Singer-songwriter Leela Gilday reconnects with the land and reflects on a year of reckoning
Appearing at this year’s online Mission Folk Music Festival, the Dene artist sings of hard truths and resilience
Photo by Pat Kane
The Mission Folk Music Festival: Folk at Home presents Leela Gilday in a free online concert streaming July 24 at about 8:10 pm, and then on view to September 1. The fest streams from July 23 to 25.
LAST MONTH, LEELA Gilday’s acceptance of the Indigenous Artist of the Year prize was a highlight of the Juno Awards online broadcast. It wasn’t just the giddy screaming and hugging you could see exploding in her Yellowknife living room, but the inspiring speech that acknowledged “a hard year”.
“I’m so proud to stand here shoulder-to-shoulder with people who tell our truths, and tell our hard truths, but also celebrate our resilience,” she said, barely containing her emotion. “This is a time of reckoning!”
The Dene singer-songwriter has expressed those truths and that resilience through her music for more than 25 years—as she will in a streamed concert presented by the Mission Folk Music Festival this weekend. But with long months of reconnecting with her land, her language, and her people in the Northwest Territories during the pandemic, she sees hopeful signs of the larger world finally taking note.
“When I say we’re in a time of reckoning, it’s because our equilibrium has been upset during this pandemic,” the singer tells Stir over the phone from one of the North’s endless summer days of the Midnight Sun, in a conversation driven by the same passion for art and politics that fuels her music. “I think it’s a time where people can take the time to reflect on what really matters and what the truth of the matter is. If you realize the country you live in has a very dark history—and not just history, but these are current realities that Indigenous people face—then maybe it might change the way you live or your attitude or your heart in some way.
“I tend to focus on resilience, because the narratives about Indigenous people in the mainstream are so negative. I think it’s important to be aware of the negative things: the truth needs to be told even the hard truths,” she adds. “But at the same time I feel it’s important to point out that we’re still here. The power and the resilience for a people to survive legislated policies, genocidal policies to wipe out our families is remarkable and its a story that needs to be told in different ways and be celebrated. I think in my songs it’s apparent that I’m inspired by that strength and resilience.”
The importance of her heritage and identity have come into even more relief as Gilday takes a prolonged break from performing concerts all over the world. She admits to missing her band and singing in front of live audiences. But Gilday, who was born in Délįne, Northwest Territories, has spent the past year and a half studying her mother tongue, and reconnecting with the Dene heritage. She’s even been working on a new album in the Dene language, which she didn’t learn growing up: “The sounds are in my brain and in my body—it’s been so much of a journey,” she says.
Gilday has been just as eager to reconnect with Yellowknife’s dramatic landscape on the edge of Great Slave Lake. She’s often written about its wilderness—look no further than her ode to frosty landscapes, Northern Lights, and endless sky in her video for the soulful “Falling Stars”. But she hasn’t had this much time to spend in Denedeh (the Dene lands) for many years.
“I love summertime so much! It’s so fleeting for us that you really feel every single day how amazing it is to see the land become so lush and all the trees,” she enthuses. “My favourite thing is to go out on the lake, because water is so powerful. And we live beside a huge body of water, one of the biggest in the world. In fact, when I go to other lakes down south, they're so small, and you can sort of see right across them. It’s like, ‘What is this? This is not a lake!’
“I’ve definitely had more of an opportunity during the past year to go fishing, to go swimming and relax,” she adds. “In the fall we go berry picking on the islands. It calls to mind that ancient connection that we have, not just a Dene, but as humans: I think we’re all very connected to the land and the water, but we often forget that.”
Though she is currently perched 400 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, Gilday, as ever, is tuned in to current events across Canada and the world. She has long spoken out and sung about the legacy of colonialism and residential schools; her own mother is a survivor of residential school. On her latest album, 2019’s North Star Calling, her song "K'eintah Natse Ju," chronicles the devastating aftermath of those injustices on families, and calls for healing through the refrain of “natse ju”.
Within this context, the artist feels strongly about avoiding words like “discovery” and “news” when it comes to the hundreds of graves that have recently been uncovered in Kamloops, and now at other residential-school sites across the country.
“I learned about it [the unmarked graves] 10 or 15 years ago listening to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” she says. “There were lots of stories of kids dying and not coming home. These ‘discoveries’ are not news to most of us in the Indigenous community. I grieve with those families and this has been really, really tough.
“But overall, seeing not just mainstream people but the government reaction to the graves being uncovered has been really powerful,” she adds. “In a way I think it’s opened a lot of dialogue. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had 94 calls to action and that was released over five years ago. Where is the action on those calls to action?”
On social media this year, Gilday called for Canada Day to be put on hold. Amid the big issues she wants addressed: clean drinking water for all Indigenous communities; for the government to stop spending millions of dollars fighting Indigenous people in court; for land and water rights to be given back to First Peoples; for child services to stop removing so many Indigenous children from their homes.
Gilday will continue to speak out, in arts-and-reconciliation workshops and in her lyrics. But her messages of resilience also carry through in the blazing warmth and power of her voice. Like the North Star she sings about, her music becomes its own radiant beacon.
“In the North, at the drum dances, there’s something in that power of music and the beat of the drums: the way the men are singing and all the people in the circle sing as well--it’s just so uplifting,” Gilday reflects. “I guess, for me, I try to echo that power and the feeling of unity in my music.”
Related Articles
