Time to tear down the silos Indigenous music category has outlived its usefulness at Junos By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 3:21 PM CDT Monday, Mar. 18, 2019

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/03/2019 (2013 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The biggest moment from this year’s Juno Awards was not televised.

At Saturday night’s gala in London, Ont., when Wolastoqiyik singer/songwriter and classically trained tenor Jeremy Dutcher accepted the award for Indigenous Album of the Year for his stunning 2018 debut Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, he asked his fellow nominees — Elisapie Isaac, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, Leonard Sumner, and Northern Cree — to stand up.

“All of your work changes this place, and it deserves to be considered outside of this category,” he told them. “Because our music is not niche. Our music is saying something.”

He’s right, of course, and his words underscore a criticism many Indigenous artists have had about the Junos for years.

‘Indigenous’ is not a genre. Country is a genre. Pop is a genre. But Indigenous? That’s too broad a term to cover off the range of music that comes from talented artists who hail from diverse nations.

‘Indigenous’ is not a genre. Country is a genre. Pop is a genre. But Indigenous? That’s too broad a term to cover off the range of music that comes from talented artists who hail from diverse nations.

When the category was first introduced in 1994, thanks in large part to the advocacy of category co-creator Buffy Sainte-Marie, it played a critical role in providing a space to celebrate Indigenous artists who were too often overlooked by mainstream institutions such as the Junos.

But just as an Indigenous category can help amplify Indigenous artists, it can also hem them in.

In fact, it wasn’t until 2014 that A Tribe Called Red became the first Indigenous act to win an award outside the Indigenous album of the year category.

“There are no Indigenous nominees outside of the Indigenous music category and it’s not because we’re not putting out excellent music,” Dutcher told Q‘s Tom Power in an interview ahead of the Junos.

“So for me, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword — I wish that we weren’t siloed into one category.”

That siloing effect reflects a stubborn tendency among Canada’s cultural institutions to think about Indigenous art, in all disciplines, as a monolith, as well as in a past-tense, anthropological sense instead of something that is diverse, evolving, and contemporary.

Even the notion of an ‘Indigenous category’ seems antiquated and othering in 2019, in much the same way ‘world music’ does. Indigenous artists, too, make pop, rap, rock, country, folk, roots, alternative, and classical music.

Indigenous artists belong in every category, on every stage, because they belong, period.

Dutcher spoke about reconciliation during his powerful speech — or tried to anyway.

Shortly after addressing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau directly — “a nation-to-nation relationship does not look like pipelines. A nation-to-nation relationship does not look like sending militarized police force into unceded territory. And a nation-to-nation relationship does not look like, in 2019, our communities under boil-water advisories” — he was played off the stage, which is especially galling considering the Juno Awards’ Saturday night gala is not beholden to broadcast timelines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mJ3LBODhGQ

And so, later in the night, after accepting their award for rock album of the year, the Arkells gave Dutcher their time.

“Our friend Jeremy didn’t get a chance to finish, so he’s going to finish the night as he should,” Arkells frontman Max Kerman said.

It wasn’t just a classy move on the part of the Arkells, it was a significant one. Acts of reconciliation can be as simple as passing the microphone, sharing a platform, knowing when to stand back and let someone else speak.

Acts of reconciliation can be as simple as passing the microphone, sharing a platform, knowing when to stand back and let someone else speak.

Reconciliation doesn’t come from silos and separation. It comes from working together and elevating each other.

“This is what holding space looks like,” Dutcher said when he returned to the stage.

He called reconciliation a lofty goal, a dream that “takes time. It takes stories. It takes shared experience. It takes music. I have hope. I have to. That we can come to right relations with each other.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkHQfYMtpOI

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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