The 27-year-old -- who is a member of the Tobique First Nations in northwestern New Brunswick, and studied music in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- doesn't believe this music should be “collecting dust on a museum shelf,” so he took five years to painstakingly put this album together, transcribing Wolastoq songs more than a century-old — once banned from being performed in public due to the Canadian government's discriminatory Indian Act from 1876 — to re-introduce them to the world.
Dutcher sat down with Billboard over sweetgrass tea at Toronto's NishDish, a traditional Anishinaabe restaurant, to chat about the album, give us a history lesson — and teach us some Wolastoq language basics. Be sure to try them on him if you see his show in New York at Joe's Pub, May 4.
To start with, there's about 60 different Aboriginal languages Canada and Cree is the biggest with 83,000 speakers, according to Statistic Canada, 2011.
Cree is the biggest linguistic group, for sure, followed by Anishinaabemowin, which is the Ojibway [19,000], or what's spoken around here, and then Inuktitut.
Do they have commonalities?
Oh yeah. It's like the language groups in Europe. Think about the romantic languages like French and Italian, they're so close together because geographically they came out of the same area. It's similar here too, I can't fully understand what they speak here, but you notice certain words, like our word for “bear” is the same.
Was it important in your family to learn your native language?
Definitely. I'm from New Brunswick originally, so that's on the east coast of Canada. My mother spoke the language growing up, and she understood the importance of passing that on to us,
If I'm going to be talking to you about an album you made to preserve and expand your language, then I should know how to pronounce Wolastoq.
Wool-las-took. The language, is Wolastoqey wool-las-two-gway. The name of the river is Wolastoq and the name of my people, “The People of the River,” is Wolastoqiyik, [pronounced] Willisto-wee-ek, and that's the first word of the record title. So the name of the record is Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonaw — wool-las-two-wi-ig lint-two-wah-gun-ah-wa.
How does it compare to the English language in terms of consonants and vowels, and how many words you have?
It came out of a different hemisphere than English did, so even the ways that we think about the world and how we position ourselves within the world are different. It's hard to explain for somebody that doesn't speak the language, but it's just a totally different positionality in how we see the world in the language. That's why it's important for us to hang on to that too.
The elders say that our language comes from the land; it's intimately tied. You see a tree, but I don't see a tree; I see a ƏpƏsiyik [pron. oposiyik]. I see the world in a different way based on the way that I speak and the way that I experience things. We have like 20 different words to describe that tree — in the bark, in certain times of season. So much to say that there's an intimate relationship between language and land.
For me, as a young person with access to that language, a lot of young people don't speak my language in our community, I was very fortunate in that my mother was able to pass on some, and through this record I've been able to double down on my efforts in revitalizing our language and I've been working with our stories, and telling our stories in the language.
Your family and the elders must be thrilled.