Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa

When Jeremy Dutcher received the Polaris Prize (the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury Prize) for this album in September, he first thanked Maggie Paul, an elder from his community who sent him on a quest that became a transformative experience and gave birth to this very album. Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (Our Maliseets Songs) involves the rearrangement of 110-year-old recordings from his community that were kept on wax cylinders at the Canadian National Museum of History.

While Dutcher is a classically trained operatic tenor, composer and musicologist, he also blends his Wolastoq First Nation roots into his music. At the museum, he listened deeply to the recordings and wrote harmonic and melodic lines around the voices recorded by an anthropologist in 1911, creating a new sound that intertwines between classical, traditional and electronic. The result is stunning and the inclusion of the ancient voices within the music buckle up the circle of time. Elder Maggie Paul knew who to send on this mission to revitalise a disappearing language (less than 100 people speak it today). “Starting this record with a death chant, ‘Mehcinut’, was a very clear statement,” says Dutcher. “I don't believe languages die. Our dances, our songs, our language, they just had to go away for a bit of safekeeping. It's now time to take them all out.”