In one of the worst chapters, from the mid-19th century until the mid-90s, the government separated thousands of Inuit children from their parents and placed them in church-run schools as a way to assimilate them. And they told us our belief system was wrong.Ĭanada has a long history of mistreating Indigenous people. Children were forbidden from speaking their language, or exercising their culture in any way whatsoever. Tanya Tagaq: It was part of the colonial process. I lost that round! Isn't this awesome?Īll the more awesome when you consider that throat singing was all but banned here in recent decades, along with many Inuit traditions and the native language. The landscape calls to mind the setting for an extraterrestrial sci-fi movie. Nunavut, literally "our land" in the native Inuktitut language, is made up of 800,000 square miles of the Canadian Arctic, roughly three times the size of Texas. Four flights and 2,300 miles from New York, we landed on a gravel runway in Nunavut, Canada's northernmost and largest territory, ancestral home of the Inuit, Indigenous people of the North. To make sense of all this sound, to understand Tanya Tagaq and her music, you have to go to the source. Tanya Tagaq: When it's effortless in the fact that I feel like I'm a fish on the end of a hook, I'm just being reeled in. Jon Wertheim: A good show means what to you? And, as Tagaq told us over lunch before a concert in New York, no two shows are alike. Those who stay in their seats are bathed in a mash up of Inuit tradition and contemporary experiment. Jon Wertheim: You're like a flight attendant. Her voice flickers, then builds to a rhythmic panting. Tanya Tagaq begins every performance by closing her eyes - as she puts it, shutting out the visual and plugging into the sound.
60 Minutes Overtime: Singing "unlike anything you've ever heard before".We'd never heard anything quite like it before and so it is we say: now, for something completely different. Rolling Stone called her music transfixing. She has brought this traditional sound screeching onto the modern scene by layering it with elements of punk rock, heavy metal and electronica. Hailing from Nunavut, a territory above the Arctic circle, Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, keeper of an ancient art form that stretches the limits of the human larynx. She is technically a pop star, but not in the same vein as, say, her fellow Canadians Drake or Arcade Fire, both of whom Tagaq recently beat out to win the country's most prestigious music prize. Chances are you won't be hearing Tanya Tagaq's music at your next dinner party or wafting over the speakers at the mall.
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