In Aunties Sing: Music is Medicine, Sandy Scofield joins in sharing matriarchal wisdom
Métis artist’s moving new CD Red Earth celebrates resilience and mourns Indigenous losses, from Tina Fontaine to theatre artist Taran Kootenhayoo
Through music, art, and connecting with Métis and Indigenous culture, Sandy Scofield has learned to live with her losses—and not only live with them, but grow.
VIMHouse presents Aunties Sing: Music is Medicine at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Friday, November 18.
AS THE BRUTAL Captain said in the film Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is failure to communicate.”
And so it’s both odd and amusing that despite having known Sandy Scofield ever since she was the guitar-playing half of Cajun party-music duo the Crimpolines, she and I still got tripped up when we convened to talk about Aunties Sing: Music is Medicine, her upcoming concert with fellow veterans Helene Duguay and Dalannah Gail Bowen.
The problem is linguistic, and cultural. I, having been born in the U.K., say “onties”. Scofield says “antis”. But we soon figured that out.
There’s another area of possible confusion that we should clear up, however, which is that to Scofield, who’s Métis, “aunties” means something quite different than the settler conception of the term.
“For Indigenous people, your first cousins are like your siblings, and their children are your nieces and nephews,” she explains. “And we don’t say ‘my second cousin twice removed’, or anything like that. We’re all cousins, right? So the concept of ‘auntie’, it’s the same thing. Your grandmother’s sisters, they’re grandmas. And aunties are just all the women that are of the older generation. They don’t even have to be your family; we’re all connected.”
In the context of this Friday’s show, sponsored by VIMHouse (the Vancouver Independent Music Centre), the three senior artists will be dispensing matriarchal wisdom in song, just as Scofield does on her freshly released and long-awaited CD, Red Earth.
It’s an album that the veteran singer-songwriter was initially trepidatious about releasing—not because of its content, but because of its length.
“I felt a little insecure about the running time,” Scofield admits, noting that after her recording sessions were complete, she decided to remove four finished songs from the playlist. “I just felt, thematically, that I didn’t want them on there,” she says.
That was probably a wise choice. As is, Red Earth is a powerful collection of songs about loss, love, endurance, and redemption, packing more feeling into its 30 minutes than many artists can access in a lifetime. Scofield sets the tone right away with opening track “Traveller”. A collaboration with Haida Gwaii–based Kinnie Starr, it incorporates the honest and painful lines “I have no children you can see/Cause trauma had a hold of me.”
“I don’t have children, and that’s why,” she explains. “I had four pregnancies, but I don’t have any children because I saw the generational trauma in my family at every turn and I thought it’s going to end with me. I paid a high price for that decision, because it’s a big angst in my life today that I don’t have that family. At holidays, all the people my age go to be with their kids and their grandkids and all that, and I don’t have that. But I could not have had those children; history would have repeated itself, because I didn’t have anybody, coming up.”
Scofield doesn’t go into that childhood trauma, but she describes her mother as “very disturbed” and her father as “a son-of-a-bitch”. And yet the very next song on Red Earth, “DNA”, is a love song to her dad that’s both an acknowledgement of the darkness in their relationship and an expression of her hope that they will reconcile in the afterlife. “You are my home/You live in my veins/You are my bones, my DNA,” she sings.
Other losses are honoured in “Hummingbirds”, dedicated to murdered Indigenous youth Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine, and the especially touching “George”, which mourns for the immensely gifted Denesuliné and Stoney Nakoda actor, playwright, and community organizer Taran Kootenhayoo, who was only 27 when he died last New Year’s Eve. When Scofield sings “I sit and write this song/about how you make me feel/like I belong”, she’s not just releasing her own grief, but giving voice to the many younger artists that Kootenhayoo had inspired.
“When he passed there were so many posts of people saying ‘You made me feel part of this. You made me relax. You made me feel like I belonged to the group,’” she explains. “They were about his ability with people to instantly defuse any tension and make them feel comfortable. And ‘all the songs you sang with me’: this is a reference to [Nlaka'pamux playwright and director] Kevin Loring hiring me as musical director and composer for these plays with the Lytton community, the Nlaka'pamux people—and I’m so sorry that they’ve stopped now, obviously, with the crisis of losing the village. But part of that was me teaching Taran these [traditional] songs.”
“I was very moved when he passed away,” she adds, “and that song came out right away."
Red Earth is not, however, a one-sided plunge into loss and mourning. Despite its sombre title, “Black Crow” is a relatively upbeat account of surviving the end of a relationship, and two more traditionally styled Indigenous songs, Ray Thunderchild’s “Maskihkiy” and Scofield’s own “Nipiy”, are glorious expressions of resilience. Through music, art, and connecting with Métis and Indigenous culture, Scofield has learned to live with her losses—and not only live with them, but grow.
“One thing I’ve discovered is that you have to go through the pain to get out of it,” she says. “The more you try to avoid it, the more it just stays. If you have some grief and sadness and stuff like that, you’ve got to deal with it; you’ve got to feel it. But then when you’re out the other side, you never have to deal with it again.”
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