Lure of the north in Gilday’s music
Grocery shopping in a southern city is a non-event: fill the cart, smile at the cashier, hit the trail.
In the north, says Yellowknife, N.W.T.-based singer/songwriter Leela Gilday, it’s different. “If you go for groceries, you’re gone for an hour and a half because you have to talk to everyone you see.”
We southerners have seen photographs of the north — endless stretches of pristine land and sky — but for the most part we know little more about the place than we do about socializing while grocery shopping.
Gilday says the north exerts an almost gravitational pull when you’re away from it. She should know: she moved south for university when she was 17 and ended up staying for 12 years to establish her musical career, something that’s hard to do when based in the north. She returned to Yellowknife in 2008.
She calls the north “a powerful place. It occupies your dreams and your daily thoughts. It’s so vast, it makes you feel what your place is on the earth in a way you can’t in the south. You feel small in the north.”
Feeling small occasionally, although Gilday doesn’t say so, might be a valuable corrective to southerners’ tendency toward self-importance.
There’s nothing small, however, about Gilday’s music. A blend of folk, pop and country, it captures with vigour what it means to be a native person from the north (she’s a member of the Dene First Nation).
While it’s sometimes just kick-up-your-heels fun, her music also spotlights the crippling alienation of Aboriginal people in a country that was once theirs. Or, as in the case of Calling All Warriors, the title track from her 2010 album, it can be a call to action over missing and murdered First Nations women.
That album helped win her the Aboriginal Female Entertainer of the Year prize at the 2011 Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards as well as other awards. In 2007, her album Sedzé won Aboriginal Recording of the Year at the Junos.
Since she returned to the north, Gilday says her music has changed in ways other than what you’d expect in the normal evolution of an artist.
She’s writing more music with a traditional, drumbased core, for example. Her songs also increasingly reflect how people interact with the natural environment, an environment that both nourishes and, if you’re not cautious, kills.
Some of these changes should wind up on her next album, likely due out later this year.
Gilday, who’s in her mid30s, says the political geography of the north has changed over the past few decades. The 1970s, when Justice Thomas Berger conducted the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry that resulted in recommendations to ban or delay pipelines, were a “heady” time for the Dene: “We were the first native people to stymie a corporation wanting to build a pipeline through our land. Now, most people are prodevelopment.
“I’ve travelled a lot in India and Southeast Asia. I’ve seen places where 500 years ago there was no development and now every resource is exploited. I feel protective of the north because it’s such a treasure. The earth belongs to our children and our children’s children.”
Such a position, she agrees, becomes “complicated” when friends and family stand to benefit from resource-based jobs.
It’s not just resource-related issues that make the north different from the south for Gilday. The light, for example, has a rare quality that she describes as “brilliant (and) poignant” when it strikes the snow.
Isn’t she worried that praising her homeland as she does will result in a stampede of southerners northward?
“I’ve travelled all over the world. Everyone I take kindly to I invite to come up. In 20 years, I think two people have taken me up on it. I’m not too worried.”