There is simply no other artist like Jeremy Dutcher. A classically trained operatic tenor and composer who sings in Wolastoquey, an Indigenous language of Dutcher’s New Brunswick Tobique First Nation, which has fewer than 100 fluent speakers in the world.

Recognizing no boundaries between classic western orchestral music and the traditional Indigenous songs of his ancestors, Dutcher doesn’t meet these styles in the middle, but melds them together in a mesmerizing musical concoction that takes the listener on a journey that is very much of the present.

Both of his albums have won the Polaris Music Award, a first in the award’s 19-year history. His debut, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, (2018) was inspired after an elder had encouraged him to listen to archival recordings of traditional Maliseet songs collected by an anthropologist and preserved on wax cylinders at the Canadian Museum of History. That groundbreaking album, bolstered by powerful live performances, established Dutcher as one of the leading lights in the growing Canadian Indigenous industry.

2023’s ambitious Motewolonuwok attempted to bring non-Indigenous listeners more fully into the conversation, with half the songs in English. One of the highlights is “Ancestors Too Young”, a gorgeous and painful song that grapples with the devastating consequences of being subject to dual discrimination for being Indigenous and queer. The song Take My Hand establishes Dutcher’s desire to connect to the broader community on his own terms as he sings, “Take my hand but not my light, the words that we find are new.”

- Sean Myers