Swarthmore will welcome vocalist and composer Jeremy Dutcher to perform on Friday, March 21 at 8 PM in the Lang Concert Hall.

Dutcher is an Indigenous Canadian tenor, composer, musicologist, and activist, best known for his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (The Song of the People of the Beautiful River), which won the 2018 Polaris Music Prize and the 2019 Juno Award for Indigenous Music Album of the Year. Due to the little representation Indigenous peoples have in the Canadian music industry, Dutcher hopes to use his music to bridge the gap between popular and Indigenous music, broadening the exposure of his heritage to the general public, and reviving the Wolastoqiyik language. “Psi-te npomawsuwinuwok, kiluwaw yut! All my people, this is for you,” Dutcher said in his speech at the 2019 Juno awards. 

“I just really want all the people of my community to understand how beautiful our songs are, and understand that we can draw on our traditions and create something new and beautiful through that lens.”

There are only 305 first-language speakers of the Wolastoqey language left in Canada. “When we lose that, we're not losing words, we're losing whole world views — ways of seeing the world that are rooted in the language,” Dutcher said in an interview with [Edit] Magazine. “I see the importance of making sure we're passing our language on, and particularly with my first record, I wanted to make sure it was coming from the Wolastoq point of view, and from the language. I do this work for those who are young. I was very fortunate that my mother passed on a little bit of the language to us, and not everyone had that.”

His dedication to creating music that connects the public with an endangered culture was a crucial consideration in Swarthmore sponsoring this event. In a 2023 interview with CBC, Dutcher said, "Not a lot of non-French or English albums have even scratched the public imagination, it's exciting to be in that very small percentage of people to bring our language into that space, and the conversation about revitalization into that space.” Even when he took to the stage in 2018 to accept the Polaris Prize, the most prestigious award in the Canadian music industry, he emphasized his work as an extension of the community he’s from. “This is all part of a continuum of Indigenous excellence,” he said, “and you are here to witness it. I welcome you."

Dutcher’s most recent album, Motewolonuwok, won the 2024 Polaris prize, making him the only artist ever to win the prize twice. The inspiration for that album came from a poem by Cherokee writer Qwo-li Driskill: “From the heavy debris of loss, together we emerge,” a story of celebration and healing as a community comes together after the loss of one of their own.

"Jeremy Dutcher is a brilliant and talented musician, and I think we’re in for a real treat! When we’re inviting musicians to perform at the college, we don’t just look at whether we like their music,” Professor James Blasina said of Dutcher. “What we also find important is how their music fits in with our department’s curriculum and the college’s mission. In many ways, we believe that Jeremy Dutcher’s music contributes greatly to that.”

With training in Western operatic tradition and a personal background in Indigenous cultures, Dutcher is a composer who brings together many different genres of music to create unique performances. “Indigenous music that he draws on through his family background and his operatic training that he has combined with his heritage produces exceptional works that bring a very underappreciated form of art to the public,” Blasina notes. 

After studying music at Dalhousie University, Dutcher went on to expand his professional repertoire through the incorporation of his community’s traditional singing styles and songs. His album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa was recorded following his research project on archival recordings of traditional Wolastoqiyik songs at the Canadian Museum of History, featuring Indigenous music that he transcribed during the process. His background informed his reverence for the music of his home while his training as a tenor brought forth modern and popular influences. 

In a 2023 interview with Toronto Life, Dutcher spoke about the intersection of classical and indigenous music. "I’ve been at this musical intersection my whole life. The two worlds may seem opposed, but they can be put in dialogue with each other. When I was studying music in university, I began to feel confined by the kinds of music the Western model allowed me to sing, which led me back to the songs I heard growing up. I’d sit at the piano and trace out melodies from our traditional songs. They were sung only to drums, but I found that there was so much music around the melodies to explore."

Outside of the music industry, Dutcher is an activist and advocate for many marginalized groups. Throughout his tours around the world, he has regularly been sought out for his work on queerness, Indigeneity, language revitalization, and fashion. “We’re expanding our minds around gender, and while it may seem new, many Indigenous nations around the country have old ways of honouring and lifting up people who are between man and woman, between these ideas of fixed gender,” he said in his interview with Toronto Life. “It’s nothing new, especially on this land. This album [Motewolonuwok] looks at how we can bring back the honoured space that LGBTQ+ people once had.”

Jeremy Dutcher in Concert is free and open to the public; the event will be held at 8 PM on Friday, March 21 in the Lang Concert Hall. All students and community members are invited to attend.