Onstage, Jeremy Dutcher sings in a deep, yearning tenor. On the phone, he giggles as he attempts to choose his favourite of Canada’s natural sites, considering options around the country before giving up.
“I’m very, very fortunate as a musician. We get to see a lot of the country that I don’t think a lot of people always get to,” Dutcher says. “There’s a lot of beautiful places out there.”
But the pianist’s heart will always be in Wolastokuk, or Fredericton, N.B., where he grew up as a member of Tobique First Nation. For centuries, it’s been the home of the Wolastoqiyik, or “people of the beautiful river:” both the land and the community are named for the Wolastoq, or Saint John River, that winds up from the Bay of Fundy.
Honouring the language is central to Dutcher’s work. His 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, integrated century-old wax cylinder recordings of traditional songs, while 2023’s Motewolonuwok featured new songs in both English and Wolastoqey. Both won the Polaris Prize. Dutcher says there are fewer than 100 people left who are fluent in Wolastoqey, also known as Maliseet-Passamaquoddy.
“Our Elders say ‘the language is the land, and the land is the language,’ ” he says. “There are certain words in our language that are really an onomatopoeia for what we’re hearing. For example, the word for bird or birds is ‘sipsisok.’ You can kind of hear the flutter of their wings.”
Along with working on a horror movie score, Dutcher has performances coming up in Canada and beyond. After playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on June 21, the Two-Spirit musician will head to Norway for a Pride gig, before summer festivals in Elora, Ont., and Dawson City, Yukon. Next, some stops in Japan, followed by concerts in Prince George, Vernon and Oliver, B.C., this fall.
Each trip is a chance to witness even more of the world’s natural beauty. When we connected with Dutcher, he told us what he’s seen so far.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity — all opinions are the subject’s own.
To just pick one is to do a disservice to the rest. I was just in Iqaluit, Nvt., for the first time, at -40 C. The land is really inspiring, but it’s the people everywhere that really light me up. Last summer, I was in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and that was another place that took my breath away.
For me, to be around mountains is awe inspiring. I just got back from the Banff Centre for the Arts, which is nestled within the mountains. It’s dry as hell. My lips and my skin were in a riot. But it was so beautiful, it’s just really stunning.
Sorry, I couldn’t pick one.
Last summer, I played an Indigenous music festival among the Sami people, the Indigenous people of Scandinavia. This concert was in northern Norway. To get to fly into the fjords and then take a bus all throughout the mountains — the way that water meets rock, I’ll remember that for a long time. It’s really stunning up there. We got to go out on the water in these see-through kayaks, so we’re able to really watch what’s above and below. That was a really special time.
It’s probably gonna be kill moose. They’re so nice and fuzzy but like, kill a salmon, you feed your family, kill a moose, you feed your community for a month. Sorry, moose.
Beavers are not so friendly. But I feel like I could get him on my side. Marry him and work on him.
I’ve already kissed the cod, so why not do it again?
This is going to be a bit of a sideways answer, but hear me out. It is a climate solution, but it’s also something that’s really near and dear to my heart. About three years ago, my mother, Lisa Perley-Dutcher, and some members of our community started the first language immersion school for the Wolastoqey language, Kehkimin. It’s on this beautiful lake. The whole philosophy is that our language can’t really be learned in a classroom like a European language. You need to go out and experience the land and have a relationship in order for the language to come.
They go out and walk with Elders every day. It’s this beautiful reframing of educational space, environmentalism and how it’s really connected with language. These young people are having a deepened relationship with place and space through language and through community connectivity. For me, this is the most beautiful and grassroots way of enabling our land defenders.
My quick and flippant answer is Mark fucking Carney.
My other answer is me. I mean that like the royal me — wait, it’s the royal ‘we,’ isn’t it? All of us could be doing better.
But also Mark Carney. Our leadership, who have been democratically elected, are not moving with what the majority of the country would like — which is not to see our beautiful lands put in danger with pipeline projects. It’s really out of step with the direction a lot of us know we need to be going. This is what the land has been telling us.
Listen to the ones that are speaking from a place of knowledge and that are in relationship with this place in a way that we’re not. I saw the movie Yintah a couple weeks ago. It’s about the Wet’suwet’en land disputes. It’s really a cool insight on us being strong in who we are as sovereign Indigenous people and speaking for this place, how that can actually have a tangible impact on these resource projects. We can say no. And when we do say no, it’s been affirmed in the courts again and again and again, from Delgamu’ukw to the Marshall decisions. We have a right to say what happens in our unceded territories and — how did I get on this trip?
Oh, Mark Carney. I don’t know that he has that good intention. The ways in which I’ve heard him speak have been like ‘drill, baby, drill.’ That feels regressive to me.
We’re so sick, we’re so gender sick. The same functions and institutions that seek to suppress our women and girls are a detriment to all. That weight sits heavy on all.
The aggression and extractive mentalities that are so much of what we’re seeing in masculine presentation today — I don’t think they’re actually a fundamental part of a healthy masculinity, but I do think this state we find ourselves in, there’s a violence to it. It’s not surprising to me that it bears out in research.
There is a mentality which values accumulation, whether that’s of resources or of capital. In order to accumulate vast capital, you need to do something to the land. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of men doing this — which is not to say that there aren’t female CEOs and oil executives that are doing bad by the globe. Any group that thinks that it can take, take, take, without offering and replanting and re-sowing: if we let our societies be run by this particular kind of person, we find ourselves in this place, which is our Earth crying out for something else. And I think a lot of people are too.
The province that I come from, New Brunswick, for the last eight years we had an Irving oil executive as our premier, but now we have a Liberal woman in and I wonder if that might change the nature of how we think about land and space and place, rematriate our society. I think this is also a climate solution, to encourage our strong women into leadership.
The logics and philosophies that got us into this place — extractive mentalities and patriarchy and all of these heavy things — they’re not going to be the same methodology that get us out of it. We need to fundamentally rethink the spaces of power and who gets to speak.
Outdoor everything. Yes.
I have a bad habit of smoking and I used to be a little careless with the butts. And a friend said ‘hey, dogs eat those up sometimes and it makes them quite sick. My dog got sick that way.’
What might feel like a small form of littering, when we think about our size and the size of those around us, we should try to walk lightly all the time. This is such a small, stupid example, but I try to take a little thing to put my butts in so I can dispose of them.
For me, it’s less about trying to change anybody’s mind, but about being a little more vocal about what’s in my mind. Trying to let that shine towards people and offer them solutions, too.
I was talking about the school earlier, with my mother. After Canadians started to have a lot of conversations about residential schools and survivors, people wanted to help. They want to be part of the solution, to make our society more equitable. But it feels intangible, because for so long, they haven’t had relationships with Indigenous people. What I’ve realized telling people about this school is they want to put their energy, their good, their spirit, towards something that can help heal.
I really feel like that’s the work we need to be doing right now, rather than giving anybody advice.
Sometimes in the fall my friend Melody McIver, this amazing Anishinaabe violist and Earth-worker, they gather this beautiful food called manoomin, what in English people call wild rice. It’s harvested in the Great Lakes, it actually grows right on that lake water. You go in your canoe and you have these sticks and you hit those grains of rice into your boat. It’s a real process, but it’s a beautiful one. I haven’t been in a couple years to go up and rice with my friend Melody, but that’s such a strong memory for me.
So I have to stick with the Great Lakes. They’re beautiful. They feed us, both in our spirit and literally, with the rice in our bodies, too.
Probably my hand drum. It was passed down to me, so it’s been around for a really long time. Old things, whether it’s objects or people or ideas, we need to be careful with them and we need to protect them and we need to go slow and we need to listen. Old things always remind me to be mindful.
It has to be the Atlantic. I’m an East Coast person, through and through and through. Not many places feel like home other than the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. I long for that place all the time, but I live in Montreal for now.
It’s my oldest brother, Shane Perly-Dutcher. He’s a beautiful artist and metalsmith. We are 14 years apart. He was very much taking me around as a young person and showing me how to work with the land, harvesting red willow roots and stripping bark. We’d go around and harvest and pick fiddleheads. That helped me to not just think about the land as abstract, that only a national park is a sacred place. No, it’s all sacred. The side of the road over there is sacred too. This is all beautiful land. He showed me that.
There’s a restaurant in Vancouver called Salmon n’ Bannock, and they have a salmon sampler. You can try salmon done in like six different ways and it is insanity. One of them is a maple salmon situation. Ever since then, I’m like, why choose? We can do both.
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