“A victory song/
But I don’t know what I am winning at.”
Joseph Naytowhow, from “Born From Dirt”
Subversive.
This is what he and I figured it would be if Joseph, a 67 year old Plains/Woodland Cree singer and storyteller, wrote and sang in the language that was not his own but that of the people who stole his childhood, a song specifically about his removal from his home to a Residential School, part of the ‘50’s Scoop.
I think we began in late 2017. As part of the excavation/songwriting process, my job was to create the musical framework and then be a filter for the lyric, to help discern the impact of the english phrases and see that their aim was true, and then suspend them in Western Music motifs.
His words, his story, his voice singing: that was the deal we struck and the deal we kept.
These are set into what our North American ears will hear as a “vibey track” but is, in fact, a Trojan Horse meant to deliver something to pierce the heart.
The song is aimed at us, you see, the descendants of the Orphans of Europe. Not at his kin.
I use the term excavating because song writing is often better when it is more of an archeological dig than an exercise in choosing the right words. Trusting the story…even admitting there is a story…is the best way of honouring the story. But it takes real commitment, and can be hard going, and is likely why Born From Dirt took a couple years until the dig was complete. A proper amount of time for a gem of a song like this.
The lyric that begins this writing appears towards the end of the song and is, in my opinion, the climax: the simply stated bittersweet truth of surviving genocide. What proceeds that line are something like shards of memory, foregoing certain details and including the more impressionistic ones, and makes lyric both fractured and evocative while keeping the sharp-edged impact of those memories intact.
You can listen below or visit the Bandcamp page and hear directly from Joseph about his time with the song and his other collaborators. I’ve included the lyrics here.
gh
Born from dirt in ‘53
January, still before the dawn.
A wild child
I come from the ochre of my mother’s heart.
nôtokwêw ohpikihâkan (old woman raised)
A truck stirs a cloud on a rez dirt road
a man in a two-piece suit, one with a gun.
Read our rights
in a language we could not understand.
mâyipayin (the time when things went wrong)
Whimpering dogs nipping at the tires
stolen away, I lost:
the language of love
the feel of the earth
the safety of
my kohkom’s skirt.
I am that boy, I am that boy, I am that boy
And my world was turned upside down.
I was born from dirt in ‘53
January, still before the dawn.
A victory song
but I don’t know what I am winning at, I lost:
the language of love
the feel of the earth
the safety of
my kohkom’s skirt.
I am that boy, I am that boy
I am that boy, I am that boy
I am that boy, I am that boy
I’m still that boy
And my world was turned upside down…
Gregory Hoskins 