The Guardian Weekly

Canada’s Indigenous rappers confront history

The horrors recently unearthed at residential schools in Canada are only the latest incident in decades of trauma for the country’s Indigenous communities. For many, rap has become a way to process the past

By Kyle Mullin

After the discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former Canadian residential schools, Drezus grew unsure about his longstanding plans to release his music video, Bless. The rapper, who is of Cree and Ojibwe heritage from the Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan province, starts the song by calling the atrocities his people have faced “an act of war”, then follows that with bar after bar of Indigenous empowerment. Unsure if that would be appropriate while his people grieved, he turned to his mother, who had attended one of those schools. Her advice? “Release it, son. We need it now.”

The boarding school system – governmentfunded, Christian church-administered – was established in Canada in the late 1800s. Its founders’ intent: to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose on them English and Christianity. About 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report in 2015 detailed nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students and 3,200 documented deaths. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease.

A greater reckoning has begun. Since May, more than 1,000 children’s unmarked graves were found at former residential school sites in the provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Such news has often caused Drezus to “break down in the past few weeks, when I look over at my family and think about what those children and their parents went through”. It also prompted him to tweet: “To grow up Native is to grow up grieving. Even when you don’t know you are.” Born Jeremiah Manitopyes, the 38-year-old rapper went to a residential school from 199697. By then, it was operated by local Indigenous counsellors who, he says, were not abusive. “They were like our uncles, or big bros,” he says.

And yet in a traumatic hazing ritual, Drezus and other young boys were forced to wear shirts emblazoned with targets before they were chased by the older students. Once caught, they would be stripped and shoved into a lineup in front of the girls’ dormitory. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers and paramedics were at the door, as if “they were standing by, just in case”, he recalls. “Everyone acted like it was in good fun. But thinking back now on how messed up it was, I can’t help but wonder: did this tradition come from something evil?”

Drezus says his grandmother’s generation contended with worse. She had to cook elaborate meals for staff, while she and her fellow Indigenous students were fed only porridge soup slop. His mother and uncle, meanwhile, were not permitted to sit next to each other at lunch or play together. “Speaking their own language was of course taboo.” Drezus sees direct parallels between those conditions and the mental health and addiction issues afflicting young Indigenous people he has worked with across Canada in his hip-hop workshops. “A lot of kids are completely shut down when it comes to social expression and being in touch with themselves. Because we lost a lot of that celebration of ourselves in these schools.”

Other Indigenous rappers also spoke out on social media immediately after the discovery of the graves. For years, these artists have addressed myriad issues gripping their communities – from rising suicide and imprisonment rates, to the lack of clean drinking water on Indigenous reserves, along with a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, not to mention waves of protests against oil and gas pipelines on Indigenous land.

One of the scene’s forebears is Karmen Omeasoo, who has rapped as HellnBack for 20 years. The Cree Nation-born, Manitoba-based MC’s latest single Kidney Warrior details his struggles with kidney failure. He aims to raise awareness about the condition, which disproportionately affects Indigenous people due to a dearth of affordable healthy food in their communities, among other factors. He and his wife, Lisa Muswagon, who is a hand-drummer, will also address the residential school graves

on a forthcoming album. A transcriber for the TRC report, Muswagon heard various accounts of residential school conditions.

HellnBack also raps about earlier atrocities – the title track from his 2018 LP, #Fourteen91, describes colonisers bearing smallpox-infested blankets – and these deep dives are also a highlight of Eekwol’s discography. One of the first female rappers in Saskatchewan’s small music scene, the MC, born Lindsay Knight, has written songs including 2004’s Too Sick, which nimbly connects domestic violence in Indigenous communities to early colonialism. That song helped her consider “intergenerational trauma” so she could clearly see “that’s why this relative drinks, or this neighbour was abused. Because trauma comes out as despair”. And yet she insists those tragedies shouldn’t stifle stories of Indigenous perseverance. Eekwol would rather call attention to female and LGBTQ Indigenous artists’ social commentary. “We are taking what we can and building it into a form of power,” she says.

That notion is seconded by T-Rhyme (Tara Campbell), a rapper with Denesuline and Northern Cree roots whom Eekwol has likened to a sister since they banded together for projects such as their 2019 album FWBW. “The focus doesn’t always need to be on our trauma, even though we are constantly triggered by the news lately,” T-Rhyme says. “But nobody can gaslight us any more – this is proof that we were [deliberately] forgotten.” Her mother had recounted being taken to a residential school and only being permitted to return for two annual holidays. T-Rhyme couldn’t “fathom somebody knocking on my door to take my six-year-old son until Christmas … It wasn’t until my kids reached that age that I processed what my mom and grandparents went through.”

FWBW features the uplifting tracks For Women by Women, and Revitalize, whose video features “pow-wows and ceremonies that show how our people are strong; that represent our Indigenous pride,” says T-Rhyme.

This is also a painfully crucial point for T-Rhyme’s friend and occasional stagemate Drezus, who raps on Bless: “They want to take my language / That’s an act of war.” He recalls his grandmother, who was barred from speaking her mother tongue at residential school. Rapping, he says, allowed him to “remove the layers of mental health issues, addiction and self-doubt. Hip-hop gave me this voice, led me to the real me and my culture, and gave me the confidence to look deep into myself.”

His rallying cry Warpath caught the attention of Black Eyed Peas’ member Taboo, who invited Drezus to the Standing Rock protests and collaborated with him on Stand Up/Stand N Rock, which won the Best Fight Against the System trophy at the 2017 MTV Video Music awards.

Another highlight was his collaboration with Grammy-winning Indigenous producer David Strickland on his remix of posse cut Rez Life, a reserve ode originally created by up-and-comers Violent Ground, brothers from the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach in the isolated northern borderlands of Quebec and Labrador.

Drezus’s lyrics include a reference to being “put in a chokehold” by RCMP officers: the now-sober rapper was inebriated to the point of defencelessness when the Mounties stopped him, but “they still beat my ass. There was obviously more to it than them just doing their job”.

Rez Life was not only cathartic for Drezus, but also Strickland (not to mention the song’s other contributors: HellnBack, Joey Stylez, Que Rock and Violent Ground). Born in suburban Toronto, the Mi’kmaw producer and engineer became known for studio work with Method Man and Drake (winning a Grammy as one of the engineers for the latter’s Take Care). After those mainstream successes, he trained his hip-hop skills on Indigenous culture, mentoring and supporting many of the community’s socially conscious MCs. His breakthrough was the 2020 compilation Spirit of Hip Hop, with traditional drummers and singers, and lyrics about Indigenous life from a who’s who of the community’s MCs.

Strickland’s support has been invaluable for Violent Ground’s Christian and Allan Nabinacaboo – AKA Naskapi9 and Nomadic. He stopped at their far north reserve on a beat-making workshop tour. Nomadic says: “Every time something hurts me, I go into my little booth and don’t think about anything but my lyrics, and how I want to express that pain.”

Violent Ground’s forthcoming Strickland collaboration is called Conquer. Naskapi9 says it is the perfect title: “They conquered us before. But now we can conquer any challenge.”

The focus doesn’t have to be on trauma, even though we are constantly triggered

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2021-08-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

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