous people. Jeremy shows that there are things about us that can find a place of harmony.
Suddenly, I have all of this year’s Polaris shortlist albums cued up. I wouldn’t say that Jeremy’s album has reignited my interest in Canadian music, but it’s certainly given me pause to consider it again. So I will.
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