The Never-Ending Playlist 5: Beyond the Secret Path

For a lot of non-Indigenous Canadians—too many, frankly—Gord Downie’s Secret Path was the first time they heard an Indigenous story in song. That’s only because they weren’t listening. Indigenous novelists, non-fiction writers, filmmakers, and certainly visual artists have all come closer to the Canadian mainstream than Indigenous musicians, with perhaps the sole exception of Buffy Sainte-Marie. Canadians have been happy to lay a small claim to her international success, despite the fact that she left the country at the age of three. It’s not like there weren’t people closer to home who deserved equal attention. The recent Indigenous renaissance in popular music started about 15 years ago with Tanya Tagaq and then A Tribe Called Red, with dozens more following in their wake—including the 2018 Polaris Music Prize winner Jeremy Dutcher. The Indigenous roots of popular music, however, go back decades, as clearly outlined in the highly recommended 2017 film Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World.

This playlist is by no means definitive; it just happens to include some of my favourites. (It also features two white allies, Bruce Cockburn and Bob Wiseman, whose songs and work have helped illuminate Indigenous causes.) The CBC Music show Reclaimed, launched in 2017, serves as an ongoing primer to the current scene and its historical context. Digital Drum and Revolutions Per Minute also do excellent work covering the scene. This playlist should only be the beginning of your journey. (It was also created in 2018; the Indigenous renaissance has produced at least a dozen great records in the last year.)

Spotify link here.
Tidal link here.

1. “I Pity the Country,” Willie Dunn. This is the opening track on the essential 2014 compilation Native North America. It’s also a perfect distillation of the power this man’s poetry had. Dunn wrote a song called “Charlie Wenjack” in 1971, which was also used in the 1976 film Cold Journey, which I talk about in the book. DJ Sipreano (a.k.a. Kevin Howes) is putting together a Dunn comp that should be out sooner than later. In addition to being a songwriter, Dunn was a groundbreaking filmmaker and later ran for the federal NDP before his death in 2013.

2. “White Lies (intro skit),” Snotty Nose Rez Kids. There is a ton of Indigenous hip-hop out there, starting with War Party many years back, up to the likes of Cody Coyote today. Vancouver’s Snotty Nose Rez Kids are from Kitimat in northern B.C., and vaulted from obscurity to the Polaris Music Prize shortlist in 2018 with their second album, The Average Savage. Their new album has the best possible title possible for a modern hip-hop album by a northern crew: Trapline.

3. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” Buffy Sainte-Marie. Where to start? Just go and read Andrea Warner’s excellent 2018 biography of the living legend. Buffy’s first album, It’s My Way, came out in 1964, and she’s been an incredible creative force ever since, up to and including her 2015 Polaris-winning Power in the Blood. This song appeared on her first comeback album, Coincidences and Other Likely Stories, in 1992; I first heard it when the Indigo Girls covered it. It was remastered (thank God) for her recent compilation Medicine Songs. Not only are the lyrics chilling and incendiary, this is a reggae-rock-powwow hybrid with a melody I often get randomly stuck in my head. The greatest protest song ever written? Quite possibly.

4. “Stolen Land,” Bruce Cockburn. Cockburn was the only major Canadian musical figure to consistently feature Indigenous issues (and artwork) throughout his career; he was singing about the mercury poisoning in Grassy Narrows back in the mid-’70s. On this 1986 track tacked onto a greatest-hits compilation, Fergus Marsh’s Chapman stick bass anchors one of Cockburn’s most pointed set of lyrics—which is saying something, considering his entire oeuvre. Cockburn often performed this live solo with just a hand drum. To my knowledge, outside of Buffy’s “My Country Tis Of They People You’re Dying,” this is the only track in popular culture to specifically reference residential schools: “Kidnap all the children / put them in a foreign system / bring them up in a no-man’s land where no one really wants them.” I was going to quote it in the book, but even Cockburn’s manager didn’t seem to know who owned the publishing rights anymore; they’d sold them years ago.

5. “Sisters,” A Tribe Called Red feat. Northern Voice. This group has plenty of tracks to choose one, but few that swing as hard as this one. (Great video, too.) In the beginning, back when they were doing a weekly Ottawa club gig and developing their sound, they called it “powwow step.” At the height of their success, when they were getting top dollar at Canadian festivals and touring the world, they embarked on a rez-only tour, bringing their live experience to geographically dispersed populations where it was likely to have the biggest impact. Rumour has it that Downie wanted them to open for the Hip on the 2015 Fully Completely reissue tour.

6. “Uja,” Tanya Tagaq. Raised in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Tagaq is the most unlikely Canadian music success story: she’s combined traditional Inuit throat singing with intense, improvisatory avant-garde music that places her trio’s sound somewhere between Diamanda Galas and Colin Stetson. In a country—and a culture—that prefers music to be predictable and pre-packaged, Tagaq breaks all the rules and has been handsomely rewarded for it. You won’t hear her on the radio unless she’s being interviewed by CBC, but she’s now so mainstream that her story is included in books for children about inspirational women. That shift started with her 2014 album Animism, which won the Polaris Prize that year; her performance at the gala was a star-making moment that was as terrifying as it was triumphant. Watch it here.  

7. “Healers,” Iskwé. This Dene singer, based in Hamilton, has been known to cover Portishead in her live set; her music’s lineage starts there and runs through to modern pop torch singers like Lorde and Billie Eilish. Lyrically, however, there’s no mistaking that Iskwé stands apart from every other female singer in her genre, representing her culture and its struggles and looking to the future.

8. “E5-770: My Mother’s Name,” Lucie Idlout. This Nunavut singer/songwriter has a powerful voice in more ways than one: she is a passionate advocate for victims of domestic abuse, and here she sings about the way the Canadian government used to identify Inuit women.

9. “Gabriel Dumont Blues,” Bob Wiseman. The other white guy on this list is also one who’s written some of the greatest political songs of the last 50 years, though that’s about the only thing he has in common with Bruce Cockburn. Wiseman grew up in Winnipeg, where awareness of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont and the Red River Rebellion is, obviously, considerably higher than in the rest of the country. I grew up in Ontario; I didn’t learn who Louis Riel was until university. I also didn’t know about Leonard Peltier until I heard Wiseman’s songs about him. And for all the credit that goes to the Hip and the Rheostatics and others who write explicitly about Canadian people and places, Wiseman never seems to get enough credit for the alternately poetic and blunt political way he writes about his surroundings. “I ain’t got a ruler small enough to measure your memory,” sings Wiseman. No shit.

10. “Tables are Turning,” Lawrence Martin. “Tables are turning / no one knew what was going on.” This song came out in 2014, the year that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was holding hearings across the country, with story after story about residential school atrocities proving that the problems were bigger than anyone had ever documented before. Martin’s musical career dates back to the 1970s, and he won the very first Juno Award in the Indigenous Music category, created in 1994. He’s also a groundbreaking broadcaster, and became the first Indigenous person elected mayor of a municipality in Ontario, when he took office in Sioux Lookout in 1991. He later became mayor of Cochrane, Ontario, and now lives in his native Moose Factory.

11. “Spirit Child,” Willie Thrasher. Willie Thrasher grew up in Aklavik, in Canada’s furthest northwest, and was taken to residential school in Inuvik where he took up Western instruments. He formed a rock band, the Cordells, who would play fly-in communities. At one gig, a white guy told him he should write songs about his own experiences. He did, and in the early 1980s he recorded an album at CBC’s Ottawa studios, tracks from which turned up on the Native North America album in 2014. These days he’s a professional busker in Nanaimo, performing with his wife, Linda Saddleback, and has started touring again in the wake of his reissued work. I was fortunate enough to interview him here.

12. “Unbound,” Robbie Robertson. Robertson’s mother grew up on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario, and the guitarist would often visit family there as a child. As he became one of the most influential musicians of the 1960s and ’70s with the Band, he rarely reflected on his heritage in public. But in 1994, he assembled Music for the Native Americans, the soundtrack to a television documentary, and in 1998 he put out Contact from the Underworld of Redboy, which attempted to fuse modern electronics and Indigenous influences with the help of producers who’d worked with U2 and Bjork. Though it got a lukewarm reception, one could argue that it’s a predecessor to A Tribe Called Red.

13. “Akua Tuta,” Kashtin. This Innu band from northern Quebec deserves a lot of credit for scoring a radio and video hit sung in an Indigenous language. Decades before Jeremy Dutcher, Kashtin had actual pop hits. Those hits are not available on most streaming services, but this song appeared on both Music for the Native Americans and the Due South soundtrack. Co-founder Florent Vallant is still releasing new music; his most recent came out in 2018.

14. “Ultestakon” – Jeremy Dutcher. “You are in the midst of an Indigenous  renaissance. Are you ready to hear the truth that needs to be told? Are you ready to see the things that need to be seen?” Those words were part of Dutcher’s acceptance speech when he won the 2018 Polaris Music Prize for his debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, an album performed in a language spoken by fewer than 100 people today. The classically trained opera singer studied century-old recordings by his ancestors and wrote modern arrangements, in a stunning and incredibly relevant act of musical archaeology. On top his talent, Dutcher is incredibly articulate. Listen to any interview with him, but particularly this one (also downloadable as a podcast).

15. “Bush Lady Pt. 1,” Alanis Obomsawin. The Abenaki filmmaker is considered a giant in the history of Canadian cinema and documentaries in general, with more than 50 titles to her credit. What most people didn’t know that she is also an incredible musician, who, among other things, booked the Indigenous stage at the Mariposa Folk Festival for much of the 1970s. This haunting and gorgeous album literally sat in her closet for 30 years before being reissued by Constellation Records in 2018. I was lucky enough to see the then-85-year-old play a show that year at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa: with just her voice and a hand drum, it was one of the most riveting performances I’ve ever seen in my life.

16. “Sky-Man and the Moon,” David Campbell. Indigenous people living in Canada are not necessarily people with historical geographical roots between the political borders of this country. That’s obvious to anyone who lives in or near an Indigenous community that historically straddled Canada and the U.S. But that could also include performers like Toronto’s Lido Pimienta, the daughter of a Wayuu woman in her native Colombia. David Campbell is an Arawak from the Caribbean who started his career in Toronto singing about Indigenous issues, lived in the U.K. for a while, and has spent most of his life in Vancouver. This synth-laden folk song is one of the loveliest tracks on the Native North America album.

17. “Nooj Meech,” Morley Loon. Credited as one of the first prominent performers to sing in the Cree language, this James Bay songwriter recorded two albums for the CBC’s Northern Service in 1975, and 1981’s Northland, My Land on Stompin’ Tom Connors’ Boot Records. In the ’80s, he surfaced in Vancouver, where he formed the band Red Cedar with Willie Thrasher. He died in 1986 at the age of 38. Loon was one of several Native North America artists who had full albums reissued by Light in the Attic.  

18. “James Bay,” Lloyd Cheechoo. I fully realize that I’m relying heavily on the Native North American comp here. But it’s so freaking good, and so important, and so overdue, and compiler Kevin Howes deserves maximum credit for making it happen. As someone who considers himself somewhat of a Canadian music historian, I was ashamed that I did not know this music before. Just listen to this song, which might otherwise have been lost to history.

19. “Call of the Moose,” Willy Mitchell. The headline on a 2015 Vice article is “Getting shot in the head is the least interesting thing Willy Mitchell has done.” That may well be true. The Cree singer from Val d’Or also staged the Sweet Grass festival in 1980, where he performed with Morley Loon and Willie Thrasher, and had the whole thing recorded on the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording truck.

20. “Ballad of Crowfoot,” Willie Dunn. This song was recorded before his debut album, to soundtrack a 10-minute NFB film--the first ever to be directed by an Indigenous Canadian. Watch the whole thing here.