Unreserved

Using music to tell Indigenous stories

03.03.2023 - By CBCPlay

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Justin Delorme is Métis and an award-winning composer who has scored hundreds of television episodes like the true-crime series Taken, films like Finality of Dusk, and documentaries – including Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On. At just 29 years-old his career is only getting started.

Raven Chacon is a Diné composer from the Navajo Nation. In 2022, he became the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his piece Voiceless Mass. The piece debuted in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist during American Thanksgiving. It features no words or lyrics, but it harnesses the absence of voice to tell a powerful story about the harm of colonialism.

Deantha Edmunds grew up learning the classics like Handel’s Messiah. She never thought she would have the chance to sing it in Inuttitut, the language of her ancestors. As the world’s only professional Inuk opera singer, she is blazing a trail in the field of classical music.

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