The first voice you hear on Jeremy Dutcher's debut album is his own — a rich, classically trained tenor singing in Wolastoqey over a lone piano. But before the opening track, "Mehcinut," reaches its orchestral peak, another voice rises to meet it: crackled, unadorned, like an echo pulled from the ether of history. That voice belongs to a Wolastoqiyik man recorded more than a century ago, singing a traditional melody and then describing his perspective on death and what comes after.
On the morning of Monday, Sept. 28, Dutcher will bring that story — and the ideas behind it — to the Lorne Watson Recital Hall at Brandon University. From 10 to 11:30 a.m., the JUNO and Polaris Prize-winning musician will sit for a conversation exploring Indigenous music and anthropology, touching on linguistic and cultural revitalization, archival work, and the ways music can connect people to language, history and community. The session includes time for questions from the audience. It is free, open to all, with no reserved seating — a rare chance to hear a major artist talk about ideas rather than perform a ticketed concert.
The visit comes the morning after Dutcher performs at Brandon's Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium, where he takes the stage on Sunday, Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. as part of a tour that also carries him to Calgary's National Music Centre on Sept. 30 and on to dates in Asia and the United States. The Brandon stop places him in a city marking the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation the same week; Brandon University will close for the day on Wednesday, Sept. 30.
Dutcher is a Two-Spirit song carrier, composer, activist and ethnomusicologist from Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, one of six Wolastoqiyik reserves in the province. He studied music and social anthropology at Dalhousie University. It was during that research, while pursuing his dual degree, that a community elder named Maggie Paul tipped him off to a collection of field recordings held at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec.
Those recordings — captured on wax cylinders, some of the earliest sound-capturing technology — had been made in 1907 by the anthropologist William H. Mechling, who collected the songs of Dutcher's ancestors along the St. John River basin. For decades they sat in the museum's holdings. When Dutcher finally heard them, he has said, the experience made him feel "almost outside the realm of time."
What followed was a five-year labour of love. Dutcher painstakingly transcribed and arranged the century-old Wolastoq songs, then built his own compositions around them, at times singing in tandem with the digitized voices of his ancestors. The result, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa — translated as "Our Maliseet Songs" — was self-released on April 6, 2018, sung entirely in Wolastoqey. That September it won the 2018 Polaris Music Prize, one of Canada's most prestigious music awards, decided solely on artistic merit. The following year it took the JUNO for Indigenous Music Album of the Year.
Accepting the Polaris, Dutcher addressed the crowd first in Wolastoqey — "Psiw-te npomawsuwinuwok, kiluwaw yut!" — before translating: "All of my people, this is for you!" He then told the room, "You are in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance. Are you ready to hear the truth that needs to be told?"
The stakes of that work are not abstract. Language activists within the Wolastoqiyik nation believe fewer than 100 fluent, lifelong speakers of Wolastoqey remain. Dutcher has resisted the language of decline that often surrounds such figures. "We can't bury it before it's dead," he told Exclaim! magazine. "It brings forward the importance of speaking life to something and not using words of death around something that's really precious." He points instead to what he calls a huge revitalization movement already underway.
That movement runs through his own family. The founder of the Kehkimin Immersion School, where children as young as three learn in Wolastoqey, is his mother, Lisa Perley-Dutcher. "Language has been a part of my family conversation for a long time," Dutcher has said. His mother's generation, he has noted, was the one that attended residential schools, where students were beaten for speaking their first language. "That time is done. That time is over," he has said. "Now we're in a beautiful time when we're sharing ourselves. We're not ashamed anymore."
One deliberate choice in the debut album speaks to his approach. Dutcher performed those songs on the JUNOS stage, at Joni Mitchell's 75th birthday party and on NPR's Tiny Desk series — and throughout, he provided no translations. That, he has said, was by design. "That was very much a project of making people uncomfortable and letting them sit in the not knowing," he explained. "It was also about a direction for the work and pointing it towards the community and saying: this is for no one else but you."
In 2023, Dutcher released his second album, Motewolonuwok, on Secret City Records — a record that blended reinterpreted traditional Wolastoqey melodies with original compositions and marked his first use of English lyrics. He now lives in Montreal.
The Brandon Q&A is presented in a recital hall within the university's Queen Elizabeth II Music Building, home to the School of Music, and follows a tradition of conversation-style appearances Dutcher has made on campus stages. For a musician whose central project is the recovery of voices that were nearly lost, the format fits: an hour and a half of talk, in a room built for listening, about what it means to carry a language forward.