FUTURES/forward Mentorships: Featuring Miranda Currie
FUTURES/forward Mentee, Miranda Currie — cohort #3 duo, October 2020 to March 2021 — mentored by Holly Arntzen
Community-engaged arts project: Sing Together! — an intergenerational Indigenous language revitalization song-writing workshop for families pilot — in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
MIRANDA CURRIE is a northern Indigenous creator living and working in Sombe K’e, more widely known as Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, among the Dene people. She walks in two worlds, with one foot in her Swampy Cree heritage and the other foot in her Euro-Canadian ancestry. Currie’s goal as musician, filmmaker, author and educator is to create authentic northern indigenous content that is accessible to children and families, in order to change the indigenous narrative in Canada. As Indigenous culture is innately tied to nature, Currie uses her artistic practices to advocate for the protection of Mother Earth and all her sacred connections. Currie’s debut album, Up In the Air, was nominated for aboriginal singer songwriter of the year by the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2015. Miranda is set to release her second children’s album in the spring of 2021. She has written three children’s books and is part of the National Screen Institute’s IndigiDocs 2020 Cohort. Miranda holds a B.Ed specializing in Outdoor and Experiential Education from Queen’s University. In March 2020, she graduated from the University of Victoria with a Certificate in Indigenous Language Revitalization. Miranda lives close to the land in her cozy shack on the shores of Great Slave Lake with her two sled dogs, Niyanin and Ellesmere. You can learn more about Miranda and her work on her website here.
My name is Miranda Currie. I am a northern Indigenous artist living in SombeK’e, otherwise known as Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. I found out about FUTURES/forward through a separate northern mentor in Yellowknife who encouraged me to apply. When I put in my application to participate in the program, I was pleasantly surprised to be accepted. Like so many artists who took a major hit during the global pandemic, without the benefit of being able to perform live and in person, I also was struggling to find meaningful work. I felt much gratitude to be accepted into the program.
During my mentorship in the FUTURES/forward program, I was teamed up with eco-rockstar Holly Arntzen (based out of Vancouver) as my mentor. After meeting Holly, as well as the rest of the amazing artists and mentors on Zoom, I was amazed. I’ll be honest in telling you, I felt a little out of my league. I’ll also admit that my intentions for applying to the program were rather self-serving. I was looking to connect with more artists outside the north and gain mentorship that would help me move my career to the next level. Don’t get me wrong, I was indeed looking forward to sharing my artistic practice with a community of people, but I felt like, until the pandemic hit, I had already been doing that anyway. Little did I know then, my perspective would change.
It was amazing to meet Holly and learn about her life’s work as an activist and eco-rock-star! She provided a model that had never occurred to me before. She had successfully combined activism, music and teaching in a way that I had desperately been searching for! She created artist residencies for herself in B.C. schools where she, along with the children, created songs with an environmental message, over the period of a week. The schools would then perform the work at the end of the week, subsequently recording and distributing the music through various mediums.
I knew I wanted my community project to echo this model, if on a smaller scale. My project, called Sing Together! — an intergenerational Indigenous language revitalization song-writing workshop pilot — was an intersection of many of my passions. It also remained part of my overall mission as an artist, which is to create authentic northern Indigenous content that is accessible to children and families.
Braided Sweetgrass is one of the four sacred medicines in many Indigenous cultures. Its three strands represent many things. One teaching is that the three strands represent land, language, and culture. Like the braided strands of sweetgrass that are inextricably linked together, so too are the land, language, and culture of a nation. One cannot be without the other. Many Indigenous languages are dying and without them cultures cannot be maintained. Though I am a Cree woman, (a language that is not in danger of becoming extinct), I have worked diligently to learn the basics of Tli’cho language and the Wiilideh dialect spoken by the Yellowknives Dene First Nation (YKDFN). I have done this as a sign of respect for the nation I live on, and to be able to help team teach with Elders and give kids back their Indigenous language. I believe this to be absolutely necessary because of its inseparability from the land and culture.
The intergenerational aspect of the workshop was a no-brainer for me as a facilitator. It feels good to sit with Elders and talk. They are also the main keepers of the Wiilideh language these days. Elders provide a grounding because of their experience on this earth, and we can always benefit from their knowledge and experience. For the Sing Together! workshop I had the great pleasure and honour to work with Miss Madeline, an Elder and language teacher.
Music is the creative modality that we use to connect everything together!
During the workshop, we played some introductory rhythm games and Miss Madeline sang a welcome song in Tli’cho. I taught about song structure and making a song-map to use as the guide for our song lyrics. We then discussed and came up with themes and genres. Our decided theme was the seasons, and the genre was folk. Each participant wrote down words they might need to be translated to language on a card. Miss Madeline was then given a chance to translate and re- iterate meanings of seasonal words. Participants used the song map and words to come up with lyrics in both English and Tli’cho. Once lyrics had been roughly established, I pulled out my guitar and started out with a chord progression. We tried a few different chord progressions while participants hummed melodies they thought might work. Magically, over the course of three hours, we refined the lyrics and melody to create a song using both English and Tli’cho called “Ile Xo”. Its connotation is “the seasons”, but more accurately the words indicate one cycle of the earth. Everyone seemed to enjoy the challenge and creative process!
I think the main shift for me in this mentorship process was one of moving from making music myself to facilitating others in the creative journey of music making and song writing! It was not a difficult shift, as I am a qualified teacher, but definitely a change in the way I think about music creation. For me, it elevated the experience to another level. I love creating music, but giving others the tools to create, then watching and gently guiding their creativity was indeed next level.
In the end I like the way the small group turned out. I always strive to decolonize learning whenever possible. For me, that means working in small family-like groups whenever possible. I think meaningful interactions occurred between child, elder, and caregiver, while having language, land, and culture be the main topic of conversation — all glued together by the creation of music!
I will be proposing an artist residency type model to the Indigenous Languages Department of the Education, Culture and Employment (ECE) Division of the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) for the following school year. There are 11 official languages in the NWT; five are Dene languages. I would like to go to a community in each language region for a week-long residency. I would create relationships with Elders and work with classes in schools to create songs using language. These songs would then be recorded and used in schools and the wider community to cultivate both the knowledge and pride needed to keep our Indigenous languages alive and thriving.
I am so grateful to Holly Arntzen for showing me the way forward in both this project and my musical career. Mahsi Cho to Judith Marcuse and Kim Gilker of FUTURES/forward for their support throughout my learning curve and the birthing of this project.
Mahsi cho. Tapekitche. Thank you!
Here is the video of “Ile Xo”, the song co-created during the Sing Together! workshop.
FUTURES/forward gratefully acknowledges that Miranda’s mentorship thrived due in part to the generous support of the McConnell Foundation, Judith Marcuse Projects, the Government of Canada’s Emergency Community Support Fund and Community Foundations of Canada.