Samian remembers the time spent with her great-grandmother, who told her family of the nights she had spent in the woods, sometimes without even having been able to build a shelter to beat the cold, and the softness of the blankets made hare skin that the family had eaten for lunch. He remembers hearing him recount, in the Anishinaabe language, the sedentarization of his community and the creation of the Pikogan reserve, where he grew up.
“I remember”, the motto of Quebec, takes on a whole new meaning when the Anishinabe rapper makes it the title of his latest song, which takes off Friday on social networks. I remember, it is also an ironic way of evoking the short memory of Quebecers in terms of Aboriginal affairs. And the song will soon be part of a whole that celebrates the 15thand anniversary of the artist’s first album, Facing yourself.
modern day warrior
If his rap is incisive and biting and he describes himself as “a modern-day warrior” who fights “with raised fists”, Samian says he does not feel aggressive in real life, he who, the week last, was excluded from the Festival international de la chanson de Granby because of the strong presence of anichinabémowin in its repertoire. “Anger, it will be transported in the studio, he said in an interview, when I make music. It’s a healthy way to vent your anger. Anger is healthy in itself, depending on what you do with it. »
His rage, he uses it to tell the truths that many do not dare to hear. “The reserves in the North, for you, it’s not profitable / I think about it every time I urinate in drinking water”, he chants. Métis, he navigates easily from one culture to another, and sometimes suffers the repercussions. “I never put on white gloves, I never pretended, too white for the reds, too wild for the whites / Yet my roots are from Quebec, but sometimes I’m too ground floor for the rednecks “, he sings. His Métis condition, as we saw in Granby, sometimes places him in curious situations.
Anger is healthy in itself, depending on what you do with it.
“Sometimes, I make an album without Algonquin [anichinabémowin]. It happened on my third or fourth album, which was mostly in French, he recalls. And people said, “Yeah, but we knew you because you rap in Algonquin, we like it when you rap in Algonquin.” Afterwards, I make an album in Algonquin, and people say to me: “Yes, but there, we don’t understand anything.” So sometimes, I say to myself: but what is expected of me? »
words like bridges
His words, whether in French or in the Anishinaabe language, stretch like bridges between cultures, between the past and the present. The memory of his people, Samian wants it to be written in history with a capital H, to bear the traces of the elders. “I carry the message of the elders, those of my country / I don’t forget where I come from, I don’t forget my origins / I don’t forget my native land, the depth of my roots / Injustice is everywhere, which makes me still rap, ”he chants.
To achieve this, he went back one day to his grandmother’s language, and still works on his texts with a translator from his village or with his grandmother. “Learning Algonquin is the work of a lifetime. It’s non-stop. I work with a translator, and I also have my grandmother who helps me,” he says.
It was only about ten years ago that this grandmother opened up to the family about her experience of residential schools, which she had kept to herself until then. In addition, the rapper’s family is a striking example of the cultural rupture caused by the residential schools: his mother did not learn Anishinabemowin, which is the mother tongue of his own mother.
Died five years ago, his great-grandmother, who had known the nomadic life, had a conversation not so long ago with Samian’s eldest son, a boy of his time who consulted his tablet, like all young people about his age. This vision then reminded the artist of the immense adaptability that the First Nations peoples had to deploy to reach us.
This history, it should not be erased from its errors either so that it sinks into oblivion. “And no, I’m not dumb enough to burn books / I’d rather read them and change the course of history / Always the same motto, as long as I rap there’s hope”, he wrote, referring to the 2019 burning of books considered contemptuous of Indigenous culture in Ontario.
Moreover, Samian is now very happy to see that some of his texts are found in history textbooks intended for students in 4and secondary.
But there does not stop his fight. In an interview, he talks about the sharing of the territory’s resources, the royalties on the exploitation which should go back more to the Aboriginals, the attention that must be paid to the management of the resources of the band councils. Always with a raised fist and a smile on your face.