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At first listen, okâwîmâw wanipaliw (Mother Lost) sounds like many contemporary musical compositions — a lone cello swells and drops with precision. But after two minutes, the beat of a Cree hand drum rises alongside a flurry of woodwinds and strings. Finally, the energy reaches a climax with a chorus of chants, increasing in unison until only they and the drum remain.

Composed by J. Alex Young, PhD candidate in Music Composition at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, okâwîmâw wanipaliw (Mother Lost) premiered at the  in February, which explores avant-garde approaches to musical creation and performance.

Young, a Métis student and composer with roots in the Mushkegowuk Cree territory of Ontario, is using musical composition to explore his personal heritage, and to shed light on the pervasive injustices faced by Indigenous people.

“I never understood it as a kid, growing up in Sudbury,” he says about the racist undertones of suburban life in Ontario. “We were viewed as less than anyone else, and not treated fairly, but it took a long time to articulate it.”

During his MA studies in composition at the University of Ottawa, Young began to unpack some of the complexities and injustices of his childhood with a three-part composition called . This project sparked a personal need to reach a deeper understanding of, and connection to, his Indigenous background.

With help from the Indigenous Graduate Award, Young recently moved to Calgary to complete his PhD studies, but the connection to his origins became stronger with distance. “It grew into a question of, ‘What matters? What matters to this culture?' So, I started looking at things like the treatment of women in the community, which brought me back to my grandmother.”

Young spent hours reconnecting with his Cree grandmother, a residential school survivor, and one of thousands of Indigenous women who lost their land rights as a result of the Indian Act (1869-1985). These conversations became the starting point for okâwîmâw wanipaliw (Mother Lost), which laments silenced and discounted Indigenous women’s voices.

The systematic marginalization of Indigenous voices, and national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, is directly linked to Canada’s legacy of colonialism. “We are at a point now where there’s so many missing Indigenous women, and no one seems to care about it,” explains Young. “This attitude goes back to the residential school system and the inhumane tone that was set for our people. We can’t be marginalized and disenfranchised like this in Canada. We need to speak out.”

While Young’s composition is rooted in grief and loss, it is also a call to break the silence and to raise our voices in protest. “In Indigenous music, one person starts out by singing a melody — one leader, and then everyone joins in. The composition mimics this, using instruments to generate a banding together of voices, and then the chanting comes in, growing louder in an act of defiance.” 

The piece concludes with an eerily long silence. At the premiere, recalls Young, audience members became uncomfortable before finally giving in to applause. “This is indicative of the whole piece,” he says. “How much can we put up with before it’s uncomfortable and we have to speak out?”

Young sees okâwîmâw wanipaliw (Mother Lost) as a ‘dry run’ for his PhD thesis piece. His plan for the coming year is to study ceremony and song in Ontario in order to better understand ideas of place and space. “I want to investigate music not just in terms of how, but where it exists. For Indigenous people, place and space is so important; it’s ancestral land. I want to find out about the areas in the Mushkegowuk Cree territory — hunting spaces, gathering spaces, trapping spaces, fishing spaces, living spaces, and I want to capture their natural sounds and reverberations and incorporate them into my compositions.” Young plans to perform his final thesis composition in spring 2020.

��ɫֱ�� unveiled its Indigenous Strategy, , on Nov. 16, 2017. The strategy is the result of nearly two years of community dialogue and campus engagement, and involved the work of a number of people from the university, Indigenous communities and community stakeholders. Recommendations from the strategy are being implemented as we move forward with promise, hope and caring for the future.