Songs at Rites of Passage by First Nations

Across North America this weekend, concerts and other celebrations are being held to commemorate the 90th birthday of American folk music mentor Pete Seeger.

In the 1970's Seeger wrote a letter to youth of the world, urging them to look into their own musical traditions even as they liked to follow American music. Since then, the output of Canadian singer songwriters has continued to increase. A growing, essential voice comes from Canada's aboriginal artists, to whom Seeger's suggestion is especially appropriate.

Buffy Sainte-Marie was among the first of these to emerge, in a spread that now includes Susan Aglukard, Mishi Donovan, Shannon Thunderbird, Courtney Jourdain and others. The strength of women in this list parallels female strength in the mainstream. Canadian music industry

For three generations Canadian children grew up with this song in schools and summer camps:

Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver
There’s where the mighty moose wanders at will

Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more
Boom da de ah-da Boom da de ah-da Boom da de ah-da boom.

Down in the forest glade, deep in the meadow
My heart cries out to thee, hills of the north

Blue lake and rocky shore…

High on a rocky ledge I’ll build my wigwam
Close by the waters’ edge, silent and still

Blue lake and rocky shore …

It is generally presented as an “Indian” song, just as “Mother Earth” is assumed to be an aboriginal concept.. Neither is of First Nations origin. Yet both are attempts to understand the aboriginal spirit of organic connection to the land.

There are examples of words spoken and sung by first nations leaders in their lives, and in those of the people they led. There is the legendary account of Chief Seattle’s farewell speech to his people on Puget Sound. This has undergone embellishment over the years.

More likely authentic is the dirge composed by Crowfoot, Great Chief of the Blackfoot Confederacy on the Alberta plains, and chanted by those around him during his passing:

A little while and I will be gone from among you.Whither, I cannot tell. From nowhere we came;into nowhere we go.

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Another and more recent is the inscription at the U’mista cultural centre at Alert Bay on tiny Cormorant Island near the northeast tip of Vancouver Island in Johnston Strait. The image of the firefly appears again. But while Crowfoot holds it as an image of Life, the Nation speaking here rejects it as a self-description:

Smoke has risen above our big houses unbroken through time.
Masks have been worn and dances performed again and again.

We are not like the firefly’s flash but like the eternal waters surrounding our land
Canoes have always carried our people and traditions back and forth.

Our elders carry our hearts and our souls from the long remembered past Into a widening future where our children await…

It is important that first peoples speak to us in their own words and voices. When white artists attempt to portray First Nations experiences, it is important that these be “run by” those they describe, just as we would do in translating a document into another language.

Meanwhile, on both sides of the “medicine line”—the aboriginal name for the Canada-US border—First Nations culture is flourishing as never before since its suppression by Europeans.