<p>It is said that music is the universal language&nbsp;but Toronto based First Nations tenor and pianist Jeremy Dutcher has created an accessible album in his native Wolastoq, or Maliseet, a language spoken today in Canada by an estimated 600 people. Wolastoqiyuk Lintuwakonaw, out Friday (April 6), is an 11-song fusion of his ancestors&#39; archival recordings and his own classical and pop influences, intended to disrupt the &ldquo;bilingual Anglo-centric Canadian music narrative,&rdquo; he tells Billboard.</p>

<p>The 27-year-old -- who is a member of the Tobique First Nations in northwestern New Brunswick, and studied music in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- doesn&#39;t believe this music should be &ldquo;collecting dust on a museum shelf,&rdquo; so he took five years to painstakingly put this album together, transcribing Wolastoq songs more than a century-old &mdash; once banned from being performed in public due to the Canadian government&#39;s discriminatory Indian Act from 1876 &mdash; to re-introduce them to the world.</p>

<p>Dutcher sat down with Billboard over sweetgrass tea at Toronto&#39;s NishDish, a traditional Anishinaabe restaurant, to chat about the album, give us a history lesson &mdash; and teach us some Wolastoq language basics. Be sure to try them on him if you see his show in New York at Joe&#39;s Pub, May 4.</p>

<p>To start with, there&#39;s about 60 different Aboriginal languages Canada and Cree is the biggest with 83,000 speakers, according to Statistic Canada, 2011.</p>

<p>Cree is the biggest linguistic group, for sure, followed by Anishinaabemowin, which is the Ojibway [19,000], or what&#39;s spoken around here, and then Inuktitut.</p>

<p>Do they have commonalities?</p>

<p>Oh yeah. It&#39;s like the language groups in Europe. Think about the romantic languages like French and Italian, they&#39;re so close together because geographically they came out of the same area. It&#39;s similar here too, I can&#39;t fully understand what they speak here, but you notice certain words, like our word for &ldquo;bear&rdquo; is the same.</p>

<p>Was it important in your family to learn your native language?</p>

<p>Definitely. I&#39;m from New Brunswick originally, so that&#39;s on the east coast of Canada. My mother spoke the language growing up, and she understood the importance of passing that on to us,</p>

<p>If I&#39;m going to be talking to you about an album you made to preserve and expand your language, then I should know how to pronounce Wolastoq.</p>

<p>Wool-las-took. The language, is Wolastoqey wool-las-two-gway. The name of the river is Wolastoq and the name of my people, &ldquo;The People of the River,&rdquo; is Wolastoqiyik, [pronounced] Willisto-wee-ek, and that&#39;s the first word of the record title. So the name of the record is Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonaw &mdash; wool-las-two-wi-ig lint-two-wah-gun-ah-wa.</p>

<p>How does it compare to the English language in terms of consonants and vowels, and how many words you have?</p>

<p>It came out of a different hemisphere than English did, so even the ways that we think about the world and how we position ourselves within the world are different. It&#39;s hard to explain for somebody that doesn&#39;t speak the language, but it&#39;s just a totally different positionality in how we see the world in the language. That&#39;s why it&#39;s important for us to hang on to that too.</p>

<p>The elders say that our language comes from the land; it&#39;s intimately tied. You see a tree, but I don&#39;t see a tree; I see a ƏpƏsiyik [pron. oposiyik]. I see the world in a different way based on the way that I speak and the way that I experience things. We have like 20 different words to describe that tree &mdash; in the bark, in certain times of season. So much to say that there&#39;s an intimate relationship between language and land.</p>

<p>For me, as a young person with access to that language, a lot of young people don&#39;t speak my language in our community, I was very fortunate in that my mother was able to pass on some, and through this record I&#39;ve been able to double down on my efforts in revitalizing our language and I&#39;ve been working with our stories, and telling our stories in the language.</p>

<p>Your family and the elders must be thrilled.</p>
