Emerging from fire, pandemic, and floods, 2 Rivers Remix now moves its Feast of Indigenous Music & Culture to Tk’emlúps (Kamloops)
Preparing for three days of free concerts, artistic director and Melawmen Collective singer Meeka Noelle Morgan reflects on a fest she helped start in Lytton
Meeka Noelle Morgan, cofounder and artistic director of the 2 Rivers Remix Society, or 2RMX
2 Rivers Remix is at Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Pow Wow Arbour on July 7,8, and 9 from noon to 11 pm
THE TOWN OF LYTTON, BC was reduced to ashes in less than half an hour. If you saw news footage of the inferno that razed an entire community in summer 2021, it was likely iPhone video taken from inside a car as it fled through a tunnel of smoke and flame, put on repeat at the time by Canadian and then global media. A caption in the top left corner read: “Courtesy of 2 Rivers Remix Society”.
“That was our video,” says Meeka Noelle Morgan, cofounder and artistic director of the 2 Rivers Remix Society, or 2RMX, promoters of an all-Indigenous music festival that made its home in Lytton when it started back in 2018. “That was our managing producer escaping out of town with his wife, his dog, his one cat. The other cat didn’t survive because he could’t find it. And it was all within 15 minutes.” The 2 Rivers Remix Society lost an office, trailer, and all its new audio and video equipment.
Calling Stir from her home turf in Ashcroft, Morgan recalls the conditions festival organizers encountered during setup earlier in the week. “We realized it was the hottest day on Earth, the exact same temperature as Dubai,” she says. Seventy-two hours later it was all gone.
The festival emerged from the fire and then the pandemic, setting up in Cache Creek in 2022 until flooding earlier this spring forced yet another emergency relocation. Reflecting the kind of community resilience written into the very DNA of the project, 2 Rivers now brings its free three-day Feast of Indigenous Music & Culture to Tk’emlúps (Kamloops), starting July 7. For Morgan, there’s something suggestive in this confluence of fate, Indigenous history, and the festival’s dual concerns of environmental and community health. Referring to the 215-plus bodies located underground at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the same year that Lytton was wiped from the map, she says: “This year we decided our theme would be Bring the Children Home, so it’s interesting that the water literally moved us to this venue, which is adjacent to where these findings were. That was something totally beyond our control.”
For Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, Morgan notes that The Feast of Contemporary Indigenous Music & Culture (aka Tk'emlups 2 Rivers Remix) aims to spotlight “the conditions of our lives”, but certainly not at the expense of a great time. Headlining this year’s festival are Polaris and Juno-nominated rappers Snotty Nose Rez Kids along with the Halluci-Nation, led by Tim "2oolman" Hill and Ehren "Bear Witness" Thomas of pioneering ethnotronica outfit A Tribe Called Red. A proudly eclectic lineup otherwise puts topliners including Indigifunk heavyweights Curtis Clear Sky and the Constellationz on the same stage as up n’ comers like alt-country outfit the North Sound and Vancouver singer-songwriter Hayley Wallis. This year’s festival also features Keith Secola—the heartland rocker responsible for 1992’s iconic single “NDN Kars”—teaming with veterans Ritchie & the Fendermen, aka “the Uncles of Lytton.”
“They’ve been together for 50 years so they’re all grandpas,” laughs Morgan. “‘NDN Kars’ is like an anthem for that community. Dancers come out all in regalia, everyone sings, so Keith Secola’s going to sing with the Uncles. We’re making all the Uncles’ dreams come true this year.” No less legendary is Willie Thrasher, who made a ferocious return to live music with partner Linda Saddleback when his song “Spirit Child” emerged as an instant favourite on 2014’s essential release Native North American (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1965-1988, a three disc set of “lost” Indigenous recordings compiled by Vancouver journalist and DJ Kevin “Sipreano” Howes.
Snotty Nose Rez Kids and Halluci-Nation (right, photo by Rémi Thériault) are headliners at the three-day fest.
Remarkably, Morgan’s own family history is entwined with Thrasher’s and a number of other artists featured on the Grammy-nominated collection. Her aunt was married to Morley Loon, represented on the set by a haunting track from 1981 called “N’Doheeno”. “I knew of Willie Thrasher because I grew up in the realm of Indigenous music and environmental activism,” continues Morgan, who was raised in Secwepemc and Nuu-Chah-Nulth cultures, but is also part St'atimc and N'lakapamux. “My dad was chief, fighting against landfill that was bulldozed into our territory at the time, and Morley had a band called Red Cedar which included Willie Thrasher. Morley was one of my first mentors and most inspirational people in my life.”
Last year’s festival reunited 10 of the artists featured on the Native North America project (“Some of these people hadn’t played together for 50 years") which gave Morgan the opportunity to return Morley Loon’s guitar to his estranged family. “I composed many songs on that guitar,” she says, explaining that she was given the instrument when Loon’s widow passed away. “I felt like that guitar went full circle, it did its magic, because my dad and Morley used to dream about having an all Indigenous music festival, and I realized in that moment: we created it, and they were there with me, even though they weren’t anymore.”
In general, the annual festival seems charged with unusual depth and significance. “I remember watching Willie Thrasher and Morley Loon when I was eight or nine,” says Morgan. “But understand that, even then, what we were witnessing was kind of taboo. That’s how it felt. It’s still taking us a long time to accept our own existence. We’re still working on that.” As such, 2 Rivers builds on the rising awareness and appeal of Indigenous culture triggered by Native North America and the passionately-received, paradigm-shifting 2017 documentary, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, while meeting its unwritten mandate of providing "safety, tolerance, value, and love for all our people.”
“We need environments where we remind ourselves that we like to be together and that there’s power in that unity,” says Morgan, whose organization also introduced a travelling roadshow version of the festival in 2022 called A Movable Feast, “and it’s just beautiful to witness when we’re all there.” If that all sounds like 2 Rivers’ artistic director has made short work of astronomic ambition, let’s not forget that she’s also a performer. With collaborators including some of her own family members, Morgan’s band the Melawmen Collective—think spiritual trip hop with earthy roots—makes its regularly scheduled appearance at Tk’emlúps 2 Rivers Remix. Whereupon Morgan, for 45 minutes or so, can finally shed the administrative duties and nourish her soul. “As soon as I get to perform, it’s like…” she pauses, then emits a sound, impossible to transcribe, that approximates something like exhaustion mixed with pure joy. “I just giver ‘er, man. The best that we got.”
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