Singer Jeremy Dutcher reaches across a century to connect with Wolastoq language

TORONTO -- Singer Jeremy Dutcher's voice is an instrument that's reaching across a century of Indigenous history.

The 27-year-old operatic tenor's debut album marks an exercise in duality, as the trained musician combines his interest in classical and electronic music with a stunning array of archival recordings he found in a dusty Quebec archive.

"Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa" is an ambitious 11-track project that weaves the past and present together in hopes of drawing attention to the fading language of Wolastoq. It's spoken in the Tobique First Nation, one of six Wolastoqiyik reserves in New Brunswick where Dutcher spent much of his youth.

On his album, the singer duets with the ancestral voices he found preserved on wax cylinder recordings. Each song carries an alluring emotional intensity that transcends the perceived boundaries of words.

"At first, there was no thought to make a record -- that came a little later," Dutcher says of the five years it took for his concept to take shape.

"As soon as I heard those voices from 110 years ago, there was a sense of responsibility."

Dutcher says he's watched the Wolastoq language fading fast as elders die and few young people learn to speak it.

According to the 2016 Statistics Canada census, 305 people considered Wolastoq -- sometimes called Maliseet -- their first language, while only 55 people said they spoke it most often at home.

"When we lose them, we also lose their entire world view -- all the songs and words they know and the jokes they carry," Dutcher says.

"There's an incredible sense of urgency."

He hopes his album instills a new energy into the endangered language for his community and listeners who are drawn in by their curiosity.

The idea began as an offshoot of his degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he'd switched from studying music to anthropological research on his Wolastoq community.

A suggestion by one of his elders pointed him towards a bountiful resource of information about his ancestors stored at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.

Once he walked into the archive, Dutcher found an unimaginable database at his fingertips.

There were photographs, documents and other records of generations past, but he says it was a series of recordings captured between 1907 and 1914 by anthropologist William Mechling that stood out. The researcher had spent time in Indigenous communities studying and documenting the languages and cultures under the assumption they were soon to disappear.

Each crackly recording offered a tiny window into an era that once seemed untouchable. Dutcher began to scribble down the words in hopes of logging them for preservation within his community, but he also found himself growing closer to the voices of people he never met.

Dutcher says he would carry the transcriptions home at night and recite the words he'd written as song. Eventually, he brought the original recordings home, as his obsession with the language began seeping deeper into his psyche.

"You can hear their stories, hear them laughing, you can hear them dancing," he says.

"They're very much alive, and they speak to you quite literally. I've definitely built them into superheroes."

Dutcher started bringing those recordings with him everywhere. He'd play them on his headphones while riding public transit, and focus on their words while laying at home in the dark. The relationship he built runs throughout his album.

On the first track "Mehcinut", Dutcher seemingly cries out into the past, repeating a singular phrase with a harrowing urgency. Eventually, a voice from one of the archival recordings emerges from the silence to answer him as the song builds to its crescendo.

The moment is especially powerful when Dutcher performs the song live, pushing against his grand piano with a ferocity that only subsides while he pauses to listen to his ancestor Jim Paul deliver his portion of the duet.

"I really do feel like every time I play these recordings on stage I bring them out with me," he says of the voices.

"This is family that I'm bringing to the stage and having a conversation."

Dutcher hopes listeners feel a similarly intense connection with the songs, and absorb them same way they would an opera where "they usually don't understand what's being said."

"They connect with something deeper," he adds.

Dutcher also wants his album to open further doors that will keep the Wolastoq language and culture alive.

He's working on a number of other ancestral projects that will further explore the archive, and highlight the contributions of Indigenous women.

"There are so many stories that need to come forward, and I'd like to think that I'm uniquely positioned to tell them," he says.

"I get so much from doing this stuff, and it brings me to a closer understanding of who I am and where I fit. We should all be so lucky to have that kind of work."