Jeremy Dutcher's music is made of memories

It's not often that a trip to the museum can change your life, but that's exactly what happened to the musician, language carrier, composer and ethnomusicologist Jeremy Dutcher when the member of Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick walked into the archives of the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa. 

There on a tip from Maggie Paul, an elder in his community who has been recording once-banned Wolastoqey songs for over four decades, he went in search of 110-year-old wax cylinder recordings of nearly-extinct songs from his peoples. 

"It was pretty incredible to just be in the presence of these things," said Dutcher, recipient of the 2025 National Arts Centre Award from the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards. "They're kind of unimpressive in what they look like — it's just a cylinder of wax — but what's contained within them, for me, that was life-changing."

For Dutcher, however, hearing those rare songs and being able to tell Paul they were there wasn't enough. Instead, he created his 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, an entirely-Wolastoqey-language LP that saw Dutcher duetting with historical recordings of songs from his community. (Dutcher estimates that there may be less than 100 speakers of Wolastoqey left, making his preservation efforts all the more pressing.)

Sweeping and emotive, the effort won the two-spirit artist a Juno and the Polaris Prize that year — alongside the reverence of many of the country's most innovative artists. ("How can I describe … the one who made me cry the first time I heard him playing and singing at a theatre in the east end of Toronto. How dare he?" wrote musician Lido Pimienta in an essay outlining Dutcher's brilliance for the CBC in 2019.) 

In the years after Dutcher's Juno acceptance speech launched a thousand headlines — "Canada, you are in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance," he said that night — he's kept a love for his culture at the centre of his creative projects and life.

In 2022, he and his family launched Kehkimin, the first ever Wolastoqey-language immersion school, in Fredericton. In 2023, he composed the score for the Atlantic Ballet production of Pizuwin, and he's currently scoring a Mi'kmaq horror film. He also released a bilingual (English and Wolastoqey) follow-up album in 2023 called Motewolonuwok.

Motewolonuwok would also go on to win the Polaris Prize, making Dutcher the first musician to take home the landmark award twice.

But as prestigious as yet another big win is for Dutcher, the content of those wax cylinders — the long echoes of the songs of his peoples, their very voices — remains the point, the reason behind all he does. 

"I am going to bring people together and start all these conversations and a call to action for Indigenous people, twirl to Indigenous sovereignty," Pimienta wrote in her essay, channelling Dutcher's fictional inner dialogue to showcase his real cultural impact. "[I am going to] collaborate with amazing musicians from all walks of life, tour the world with my gifts, inspire my community to be proud and share all of our language with others, and most importantly, with ourselves."

And that's exactly what Dutcher continues to do.