They are classics by Pink Floyd, Queen and Metallica such as you’ve by no means heard them. Translated into her Inuit language, singer Elisapie makes use of them to convey the hopes and trauma of Canada’s Indigenous individuals.
“It’s funny — it’s an album of covers but it’s my most personal album,” the award-winning singer, whose full title is Elisapie Isaac, instructed AFP throughout a visit to Paris.
Elisapie, 46, grew up in Salluit, a small village in Nunavik, the northernmost area of Quebec, accessible solely by aircraft from the large cities.
She already had a following in Canada for her mix of folks, pop and conventional Inuit music.
But her new album of covers entitled “Inuktitut”, the language of her area, has introduced a glut of recent followers internationally — not least after Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich shared her light however emotional model of their hit “The Unforgiven” (renamed “Isumagijunnaitaungituq”) on social media.
The metallic band was a supply of launch for Elisapie rising up.
“Metallica were like our big brothers. They protected us for the duration of a song, telling us: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re sad, if you want to scream,'” she recalled.
Elisapie additionally acquired a private message from Blondie singer Debbie Harry, praising her cowl of their 1979 hit “Heart of Glass” (“Uummati Attanarsimata”).
Like many Indigenous communities in Canada, hers stays haunted by reminiscences of the residential faculties into which hundreds of youngsters had been compelled from the nineteenth century proper as much as the Nineties.
Abuse was widespread and kids had been banned, typically violently, from talking their ancestral languages or practising their traditions — a system now condemned as “cultural genocide”.
Other songs on the album embrace covers of The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horse” (“Qimmijuat”), Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” (“Qimatsilunga”) and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (“Qaisimalaurittuq”).
The latter is especially poignant for Elisapie, bringing to thoughts the various Inuit individuals misplaced to suicide, together with her personal cousin.
“All the music that I listened to when I was young in the 1980s brought back warm, dancing memories,” she stated.
“But it also awakened everything that was happening around us — the effects of colonisation, sedentarisation… residential schools. Everything that made my people suffer,” Elisapie stated, who has additionally labored as a social employee, activist and journalist.
She described her area’s excessive suicide fee because the “Arctic pandemic” and recalled how her cousin had failed to seek out her place in a world torn between custom and modernity, finally taking her personal life.
The album is designed to heal outdated wounds but in addition deliver hope to a group that has “been so ignored, as if no one lives in our northern regions, as if it’s just a big white wall,” Elisapie stated.
“This record is meant to say that we are good, that we are beautiful, that we are worth something, that we can be listened to,” she added.
© 2023 AFP