Introducing the Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC)

The Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) serves at arm’s length from the CMC on matters related to cultural appropriation and misuse of Indigenous songs, story, and culture. The IAC is a group of Indigenous folks from across Canada with a broad range of expertise in music, curation, museology, performance, and repatriation. Its mandate is to provide recommendations to CMC for appropriately redressing instances of misuse in compositions on an ongoing, case-by-case basis. This work is made possible with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Canadian Heritage to support thinking about these issues in a large-scale policy basis.

It is a major priority for the CMC to work with Indigenous leaders “to examine and search for resolutions to the use of Indigenous Song and Story in the works of Canadian Composition past, present and future; [to establish] protocols for composers and performers when composing and performing works influenced or based on Indigenous materials” (Goal #1, current 2019-2024 Strategic Plan). Having been part of the cause of injury, CMC has to be part of the healing and the solution and take leadership in the healing.

As an arms-length group, the IAC advises the CMC but is not a formal CMC Committee. The IAC is at a preliminary point of a much longer project.

“The history of Canadian classical composition is a colonial history. Since Confederation, composers have resourced the songs, stories, and cultural wealth of Indigenous Peoples as part of an expansive nationalist impulse to define an authentic Canadian music” (from the background section o the IAC Terms of Reference). From 1885-1950, the Potlach Ban made it illegal for Indigenous communities to perform songs and hold ceremony. Shortly after this, composers were encouraged to look for a “so called authentic Canadian sound”. Fostered by the government, people were pushed to do assimilation and theft of the material. There was misappropriation, but there was also annihilation of language and culture.

The Canadian Music Centre was founded in 1959. It was established in the context of violent state policies targeting Indigenous communities including the Potlatch ban, the 60s scoop, and residential schools. These policies were not part of some dark chapter that has ended and is in the past, as injustice and violence against Indigenous people are ongoing: missing and murdered Indigenous women, the (disproportionate) incarceration of Indigenous people, the defunding of Indigenous-led education curriculum, and many more well documented forms of systemic violence.

The CMC is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization in its governing structure and activities. The Accountability for Change Council was established in 2020 to support these goals. For more information about the CMC’s work for change, please visit Accountability for Change.

We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the 94 calls to action that were released in 2015 as part of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission’s final report.

 

Indigenous Advisory Council

Purpose

The purpose of the Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) is to oversee the work of redressing the misuse of Indigenous songs and mis-representation of Indigenous cultures/peoples in compositions by Associate Composers of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC). The IAC’s understanding of redress centres Indigenous, community-specific models of making amends for infractions against Indigenous rights.

The committee will advise on protocols, procedures, and consultation with Indigenous communities whose music has been appropriated and/or misused. The IAC, supported by—but at arms length from—the CMC, will come together over the next year to examine this large collection of compositions that represents Indigenous peoples, history, and culture, and from this work propose ways to address the various misrepresentations and appropriations present in the collection. The council will also work with the CMC to determine ways of addressing the larger context of misrepresentation with CMC composers by providing guidance on the kinds of information and workshops that will need to be developed for composers with much-needed models for Indigenous-centred forms of collaboration. At the discretion of the committee, committee members may also suggest works by composers not represented by the CMC for the IAC to address.

As a group of Indigenous artists, composers, musicians, scholars, and curators, we will strive to centre reclamation and empowerment, understanding that among the members of the advisory council we represent many different approaches to reparation and redress from our varying protocols and cultural values.

Scope of the Work

Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Canadian Heritage, the work undertaken by the IAC will play a key role in initiating Indigenous-led efforts of redress. This will involve a prolonged examination of several hundred works in the CMC collection to assess the various kinds of misuse. There is a wide-ranging spectrum of different kinds of misuse—from compositions that mimic Indigenous musics; to restricted stories being used as the basis for pieces; to appropriation of language, place-names, and people; to the unauthorized use of ceremonial songs that breach cultural protocol and infringe upon rights. Each Indigenous nation has defined rights specific and unique to that particular nation. Whether these are hereditary rights, cultural rights, or other legal orders, the IAC will engage knowledge holders from different communities in order to follow specific Indigenous rights systems in dealing with infractions. In addition to the IAC sharing its findings and recommendations with the Canada Council for the Arts and Department of Canadian Heritage, it will also disseminate this information in public biannual reports.

Composition of the Indigenous Advisory Council

(see bios below)

Indigenous Council Members (Voting)
Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah), Chair
Marion Newman (Kwagiulth/Stó:lō), Chair
T. Patrick Carrabré (Métis)
Nika Collison (Haida)
Robin Gray (Ts’msyen / Mikisew Cree)
Melody McKiver (Anishinaabe)
Jessica McMann (Cree)
Taqralik Partridge (Inuk)
Olivia Shortt (Anishinaabe)
Jason Young (Métis-Cree, Indigenous Outreach Coordinator)

Supporting Members, (Non-Voting)
Jeremy Strachan, Project Manager and Secretary
Clare Pellerin, CMC Liaison

The IAC draws on a wide range of expertise including that of composers (CMC Associate Composer Carrabré, McKiver, McMann, Young), musicians/singers/performers (Shortt, Newman, McKiver, McMann, Partridge), scholars (Gray, Robinson), experts on repatriation (Collison, Gray, Robinson), and art/festival curation (Robinson, Partridge, Carrabré, Newman, Shortt). Many of our committee members work across cultural practice, music performance and scholarship. In addition to these council members, additional members from specific Indigenous communities will be engaged when the music under discussion involves a song used from a particular community or represents a particular community.

Background

The history of Canadian classical composition is a colonial history. Since Confederation, composers have resourced the songs, stories, and cultural wealth of Indigenous Peoples as part of an expansive nationalist impulse to define an authentic Canadian music: Ernest Gagnon, whose 1858 composition Stadaconé: Danse sauvage pour piano was among the first to use “certain stylistic aspects of native music later wrote that composers should ‘seek out these sources’ to ‘lay a foundation for a musical language’ in Canada.” By the middle of the twentieth century a substantial recorded archive of oral culture—collected when Canada was enforcing its most repressive and genocidal policies towards First Peoples—was actively promoted to settler composers invested in creating a national musical expression as Canada’s centenary approached. Composers, encouraged to “write Canadian,” benefitted from the abundance of recordings and published transcriptions by museum staff (Marius Barbeau, James Teit) and ethnomusicologists which subsequently provided unprecedented access to melodies, songs, and stories—collected under duress and sometimes without proper consent. In the same way that Indigenous traditional lands, waterways, and material culture have been taken as part of Canadian colonialism, Indigenous Peoples have been separated from their intangible cultural belongings contained in song and story through ethnographic collection.

The Canadian Music Centre exists as an organization that supports and promotes Canadian composers. Part of this work involves the circulation of musical scores. The CMC library houses over 26,000 scores by 1,125 composers, and has 12,000 archival recordings available online. All of these works and recordings are freely accessible to the public. At present, there are more than two hundred works by non-Indigenous and settler Canadian composers—and their associated archival recordings—in the CMC’s library that represent Indigenous history and culture, or use Indigenous stories and languages. Many of these works also appropriate, adapt, and cite Indigenous songs. Given the paucity of performances of works, the misrepresentations and appropriations have to present largely remained out of view (ear-shot) to Indigenous communities, families, and individuals whose songs have been appropriated.

Biographies of IAC Members

Dr. Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator and writer, as well as an the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. In the autumn of 2022 he will begin a new appointment as Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Robinson’s research has focused on the appropriation of Indigenous song in classical music, ethnographic recording and repatriation of Indigenous songs. In 2017 he led a multi-year project working with the Canadian Opera Company, National Arts Centre, and Nisga’a Lisims Government to address the appropriation of a Nisga’s limx-oo’y (dirge song) in the opera Louis Riel by Harry Somers and Mavor Moore. His book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University Minnesota Press, 2020), examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening. Hungry Listening has received awards including best first book for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Labriola Centre American Indian National Book Award, and the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Monograph Prize.

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Kwagiulth and Stó:lō mezzo soprano Marion Newman (she/her), also has English, Irish and Scottish settler heritage.  She “sings with rich, opulent tone, and her delivery pulses with the multiple meanings of her duplicitous existence.” (Opera News) Roles include Rosina and Carmen, Dr. Wilson in Missing and she was nominated for a Dora Award in the title role of Shanawdithit. Marion is a member of the Indigenous Advisory Council of the Regina Symphony, sits on the advisory board of the Canadian Music Centre of BC, the Association for Opera in Canada and is part of the Circle of Indigenous Artists for the Canadian Opera Company. Marion is always working on rising to the expectations of her talented and respected colleagues who continue to give her opportunities to share her voice as a speaker, teacher, facilitator, dramaturg and as a Co-Founder of Amplified Opera. Marion is the host of Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC radio, where she hopes to continue raising the profiles of her Canadian colleagues.

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T. Patrick Carrabré is a Métis composer living in Vancouver. Construction of identity and community engagement are long-term themes in his compositions, concert and radio programming, and administrative activities. His best-known works include Inuit Games, for katajjak (throat singers) and orchestra, which was a recommended work at the International Rostrum of Composers (2003), Sonata No. 1, The Penitent, for violin and piano, and From the Dark Reaches, which were nominated for JUNO awards, and A Hammer For Your Thoughts… which won a Western Canadian Music Award (Best Classical Composition). Recent work includes Snewíyalh tl’a Staḵw (Teachings of the Water), written in collaboration with the Elektra Women’s Choir and Orpheus (1), written in collaboration with pianist Megumi Masaki – both will be released digitally in the 2021-2022 season.

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Jisgang Nika Collison belongs to the Kaay’ahl Laanas clan of the Haida Nation. She is executive director and principal curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Llnagaay and has worked in the field of arts, culture and heritage for more than 20 years. Deeply committed to reconciliation, Nika is a senior negotiator for Haida repatriation initiatives, pursuing reparation and relationships with mainstream museums and other institutions on a global scale. Collison currently serves on the Royal BC Museum’s board of directors and its Indigenous advisory and advocacy committee, the American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall restoration advisory table, and the Canadian Museum Association’s Reconciliation Council.

Nika consults, publishes and lectures internationally. Her recent publications include The Indigenous Repatriation Handbook (Royal BC Museum, 2019) and Athlii Gwaii: Upholding Haida Law at Lyell Island (Council of the Haida Nation, 2018). Collison is a recipient of the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology from the AAA Council for Museums Anthropology for her work in repatriation and Indigenous scholarship and was named one of the top 10 Cultural Professionals for 2017 by the BC Museums Association. Collison is a traditional signer who has led the ceremonial Haida dance group, Hltaaxuulang Guud Ad K’aajuu, for over 20 years. She is a life-long Nation-based scholar of all things Haida and holds a financial management diploma from the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

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Dr. Robin R.R. Gray (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2015) is Ts’msyen and Mikisew Cree, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Gray held a 2-year University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research centres primarily on the politics of Indigeneity in settler colonial contexts such as Canada, USA, New Zealand and Australia. As a socio-cultural anthropologist and Indigenous studies scholar, Dr. Gray employs critical ethnographic, community-based, Indigenous and intersectional methodologies in the study and presentation of knowledge, power, culture and society. Dr. Gray’s current research projects focus on the repatriation of Ts’msyen songs from archives, and foundational issues related to the preservation, management, ownership, access and control of Indigenous cultural heritage. She is working on a book manuscript titled, Indigenous Repatriation: Law, Property and Nationhood. In it she is analyzing various forms of Indigenous repatriation to interrogate the colonial power dynamics engendered by the transformation of Indigenous cultural heritage into the property of people, states and institutions unrelated to the source community. Theoretically, it necessarily confronts the contested sites of archives, museums, law, ethnographic collecting practices, cultural appropriation, collective memory, intellectual property issues, and Indigenous rights, while it also disrupts totalizing discourses of Indigeneity, nationhood, property and heritage—including the concept of repatriation itself. 

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An Anishinaabe composer and violist, Melody McKiver (they/them) is “changing the way we think about the viola” (CBC). Praised for their “unique and captivating world of sound” (Exclaim), Melody is a compelling solo performer currently based in Brandon MB, Treaty #2 where they are an Assistant Professor of Music Composition with the Brandon University School of Music. Their work integrates electronics with Western classical music to shape a new genre of Anishinaabe compositions. Melody is a recurring participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Indigenous Classical Music Gatherings. They are the 2020 recipient of the Robert Fleming Prize, awarded annually by the Canada Council of the Arts to an exceptionally talented young Canadian composer. Melody holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from Memorial University and a BFA in Music from York University. When not working in music, Melody is passionate about learning Anishinaabemowin, cycling, canoeing, and Anishinaabe plant medicines and food sovereignty.

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Jessica McMann is an Alberta-based Cree (Cowessess First Nation, SK), multi-disciplinary artist. She interweaves land, Indigenous identity, history, and language throughout her dance and music creation/performance practice. A classically trained flutist, she holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Calgary and an MFA in Contemporary Arts from Simon Fraser University.  Her work fuses together traditional language and dance with her own contemporary experiences as an Indigenous woman and Two-Spirit person. Jessica currently resides in Cochrane, Alberta, where she works for the City of Calgary as Curator of Indigenous Art. She is also co-founder and co-director of Wild Mint Arts, an Indigenous arts company.

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Taqralik Partridge (Inuk) is a writer, spoken word poet and curator originally from Kuujjuaq, NU. She is Director of the Nordic Lab, a branch of Galerie SAW Gallery in Ottawa, ON, that hosts residencies, exhibitions, workshops, panel discussions, performances and off-site projects that aim to advance contemporary Indigenous artistic expression in Canada and internationally by bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from Canada’s North and South, as well as other circumpolar nations.

Partridge’s writing focuses on both life in the north and in southern urban centres, as well as the experiences of Inuit. She also incorporates throat singing into her live performances. Her performance work has been featured on CBC radio one and her writing has been reproduced in Swedish and French language translations. She has toured with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano and with Les productions Troublemakers under the direction of Cinematheque Quebecoise composer Gabriel Thibaudeau. Her short story Igloolik, published in Maisonneuve magazine, won first prize in the 2010 Quebec Writing Competition and has been published in Swedish and French.

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(They/Them: Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) Olivia Shortt is a Tkarón:to-based trans-disciplinary performing artist. They are a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, administrator, and producer. They made their Australian debut in 2017, performing new Canadian and Australian works for saxophone and Ondes Martenot, in Melbourne, with keyboardist Jacob Abela; They made their Lincoln Center debut in 2018 in New York City, performing Michael Pisaro’s A Wave and Waves, with the International Contemporary Ensemble; they made their film debut, acting and playing saxophone, in acclaimed filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; and recorded an album with their duo Stereoscope, consisting of Robert Lemay’s composition Fragments Noirs two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (an underground laboratory specializing in Neutrinos and dark matter physics in Northern Ontario, Canada). Their own performance-art-storytelling-work has been featured at Native Earth’s Performing Arts’ Weesageechak Festival, Upintheair Theatre’s e-Volver Festival, Paprika Festival and the Vector Festival.

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Jason Young is a Cree-Métis Composer from Northern Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Music (Honours) from Carleton University and a Masters in Composition from the University of Ottawa. As a University of Calgary Ph.D. Candidate specializing in Composition he has served as both a Graduate Assistant and Lecturer. He is currently operating as an Indigenous advisor for the University of Calgary Equity Diversity Inclusion and Decolonization Committee and the Canadian Music Centre’s Accountability for Change and Indigenous Advisory Councils. In 2019 he was awarded the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for his research on Indigenous culture which encompasses aspects of Cree storytelling, ceremony and song as inspiration for a new creative work. The cultural focus of his studies is that of his ancestral Mushkegowuk (Moose) Cree heritage. J. Alex Young feels to reflect a musical unity between his Indigenous Cree and Western heritage that a unity of self, community, land and spirit must be maintained; thus his compositions are often combinatory sonic and narrative explorations of his personal connection to home, family, story and spirituality.