Renae Morriseau shares Indigenous songs and sisterhood, as M'Girl opens Firehall's Music in the Courtyard concerts
Protocols and a sense of responsibility power the rhythm of hand drums and rousing harmonies
Renae Morriseau
Firehall Arts Centre and the Vancouver Independent Music Centre present M’Girl on July 30 as part of the Music in the Courtyard series.
FOR MORE THAN 15 years, the Indigenous women of M’Girl have been performing rousing harmonies with percussive hand-drums.
As members have shifted over that time, the mainstay has been Renae Morriseau, the well-known Vancouver Cree and Sauteaux artist who moves fluidly between music, theatre, film, television, and storytelling.
“M’Girl changes constantly, but the reason I'm sticking around is most of the songs have been gifted to me,” Morriseau tells Stir in a phone interview.
Though she also writes her own traditional music, Morriseau receives many social and ceremonial songs, from people from the Cree, Anishnaabe, Nlaka’pamux, and other nations. Those gifts range from “Warrior Woman”, the anthem for missing and murdered Indigenous women by Lil'wat elder Martina Pierre, to songs from the Lytton First Nation’s late Shirley James, to the ceremonial “Honour Song” from Morriseau’s late brother, Frank.
“There’s a responsibility we hold when we hold songs from different nations,” Morriseau explains. “I hold an accountability and responsibility to that community. When I perform each song, I explain what the song is—that it’s all about land and water, our relationship with the natural world and our community.
“My protocol is that, when I sing a song, I have to let the people know, the witnesses know, where that song comes from, who created that song, and what that song represents,” she continues. “I could go on forever about each of the songs: for every one of those songs there is a story behind why it was created.”
Audiences at the opening concert in the Firehall Arts Centre’s Music in the Courtyard series will hear those tales in the first set of M’Girl’s performance, featuring artists Michelle Bardach and Sherryl Sewepegaham, with Beaver Thomas on guitar. The second set spotlights original music and covers by each of the singers.
Morriseau’s sense of protocol carries through to ushering new members into the group. When Bardach, a Coast Salish Indigenous singer, actor, and writer from the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw and We Wai Kai Nation, joined recently, Morriseau, as she always does, gave the newcomer one of her ceremonial medicine bags.
“In my little medicine bags, I have the four medicines: the tobacco, the cedar, the sweet grass, and the sage,” she explains. “So the sweet grass and the tobacco I get from home, the Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba; the sage is growing in my garden; and usually the cedar is from Vancouver, from the Coast Salish territory, because that's where we're at.
“When I invited Michelle into the space to learn these songs, I gifted her that so she could hold these songs in a good way, and in a way that feeds her soul or her spirit,” she adds. “Because we believe when we sing our songs that we call upon our ancestors.”
And so it is that a M’Girl performance transcends a regular concert experience. The fact that this concert is taking place live and in-person, amid a year of reckoning around the legacies of colonialism and residential schools, gives it extra resonance. These are not new issues for the evolving sisterhood of M’Girl, of course; look at least as far back as the wakeup call of the 2011 video for “Eyes Wide Open”, directed by Morriseau and featuring inspiring scenes of education and language reclamation (see below).
“One of the things, when we talk about reconciliation in a bigger sense, is it’s really all about relationships--to be respectful, and to really be able to listen without bringing the colonial ear,” Morriseau says. “What I've learned in terms of the songs I’m creating, and the theatre I’m creating, is the ability to move past traumas to reimagine a world of love and home and harmonies.”
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