Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology (LITA 164) WILLIE DUNN NOTES: “My name is Willie Dunn, and I’m an ex-Canadian soldier, a folk singer, and I still do gigs today. That’s my thing,” said the man to Voluntary In Nature in Ottawa in early 2013. “My mother was from Restigouche, my father, Liverpool, born in Belfast. We don’t know what he was. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m Scottish [laughs]. I’m Irish, or I’m English,’ you know. He said that so often [laughs]… At least I know my mom, she’s from Restigouche [laughs]. Oh, dear. My father was something else, a beautiful man in his own right. Worked hard. Worked himself to death, in fact, for his family… I’m pretty normal, you know, as a person. There’s nothing really remarkable about my life and about the life of my family except that we all love each other. We care about each other. We work hard to make sure that everybody is fine. That’s basically it. And above all, well not above all. We like our cats [laughs].” Six Strings, Airwaves, and a Notebook Almost two years into the second World War and more than 74 years after Canada’s confederation, William Lawrence Dunn was born on August 14, 1941, the seventh of eight children in the Metallic/Dunn household. His mother was Stella Metallic (1909-1992), a Mi’gmaq woman from the eastern shell of Turtle Island whose great grandfather, Adelumpi, was a refugee assigned to live in Restigouche by the British after the War of 1812. His father, William Sr. (1900-1958) shared the same name as his son, and despite any uncertainty in the family tree, was of English and Cornish heritage. William Sr. grew up in Liverpool, via his Belfast birthplace. He was a ship plater by trade who served as an apprentice at the Cammell Laird shipyard across the Mersey in Birkenhead. By 1921, the Great Depression was in full swing, and British jobs were few and far between. The thought arose to seek opportunities in Canada, but after crossing the Atlantic, William found a similar situation and began hoboing around the country by train, riding the rails to the Prairies at harvest time to seek seasonal work before travelling to the Maritime region where he met Stella in the early 1930s. It wasn’t long before Stella and her sister moved from Restigouche (Listuguj), an integral part of the Gespe’gewa’gi (“The Last Land”) district and Mi’gma’gi, to the city of Montreal to live with William Sr. and start a family. Stella already had two children, Grace and Hazel, from an earlier relationship, but everyone was brought up together in Quebec. While the ship building industry wasn’t always reliable, it boomed at the dawn of World War II, and William found himself neck-deep at Canadian Vickers on the east end docks of Montreal in what is known as the Maisonneuve district. This is also where the family lived, which grew to include John, (Mary Ellen) Gloria, Stella Jean (Jeannie), Elizabeth Christine (Betty), William Lawrence (Willie), and (Irene) Linda. With many mouths to feed, money was tight, and William Sr. rambled in and out of employment during the post-war landscape. “We always managed to get by, and I credit my

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mother,” shares Gloria Martin Dunn (1934- ), revealing the glue that kept everyone together. Despite providing clothes, food, and shelter, there was often a lack of stability in terms of location. “We lived in flats, and we moved every year,” recalls brother John (1933- ). While the love flowed freely wherever the family called home, the tough streets of Montreal were not always so welcoming and despite occasional trips to Restigouche to connect with the Metallic clan and community, the Dunn family’s Native heritage was not at the forefront and never celebrated. “I’m going to give you a take, my take, on the Native part of the Dunn family,” explains John. “First of all, my mother never, ever told us that she was Native. She never admitted that we were part Native, like never, and so you say to yourself, ‘Was she ashamed?’ She was brought up to be ashamed. In the school system where she was, it was all Natives, but they all grew up the same way… They were raised to think that they were inferior, and that’s the way it was. But we, as kids, we said, ‘What’s wrong with being Native?’ As far as we’re concerned, we’re good people… “Fast forward to when I was in university and my sister Jeannie, who was seventeen at the time, was engaged to this Frenchman [Jean-Claude Deret]. He was involved in the acting profession, radio and that kind of stuff… So we’re all gathered in the kitchen as families do around the big kitchen table, and we’re all talking. Jean-Claude is there and all my sisters. My mother’s there. I’m not sure where my dad was, but we’re all carrying on a nice conversation, and it was just a very interesting nice time, and then all of a sudden, Jean-Claude says to us in a loud voice: ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ And everybody stopped talking. We looked at him, and we said, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘You people act like you’re ashamed to be Native.’ Woah! We all looked at our mother and said to ourselves, ‘This guy’s gonna get himself killed!’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t be ashamed of yourselves. You don’t ever talk about being Native.’ And wow, that was like a big blow, but at the same time, we started saying, ‘What’s going on?’ And he says, ‘You guys should be proud! You’re one of Canada’s first peoples, and you should be proud of being Native!’ And we looked at each other, and that’s the first time [emotional pause] that we lifted our heads up and said, ‘I am proud to be a Native…’ My mother still never, ever talked about it, but I think he did her one hell of a big favour by saying you should be proud of yourself. It affected us for the rest of our lives.” Even as a young boy, Willie could not help but be touched by this affirmation. It was the talk of the family. Jeannie and Deret separated not long after, with Deret returning to France, but in addition to having a child together, their relationship bore another special gift. Under the Christmas tree in 1955 was a brand new acoustic guitar, a present for Willie, who “never looked back,” according to Gloria. “He found something there, you know? Yeah, that’s the story anyway. The one that’s been handed down [laughs].” Even her little brother agreed. “I’ve been playing since I was fourteen,” said Willie with a guitar still at arm’s reach. “I love music. I love the sound of the guitar. I used to lock myself in the closet, man. I used to play in the closet [laughs], ’cause the acoustics were better [laughs]. My father and mother used to come there and say, ‘What are you doing in the closet, Willie?’ Just the sound, man… Eventually, I had to get out, ’cause, you know, the air [laughs].”

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Though William Sr. and Stella favoured opera and current radio hits, it was country music that encouraged Willie to step out of the closet and into the musical universe. “I’d heard Hank Williams since I was a little boy,” noted Willie about his love of “cowboy music,” and from there he branched out into different threads. In the 1940s, the patchwork quilt of the American folk music revival was being sewn by artists like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Work songs, labour movement songs, protest songs, and love songs were the order of the day, heard across the land as the voice of the people. These words and melodies of freedom caught Willie’s attention, and with practice, he started crafting his own. Poetry was also entering the equation as a muse. A friend of notable British-Canadian writer and humourist Stephen Leacock, William Sr. was a pencil and paper packing poet in his hoboing days and helped to foster his son’s interest in the written word. “He may have been a bum, but he came from England, and he got a typical middle class English education,” mentions John about his father’s UK studies. School wasn’t young Willie’s bag. He preferred to bury his head in books at home and practice guitar for solace, dropping out of classes altogether after completing Grade 10 at Montreal’s English-language Rosemount High. After saying so long to the teachers and their “dirty looks,” it was time for action. Unfortunately, William Sr. passed on in 1958 at only 58 years of age and it affected the family deeply. Willie’s youthful days had come to an end. Statement of Service On January 11, 1960, Willie Dunn joined the Canadian Armed Forces. “The senior captain, you know, the recruitment captain, he said, ‘Why do you want to join the army?’” recited Willie. “Well, I needed a job [laughter].” After rigorous training at Camp Borden, about 100 kilometers north of Toronto, Willie was sent overseas for peace support service in the newly independent Congo in central Africa following five decades of Belgian colonial rule. Another life-changing catalyst came from a Congolese teacher who asked Willie about the status of Indigenous peoples back home. While an innocent question, it resonated deeply both personally and in regards to North America’s own troubled colonial history. The thought lingered amidst the conflict at hand. By 1963, Willie’s term was over and he was ready to return home. On the way back to Canada, the young soldier spent time in Europe, Ireland in particular, and hitched his way around, breaking bread and supping pints with the locals. Energized by the clean, country air, Dunn returned to Montreal with music on his mind. He received a full discharge on August 28th, only two weeks after his 22nd birthday. “I did have a weapon, but I handed it over to the ordnance guard, and after that, I never looked back,” said Willie. “I wanted to play guitar, and that’s what I went about doing.”

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Taking a Sip To keep afloat, Willie took a job cooking on full-service passenger trains, but words, poetry, and melody filled most non-working moments. “I learned a lot about American folk before I entered a coffee house,” explained Dunn. “The coffee house is a stage, and it’s a hard, hard stage.” Throughout the 1960s, coffee houses were popping up across North America, meeting places where ideas, as well as songs, could be exchanged. In solidarity, Willie and a few partners launched The Totem Pole Restaurant & Coffee House on Rue Stanley in Montreal’s downtown core. Offering meals and nightly entertainment, The Totem Pole was a clubhouse as well as a platform where Willie could practice his expanding repertoire of original compositions and standards. On a smaller scale, the Montreal coffee house scene mirrored the action in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, and Fred Neil performed on a regular basis, as well as being a nucleus that helped to activate the careers of Canadians Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, and Ian & Sylvia. Elsewhere in the Big Apple, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s debut LP (It’s My Way!) was released in 1964 by New York-based Vanguard Records, well-known for its catalogue of classical, jazz, and folk recordings. While the Cree singer-songwriter’s album didn’t hit the charts, it did register within folk music circles from coast to coast and added two immediate standards to the genre’s growing songbook: “The Universal Soldier” and “Cod’ine.” Dunn did a three-month stint in New York during this era. He also attended Rhode Island’s acclaimed Newport Folk Festival, a memorable experience. “I met Bob Dylan there. I met Joan Baez,” reminisced Willie, but it was veteran country blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt (1892-1966) that made the biggest impression: “He was a little guy, a short black guy. He always wore this little fedora, and he introduced me to all of the black musicians in the tent that we were at. What kind of person would do a thing like that, eh?” Willie later shared a bill with Hurt in New York as well as folk scene staples Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He also took to the stage at the landmark Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs. By the end of 1965, Dunn was beginning to garner some attention in Montreal. Though he lived and breathed music, it was still a struggle to pay the bills, and there were many times when the young troubadour went hungry. Thankfully, there was always a friend willing to chip in what little they had. Willie also found himself in occasional confrontations with the police for defending himself against unprovoked racist attacks, but at the end of the year, an unexpected break arrived. Dunn was asked to appear on the CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) nationally televised The Songs of Man, hosted by Jewish Austrian-American actor, musician, unionist, and activist Theodore Bikel. With a small backing band in tow, Willie performed two songs: “Rattling Along the Freight Train,” which featured his father’s rail-riding poetry, and “The Tears Still Fall Within My Mind,” an original number that, according to Bikel, made Willie Dunn “join the ranks of the composer-singer-writers.” The Songs of Man helped to bring Willie and his music to a wider audience and even put a few bucks into his pocket, but survival was a much bigger picture than what was viewable on the

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era’s standard 25-inch black and white TV screens. Willie was still finding his voice as a poet, and Montreal was the perfect place to practice his craft. In the 1960s, the primarily French and English speaking city was teeming with venues large and small and fuelled by strong coffee, booze, cigarette smoke, smoked meat sandwiches, sex, nightlife, and fashion, all overseen by the 31-meter-tall cross resting on top of Mont Royal. While the province of Quebec had its own insular music business on the Francophone side, featuring everything from chansonniers to beat groups and country singers, Indigenous artists active in the industry were few and far between. One such group was George Hill and The Mighty Mohawks, a popular country and folk ensemble, and to the west, The Chieftones: Canada’s All Indian Band, who formed at an Edmonton residential school. Unlike today, there were no Indigenous music organizations to support these artists. While radio or television presence was limited at best, there was an assortment of Native print media representation, with regional newspapers like Cardston, Alberta’s Kainai News: Canada’s Leading Indian Newspaper, and by the tail end of the 1960s, the seminal Akwesasne Notes, that circulated current events, politics, perspective, cartoons, recipes, stories, and art from across Turtle Island. The year 1967 was monumental for Willie Dunn, kick-started by a shotgun wedding with his pregnant girlfriend, Joan. Their son, William Jr., was much loved, but his dad was not always present. Constantly on the move, a flurry of action and events began to unfold that would come to further define Dunn’s musical life. Willie was a regular contributor to the Montreal Folk Workshop, where he connected with like-minded souls including Bruce Murdoch, Beverlie Robertson of The Chanteclairs, and American draft dodger Jesse Winchester. He also established a working relationship with Ojibway radio host, actor, and activist Obediah (Johnny) Yesno, who along with John Barbarash, produced the CBC’s Indian Magazine, a half-hour Indigenous-focused current affairs program. When Barbarash asked Dunn to write a series of stories and ballads that would be broadcast weekly on Indian Magazine, the young songwriter jumped at the chance. Taking both topical and historical turns, Willie created a series of honouring songs for the program, including the earliest versions of “Crazy Horse,” “Charlie,” and “Louis Riel,” as well as lesser-known numbers like “Big Bear,” “Ode to an Indian Girl,” and “Poundmaker.” “I used newspapers, magazines. I read, I read, and I read,” enlightened Dunn. “In fact, back in those days, there wasn’t much in the way of books that you could read outside of American authors. There were very few Native authors. Very, very few, so you had to more or less devise your own system of looking at your people and deciding what you had to write, and that’s what I did… I was given the commission to do one song a week, and one of them was ‘The Ballad of Crowfoot,’ which I picked off of the book by [Six Nations’] Ethel Brant Monture [Famous Indians, Canadian Portraits, Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd., 1960]. I met her in the Indian Centre of Toronto, and we got along… You can still pick up this book at your library.” 1967 was also a monumental year for Canada, which celebrated its centennial anniversary. For Montreal, it meant hosting the world’s fair. Between April and October, Expo 67 brought

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together people from 62 participating countries, each represented by their own pavilion. The Indians of Canada Pavilion was an opportunity for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit to share their powerful stories, art, and culture as well as to build greater awareness of white supremacy, cultural genocide, assimilation tactics, and the effects of colonialism past and present from church and state. The pavilion caused dissention in the Canadian mass media. Within Indigenous communities, there were varying opinions about the worth of this exercise. Dunn, for one, thought that the funding spent to build the pavilion should have gone to community support and infrastructure. In response, Willie penned “The Ballad of a Pavilion” for Indian Magazine. He also appeared in a televised CBC interview about his perspective on the matter. Willie was becoming a spokesperson for Indigenous issues along with a small group of radical Native activists in the emerging Red Power movement which connected him with the likes of Samson Cree Jerry Saddleback and, to the south, Floyd Red Crow Westerman (Custer Died For Your Sins) and A. Paul Ortega (Two Worlds). A Challenge for Change As the year progressed, business at The Totem Pole slowed down, and Willie, guitar in hand, decided to head west to look for opportunities and connect with fellow radicals. “I hit the road and thumbed my way across Canada,” explained Dunn, echoing his father’s hoboing days. “I left Montreal with fifteen dollars. Heaven help me, man. I ran out of money in Winnipeg [laughs], and I ended up going without food for five days [laughs], but it was good to get to Vancouver after all that time and all those difficulties that I’d been through.” Once in Vancouver, Willie became a regular at the Bunkhouse, a west coast haunt of serious folkies like David Wiffen. He also joined forces with Tony Antoine, co-founder and spokesperson of the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP). “That was the early days,” voices Scottish-Canadian musician, bard, and boatman Bob Robb, Willie’s pal and top guitar picker. “When it was an idea that through social relations, you could actually have some sort of, not so much militancy, but a firm activism rather than the usual sort of, ‘Oh, you’re having demonstrations against the RCMP?’ ‘Cause it never happened. Yeah, well, it’s happening… It’s difficult for us today to comprehend the separation, even the ignorance of the general population of the Native world and situation.” The times were most certainly changing, and things were coming to a head. While on the coast, Willie was asked to compose a selection of songs for the stage adaptation of Ukrainian-Canadian playwright and novelist George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. Premiering at the Vancouver Playhouse on November 23, 1967, it has become a staple of Canadian theatre. The initial run starred August Schellenberg, Chief Dan George (Geswanouth Slahoot) of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, and Saskatchewan-born Frances Hyland, a non-Native actor, as Rita Joe. From Vancouver, the play continued on to Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and is still performed today.

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Despite participating in a gainful production, money was still tight for Willie, and it was often hard to make ends meet. “A musician in Canada is not a rich man,” maintained Dunn without any illusion or irony. “It was very difficult in so many different respects. I didn’t quite know sometimes where my next meal was coming from… I’d go down to the Pacific, when I was in Van, and play, and people would throw money. I’d go over to the local restaurant and get bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee [laughs]. That would do me for the day.” After a stint in Los Angeles in support of Cesar Chavez and the Delano grape strike, where he observed an inspiring take on social awareness, activism, and protest, action in the east pulled Willie back to Toronto. An outgrowth of the Canadian Indian Youth Council, the Nishnawbe Institute was formed in Toronto in 1967. Anishinaabe community leader, activist, and educator Jeannette Corbiere Lavell (OC) was the organization’s president as well as a co-founder of the National Native Women’s Association, which she headed in 2009: “It was to be part of this [free] university, Rochdale College, that was being set up,” explains Corbiere Lavell. “Indian studies as seen through our eyes… Cross-cultural dialogue and communication as well. Professional people would come to our workshops to get away from the stereotypes.” Willie arrived on the scene during the formative days of Nishnawbe, which brought together Wilfred Pelletier, Isaac Beaulieu, Harold Cardinal, Duke Redbird, and many others, all connected through their culture, people, and politics. “Willie fit right into it. He would ask [questions], and he was there. He was a leader once he found out about all this history and what our people did. Then, he just got more and more active.” “Now you have to understand the times,” says Rarihokwats (born Gerald Thomas [Jerry] Gambill), editor of Akwesasne Notes and a mentor to Dunn. “The anti-Vietnam movement was very strong. John F. Kennedy had been President, inspired people… and then was assassinated. These were very fast-moving, eventful, changing times. Malcolm X. The hippies and the commune movement. The founding of the Peace Corps and the founding, in the US, of the domestic Peace Corps… The Peace Corps itself went overseas, but they did a similar thing domestically, which was imitated in Canada as the Company of Young Canadians.” “The Company of Young Canadians [CYC] were the origin of most of this stuff, the Film Board Native crew, Akwesasne Notes, and Nishnawbe Institute,” informs musician, photographer, and writer David Lavell. “A lot of those people started off in CYC, and in fact, most of the Native organizations, the National Indian Brotherhood, the Ontario Indians, the Indian-Eskimo Association, a lot of them, arguably all of them, came out of CYC.” In 1968, Willie joined the CYC and continued his travels back and forth across the country, including trips to the province of Saskatchewan where he was jailed for protesting. National Film Board of Canada (NFB) director Colin Low was a principal motivator behind the CYC and its filmmaking arm, Challenge for Change. Rarihokwats breaks down the program’s mandate: “Get a camera in the hands of movement people, poor people, people with a cause, and let them picture their own situation, and then use that to plead their case, advance their case… The overall theme was the use of motion pictures to advance social change.”

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The NFB’s Indian Film Crew (IFC) was an outgrowth of the CYC/Challenge for Change and partially funded by the Department of Indian Affairs. “The theory was that if we could form a film crew with a director, cameraman, sound people, you know, the whole works, that this crew would make a different kind of a film,” says Rarihokwats. From coast to coast, a call was put out to aspiring Native filmmakers. Experience was helpful but not necessary. Though not able to accommodate a fraction of those interested, an interview process brought together the first IFC: Barbara Wilson, Tom O’Connor, Noel Starblanket, Roy Daniels, Morris Isaac, Mike Kanentakeron Mitchell, and Willie. Each person had an area of focus—camera work, sound, editing, direction, production—and was trained accordingly. Abenaki singer, activist, and still active NFB filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin (OC) was already involved with the Film Board and provided guidance and support to the IFC while remaining independent. “There were no Native films anywhere,” recalled Dunn, looking back. “People in Germany, people in Belgium were saying, ‘Where’s the Native films in your country? You have so many [Indigenous] people?’ It wasn’t simply the Germans; it was the Italians, the French. ‘So, what’s happening with you people?’ So that was an impetus to get organizations like the NFB to get us on board. The CBC as well.” Many of the IFC had never been to Montreal before nor lived in a large city and Willie was the perfect guide. He had initially heard about the program from one of Montreal’s favourite sons, animator Ryan Larkin, his roommate at the time, who facilitated an interview with British-Canadian CYC/NFB producer Barrie Howells. Each of the IFC members received a basic living wage, “strictly poverty income,” acknowledges Rarihokwats, but it was enough to get the IFC up and running and work begun. After a short training period, Willie, like Alanis, realized that he could go and do his own projects. The Ballad of Crowfoot “In the middle of all this, there was a party one night at Alanis Obomsawin’s house,” remembers Howells. “We all had a few drinks, and Willie got out his guitar and started singing. One of the songs that he sang was ‘The Ballad of Crowfoot.’ The evening went on, and Willie played a few more songs, and someone said, ‘Play that ballad again!’ so he played it again, and I said to him, ‘Look, Willie, let’s talk about that. It sounds like it would make an interesting soundtrack to a short film.’ A few days later, Willie and I had a chat. Because I was producing, I was able to access, through the programming group which I was a part of, a bit of financing here and there… We came up with enough money, peanuts, a few thousand dollars for Willie to go and start doing some research.” Willie was no stranger to the archival process. He had already been searching through historical documents for a variety of Native organizations and was fully aware of their significance. “So he spent quite a bit of time in Ottawa researching the archives up there and gathering together a huge pile of photos, and then we gave him a camera and a room to work in, and he put the pictures up on the wall and filmed them with his camera,” continues Howells. “Now, what that ended up with was a pretty poorly shot piece of film. It was a bit shaky and rather

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static… but it obviously showed promise. So what we did was put together more of a budget and decided to redo the whole thing on a proper animation stand… So then he spent a few months working with the animation people, putting these pictures on a stand and saying, ‘Ok, I want the close-up of this guy. Move this one over here.’ It was all re-shot in 35mm black and white, and then he took it back into the cutting room and cut the film that you see.” Dunn’s innovative use of still photos as a storytelling device was later popularized by celebrated American filmmaker Ken Burns. With no modern-day digital technology available, this was a handmade celluloid affair. Crowfoot’s soundtrack was recorded by Willie and Bob Robb at the NFB headquarters in Montreal. Early attempts fell short in length until the mark was finally hit after a handful of additional takes. Alternate versions of “Crazy Horse,” “Mungo Martin,” and “Buffalo Song” were also recorded during these sessions, the latter two evolving into “The Carver” and “Métis Red River Song” respectively. Audio tape reels uncovered while conducting research for this anthology reveal the scope of Dunn and Robb’s improvisational feel with their instruments, also evident on stage. Lyrically, words would weave in and out of Dunn’s poetry at any given moment depending on the occasion or his own personal condition. No song was ever presented in the same manner twice. While Willie was neck-deep completing Crowfoot, his IFC peers were busy on projects of their own. Working within the colonial state-funded bureaucracy posed many challenges, but a series of influential films were being created in this decisive era, including These Are My People… (1969) and the groundbreaking You Are On Indian Land (1969). Each year, new IFC members, including Albert Canadien of The Chieftones and Alex Redcrow from Saddle Lake, Alberta, were brought to Montreal to learn and share. The Ballad of Crowfoot, Willie Dunn’s directorial debut about the days and times of the 19th

century Siksika chief, was released at the tail end of 1968. The film was devastating: a no-holds-barred story of colonialism from an Indigenous perspective told by a grassroots radical, funded and distributed by the Canadian government—revolution from within the system. Still, in the pre-digital, analogue era, any film had to find its rightful audience to register. “Once you’d produced the film and got the approved test printed, it was handed over to distribution who handled the promotion,” explains Howells. “The first time I ever saw it was at a theatre in Toronto. You not only could have heard a pin drop, but nobody moved right through the intermission until the following film started,” describes David Lavell. Word travelled fast each and every time that Crowfoot was screened. It became a tool for teachers across Canada and beyond and received a nationally televised broadcast on CBC’s Gzowski program in June of 1970, preceded by a short interview with Willie and Mike Mitchell. “Film is a strong thing,” said Dunn to host Peter Gzowski while stating the importance of direct action over cinema to further social change. “I don’t think that film’s the end-all. I think it’s a beginning. We have to inform the people, our people.”

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Willie was deservedly lauded for his film and received a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival and the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival in New York. The most prestigious recognition was a cash prize of $2,500 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the fabled Oscar Awards. “People were walking down the hallways of the National Film Board, and they would point me out, ‘Academy Award!’” recalled Dunn with a wink. “So it doesn’t matter if you’re a Native person or not; you can still win big time and that’s what I did.” Apart from being the headquarters of the NFB, Montreal was electric in the 1960s and 70s. The bars and brasseries were alive with entertainment as well as progressive conversation. “The Bistro was one of our drinking holes on Mountain Street,” notes Bob Robb. “It’s the kind of place where Leonard Cohen was not the most interesting guy in the room.” While Cohen was devising a career in a business that embraced his poetry, Dunn was avoiding the industry altogether. In fact, he repeatedly deflected interest from Columbia Records, home of Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash, who wanted Willie to project a rebellious country image and sound in an attempt to shift units. He only wanted to be himself. “Well, that was partially because the folk scene in New York at that time, a lot of it, courtesy of people like Pete Seeger and The Weavers, was heavily influenced by the left wing,” reasons David Lavell, “and consequently, the left wing at the time didn’t think much of people becoming rock stars and Hollywood types… They always made a point that they weren’t in it for the money, and they weren’t interested in doing records and all the rest of it. Some of them graduated out of that, and some of them never did. Some of them still had the attitude right until the day they died.” Like Alanis Obomsawin, Willie was on his own journey. “He wasn’t in anybody’s stable,” confirms Robb. “We’d get letters from Loretta Lynn, like, ‘Oh, come on down to Nashville and do this with me.’ Especially in those days, what you call the ‘transit days,’” when fame and fortune weren’t viewed as success. “There was a lot of sharing and inclusiveness, which is a big part of the Native experience that doesn’t readily translate into a normal sort of economy. There was a lot of lean times and floors and cohabiting, and it was sort of like safe places on different reserves that you made it to.” Akwesasne Notes Through his association with Mike Kanentakeron Mitchell, Willie began visiting the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne (“Land where the partridge drums”) amidst a wave of protest, activism, and self-reflection. A deeply-rooted community and region that straddles the Canada-US border on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, known in the Kanien’kéha/Mohawk language as “Kaniatarowanenneh” or “big waterway,” Akwesasne is a long-standing focal point of Indigenous resistance against colonial and settler government interference, oppression, and bureaucracy.

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This reality crystalized on December 18, 1968 when members of the community erected a blockade in front of Cornwall Island’s International bridge to protest custom duties being imposed on Indigenous peoples, a direct violation of the Jay’s Treaty of 1794 between Britain and the United States, a treaty not recognized as binding by the Canadian government. On the back of the Cornwall protest and in response to the need for connectivity amongst Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island, Akwesasne Notes and the White Roots of Peace travelling group emerged. “I was living on the reserve, but I was also teaching down in Vermont at a university,” shares Rarihokwats, then a practicing lawyer. “I got an urgent phone call, ‘Come back immediately! There are fifty-four people in jail. We gotta raise bail money!’ I was in charge of the bail money exercise, and I asked everyone on the rez to give me lists of their relatives that lived away, and I used that as an appeal. And I simply, on 8.5-inch by 11-inch paper, photocopied newspaper clippings and asked people to contribute to the bail fund. There were so many people who did contribute but also said, ‘Oh, it’s so good to hear news from home, and please keep me informed.’ So we did. “In June of 1969 came the ‘White Paper,’ abolishing Indians out of Canada, so we sent news out on that,” continues Rarihokwats. “Pretty soon, people were sending us more and more addresses… And I began to use the web press instead of a photocopier… It grew to 100,000. None of this was ever planned, but it was a very significant force because the people we got involved were not only activists, but they were also traditional people. All of the people who travelled with us were traditional Mohawks who came deep from the Longhouse, and this was the message we took to other traditional people, and everywhere we would go, we would look for the traditional people of that area, or we knew them from one thing or another.” Portrait of an Artist “During the 70s, 80s, I saw a movement happening among the Native people, and that was to dispose of the Indian agent and take over the power,” observed Dunn. “That continues to this day.” To complicate matters, recent promises from the Liberal Party of Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, son of the “White Paper’s” co-creator and ex-PM Pierre Elliot Trudeau (1919-2000), extolling “Nation to Nation” dialogue and “reconciliation” have frequently fallen short of the mark. According to David Lavell, the Trudeau-led Canada at the turn of the 1970s still felt like the “frontier” in many ways: “Some of it was official, and a lot of it was… that’s just where we all were. Everyone doing different things, all contributing deliberately or not to some sort of movement… It was also on the fringe of the budding Native political movement, which pretty soon turned into people just grabbing power and money… So that was another aspect, which Willie, to his credit, never got involved in… He was a genuine activist.” Dunn’s songs, films, and actions made him an inspiring figure to many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, as well as many Indigenous peoples from around the world. They also made him the subject of mass media, public educators, and the colonial powers that be. In the June 1970 issue of long-running Canadian current events magazine Maclean’s, journalist Jon Ruddy profiled Dunn in a three-page exposé entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Half-Breed.” The

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article’s agenda emphasized Willie’s perceived contradictions as a hardscrabble and hard-drinking Mi’gmaq man living and working in one of Canada’s largest cities, travelling across the land and connecting with his Indigenous heritage, and instilling pride in all four directions. It was also the last straw for the mother of his son, who was understandably unimpressed to read of Dunn’s secular excesses and fast living away from home. Poet Duke Redbird from Saugeen First Nation was quoted by Ruddy: “Willie isn’t lazy. He’s in the process of discovering himself, and it’s taking a long time. Willie has found that you can’t have integrity among our own people without screwing the whites. That’s why he gets into these scrapes.” Johnny Yesno also weighed in: “I play his tapes, and the audience always writes in to ask if the songs are on records. They’re not… Most of the time you can’t even find him. He can’t stay in one place.” Later in the Maclean’s piece, Dunn replied from his desk at the NFB: “I should stay here and help in my own way. I’m going to start right now with music. I have felt that I’d be exploiting the Indian people to make records about our past. But if you don’t do nothing, nothing’s going to happen. I’ll go ahead and make those goddam records.” And with a little help from his friends, Willie did just that. By the turn of the 1970s, the songs that Dunn had written for Indian Magazine had evolved into legends of their own, and in 1971 Johnny Yesno was able to parlay his profile in the Toronto media world to amplify their reception even more—a deal for Willie on the newly formed Summus Records label, a musical division of a local advertising agency. Summus was helmed by well-known composer, arranger, producer, and music director Howard Cable in response to the emerging Can Con regulations to help ensure that Canadian content was being played on commercial radio. Along with Dunn, Summus released material by Jamaican keyboard king Jackie Mittoo, an originator of ska, rocksteady, and reggae who immigrated to Canada in 1968, and The Sanderlings, a teenage vocal pop group. With his now well-worn songbook in place, Dunn travelled from Montreal to Toronto along with Bob Robb, Jerry Saddleback, and bass player Norman Ricketts to lay down his debut LP. Once settled at Thunder Sound, one of the city’s top recording facilities (Eastern Sound was also used), the gang was joined by studio musicians Jack Zaza and fiddle champion Al Cherny at the behest of Cable. Utilizing a deceptively lilting, dirge-like melody emanating from the Scottish folk music tradition of the Orkney Islands, Willie Dunn’s “Charlie” is one of the most powerful songs ever recorded and one of the most important in Canadian music history, regardless of the breadth of its audience at the time of release. Folk enthusiasts may recognize echoes of Pete Seeger’s “I Come and Stand at Every Door,” based on a poem about Hiroshima by Turkish writer Nâzim Hikmet and subsequently covered by The Byrds on their 1966 LP, Fifth Dimension. Joan Baez also interpreted this tune as “Silkie” in 1961 (Joan Baez, Vol. 2). “Charlie” tells the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy who ran away from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario and passed on to the spirit world four feet from a set of CN (Canadian National) railway tracks on October 23, 1966. This real-life

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horror was featured in the pages of Maclean’s in February of 1967 by writer Ian Adams and shone a spotlight on this travesty of human justice known all too well in Indigenous communities. Dunn had originally shared “Charlie” via Indian Magazine in 1967, but this specific recording, despite any lightness in feel, is by far the weightiest version available. Throughout the sessions, completed in a mere 12 hours of studio time, both Saddleback and Dunn championed the contributions of guitarist Bob Robb. Their takes were predominantly live with minimal overdubbing, and Cable also oversaw the production on the backend. Dunn elaborated: “There’s one thing that I like about people in the industry: they pay you. Cable did. I ended up with four, five, six hundred bucks after my recording session. Flabbergasting, ‘cause in those days, that’s like thousands, you know, today, and Howard did it, but I also realized that he had an orchestra, and he treated me as any one of his musicians.” Willie was living hand-to-mouth and fully cognizant of the dynamics of exploitation propelling the business of music and the capitalist economy. Yesno asked David Lavell, then a photojournalism student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, to shoot and design the cover. “It was a triple exposure,” edifies Lavell, who further explains the ring around Dunn’s portrait. “It was a hand drum. There would have been a negative of the hand drum and a negative of the print and one of Willie. And that was well before the hand drum had become widely associated with the Native community. There was still a couple of guys around that had hand drums and used them, but the way it is now, everybody’s got a hand drum. It was pretty well unheard of in those days.” Unfortunately, Lavell’s name was left off of the credits on the finished sleeve. Despite an album of life-changing songs, the record would not stand a chance in the Canadian shops without the necessary promotion. Summus was distributed by the well-established London Records of Canada, but they were unable to promote their album to any degree of commercial success. “Schooldays” backed with “Charlie” was released into the marketplace to further test the waters and hopefully garner some interest on radio, but it didn’t get past the starting gate. Dunn’s message revealed far too many truths for mainstream Canadian audiences to digest and trying to fit the LP into any playlist—country, MOR (middle-of-the-road), or pop-rock—wasn’t doing his creations justice anyways. Willie Dunn was, and still is, music beyond the charts. Voice of the People Dunn was given 100 copies of his LP by Cable to sell at gigs, but the world of record retail was another beast entirely, especially when competing again the corporate American rock music machine, which had already absorbed Canadian-born artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Committed to fighting the good fight in Canada, Dunn was on another trip altogether, and despite the aforementioned Can Con regulations designed to help get “Canadian” artists and their labels airplay and sales, visibility was still an issue. The Canadian industry was still in its infancy and unable or unwilling to embrace an artist with such a strong lyrical stance and no interest in playing the showbiz game. “Willie might as well have produced it himself and paid for it,” felt Lavell in hindsight.

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Prior to the release of Willie Dunn, the songwriter spoke with journalist Alex Binkley from the CP (Canadian Press) about racism and fascism in Canada: “The kind of mentality that only wants to look after its own kind… We’ve got to stop cowboy and Indian movies and the racism they create. We’ve got to stop films that make kids ashamed of themselves if we are ever going to live together. All we’re doing now is taking away people’s self-esteem.” Dunn expressed a similar sentiment in 2012 when discussing the lyrics of his song, “I Pity the Country.” “There’s a lot of Canadians who do that, too,” decried Willie. “They just thrive on hate, man. Racists, bigotry, various other untoward things that they deal out to their fellow Canadians. I find that really atrocious.” Elsewhere in Binkley’s interview, Dunn articulated his current goals: “To be a good filmmaker” and to “remain active in the Indian movements, but not as a leader.” He discussed The Seeds of Exploitation, a working title for The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as a film about Louis Riel which never saw its way to production. Though his album wasn’t setting the charts on fire, Dunn’s poetry and films were trickling into Canadian classrooms and discussed in reverential tones amongst the folk fest set, but most importantly, they were inspiring his people. Vinyl records, film, and mass media were only three of the ways that Dunn was being heard by audiences across Turtle Island. Willie was active at poetry readings in Montreal and also taught guitar at workshops in various locations as far away as Manitoulin Island while staying involved in direct action protests against human rights violations and lands rights issues within the greater Native movements. Prominent Métis leader, Tony Belcourt (1943- ), goes into detail: “We all came together in the early seventies. Buckley Petawabano was involved and Johnny, Duke, Shingoose, Alanis, Tantoo Cardinal. We were just getting off the ground and wanted to create some awareness about Métis and non-status Indians. Indian Rights for Indian Women was fighting for recognition of their rights, and the Métis didn’t have any profile whatsoever at that time, so we started that organization, the Native Council of Canada, which later evolved into CAP, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, and we made a lot of noise. People would come around, and we’d always end up at my place or somebody’s place. Lee Cremo would come in from Nova Scotia, and we’d just jam… So we were in the days of organizing, rallies, and just generally speaking out.” Native groups, friendship centers, direct action, and gatherings brought Indigenous peoples of various nations together to learn from each other, collaborate, strengthen culture, and create positive change. Dunn spent more and more time at Akwesasne and with the White Roots of Peace during this era, occasionally performing for the group. He was informally given the name Roha’tiio (“His voice is beautiful”) by a Mohawk Chief who recognized both the community’s appreciation of his presence and the sharing of his gift. Considering the distance between the forward momentum of various Native movements and his album’s stunted performance in the record retail world, Willie decided to re-record his debut with all profits going to support the White Roots of Peace, which would help to bring its important messages directly to Indigenous peoples in addition to allies and conscious supporters around the globe.

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Grassroots Growing With the changing times came further changes to Dunn’s repertoire. Instead of the traditional folk approach evident on his Summus LP, this new recording would display a fuller sound as well as a slightly expanded lineup of musicians. Gone was “Half Breed Blues,” a talking blues number, as well as “Peruvian Dream” Parts 1 and 2, replaced by the mighty “Crazy Horse,” “The Carver,” “O Canada!” and “Cree Grass Dance” featuring Jerry Saddleback. “None of us had any money, but we had food on the table, and Willie ate with us,” recalls Rarihokwats about the grassroots undertaking. Jerry Saddleback was already present at Akwesasne, sitting with a Six Nations clan mother to learn more about the Great Law of Peace, also known as Gayanashagowa, the oral constitution that created the Iroquois confederacy between the Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. “It was pretty interesting how it all formed from the cultural aspect of hardcore culture type things, with people that were right into their Indigenous history and ancestry,” meditates Saddleback. It should be noted that there was extensive consultation and protocol followed by Jerry when recording his parts on Willie’s albums, an extension of the inter-tribal exchanges happening during the era. These contributions should be listened to with this in mind and the highest level of respect when sharing. The White Roots of Peace sessions were conducted in Montreal at the studio of renowned Quebecois engineer André Perry, who had recorded the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and friends in 1969. Perry was a master at his craft and helped to bring an extra dimension to Dunn’s songs, along with executive producer and arranger Michael Patrick, a non-Native friend from Montreal. Paraguayan harp player Eralio Gill, another Montreal resident and Expo 67 participant, was brought on board for “The Carver,” a eulogy for legendary west coast Kwakwaka’wakw artist Mungo Martin (Nakapenkem) (1879-1962), as well as an Indigenous interpretation of Canada’s national anthem. Eminent Mi’gmaq fiddle player Lee Cremo (1938-1999) was also on hand, much to Dunn’s delight. “The engineer called me over and said, ‘I keep hearing this tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.’ I said, ‘Let me hear it.’ So he brought the tape back… [laughs] It was Lee. When he plays, he’s tapping his foot all the time [laughs], and it came right out on the record. The engineer was unhappy; I said, ‘Leave it in, for fuck’s sake!’” Cremo certainly elevates these specific versions of “Louis Riel” and “School Days” with his down-home style. Once the music was recorded, Rarihokwats and Dunn assembled words and imagery for the album’s gatefold sleeve and reached out to well-respected Mohawk artist Kahionhes (John Fadden), a teacher and contributor to the Akwesasne Notes newspaper. “They wanted a colour image for the cover,” says Kahionhes from his family-run Six Nations Indian Museum in Onchiota, New York. “I produced one, and then they took that and put it on a bus, and the bus was to deliver it to wherever it was supposed to go… Then what happened was that it got lost, so I quickly hammered out a second one.” With its symbolic usage of the turtle and eagle and a medicine wheel colour palette, Kahionhes’ vivid painting acts as a shield and protector to the sacred contents within as well as a welcoming sign to all who cross its path.

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As humble as the initiative was, the results exceeded expectations on every level. Willie and Michael Patrick quickly began shopping for a deal to help offset production costs, hoping that they might find a more supportive ally than Summus on this go round. As fate would have it, Montreal music industry player Robert Nickford was about to start his own independent venture while still employed at Warner Bros., working with Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, and Black Sabbath. “I bumped into Willie by accident one summer afternoon,” remembers Nickford about the beginnings of his Kot’ai imprint, a name and label devised to organically represent the energies of two I Ching hexagrams, “peace” and “revolution.” “It was the end of the day, afternoon, so I walked into the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Stanley Street just to have a four o’clock cold beer, and there was Willie. There wasn’t a band, just Willie and [Bob] Robb playing on stage… I had my beer, and I liked what I heard. There was nobody in the place… Willie mentioned that he had an album, and they were shopping for a distribution deal.” Nickford brought up mutual friend Jesse Winchester to Dunn, an original conspirator in the Kot’ai label before being poached away by Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, and the promise of a steady paycheque. After exchanging phone numbers, Michael Patrick stepped in to connect Nickford to Rarihokwats to work out all of the necessary details in Akwesasne. Music Industry Blues “Once you get into this one, there are some delightful surprises in store,” read the short review of Willie Dunn in the October 7, 1972 issue of Canadian music industry journal, RPM. “Much of the material has to do with the mistreatment of the Indians, okay. But there is significant music here of general interest. Free-formers will be the first to discover ‘Charlie Wenjack’ and the other delights.” Though positive in tone, the disconnect between the actual content and its colonial media interpretation is clear to see. With a newly implemented Canadian content system in place that primarily benefitted Canadian artists who had already achieved success in the United States or a select number of old stock gatekeepers with little imagination or interest in “sharing the land,” financial prospects were daunting—hippie idealism be damned! Once again, sales were “very, very low,” admits Nickford. “I don’t think we sold a thousand copies of the album.” After discussions with Dunn, it was determined that “I Pity the Country,” backed with “The Carver,” would be released as a single in the spring of 1973. Charting as high as 79 on RPM’s “Country Playlist,” it sold even less than the LP. Though “I Pity the Country” didn’t fit commercial radio’s restrictive formats, what couldn’t be charted was the glowing support for Willie’s album in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities and, later, on broadcasting outlets like Wawatay Native Communications Society, formed by members of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in 1974 to spread Indigenous news and culture. Dunn had delivered a classic to Indian Country. Regardless of numbers, Nickford was a friend to Dunn and a genuine soul, a rarity in the oft corrupt music business. “I was just happy to bring whatever project I got involved with from A to B or C to D… I didn’t get involved to generate record sales. I believed in the cause. I believed in Willie Dunn!” The goal for Nickford was not only to shift units but to help raise awareness about Willie, who could be found touring Canadian universities, pow wows, folk festivals, and

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Native community events. With no booking agents, PR steam, or big money backing, this was a grassroots affair. “We are not your children anymore…” “Willie didn’t see himself as a rock star type,” asserts David Lavell. “He was like a lot of folk musicians at that time. They liked playing music, and you got gigs when you got ‘em, and he used to do Mariposa periodically, and he was happy with that, and his stuff with the Film Board gave him a living.” Dunn’s next NFB project was a collaboration with veteran Canadian editor-turned-director Martin Defalco, who had recently completed his first feature length film, Don Messer: His Land and His Music. Far from a cinematic celebration about a popular Canadian folk music icon, The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1972) was a well-informed critique and attack of the colonial system and infrastructure, narrated by no less than George Manuel (1921-1989), a hereditary chief of the Secwepemc Nation and President of the National Indian Brotherhood, now known as the Assembly of First Nations. Between Dunn, Defalco, and the resources at the NFB, all of the necessary procedures were followed to document Queen Elizabeth II’s official Canadian visit to celebrate The Hudson’s Bay Company’s 300th anniversary as well as filming public forums between HBC representatives and Native leaders like Dr. Howard Adams, a well-respected Métis educator, writer, and radical. Connections like Adams and Duke Redbird, also featured in the film, were to Dunn’s credit. “Willie moved all across Canada, but he had no money or anything,” notes Defalco. “Crashing on couches, he’d be all over [the place], so he knew everybody in the radical movement, the young people, and so he got us any contacts we needed.” Dunn could also be seen in front of the camera, performing a moving version of “I Pity the Country” in a classroom filled with a culturally diverse audience, all visibly touched and unified by Dunn’s undeniable song. Still, a much rumoured encounter between Dunn and Elizabeth was not caught on camera yet speaks directly to Willie’s indomitable spirit. It has been said that during a formal line greeting, Willie leaned into the Queen’s extended handshake and confidently stated: “We are not your children anymore.” “It sounds apocryphal as they say,” believes David Lavell, “but on the other hand, Willie would certainly do it if he had the chance.” “Don’t forget, there weren’t the security problems that there are now,” reminds Defalco, “although there was still security. We were in places like The Pas, and we were in Dauphin. The Queen and the Prince [Philip] would come down to meet the press.” One thing is for certain: The Other Side of the Ledger ruffled the right feathers. “[The] Hudson’s Bay was really put off,” recalls Defalco. “They were going to bring a great deal of pressure [to stop production], and of course, the young Indians got together and started to spread the word, so they backed off, and we managed to release the film. I thought it might not get released because you’re saying it’s the government doing this, and they’re a legitimate government.” Whether or not the HBC or British monarchy or Canadian government wanted to acknowledge any of their historical or contemporary wrongdoings, Ledger remains an important documentation of colonial arrogance, oppression, and Indigenous resistance.

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While the NFB was providing a basic living wage and office space for Willie, who also contributed to films by Clay Borris (Paper Boy, Rose’s House) and Mike Mitchell (Who Were the Ones?), the Indian Film Crew was running its course. City life and bureaucracy finally took its toll on the young filmmakers. Barbara Wilson (Kii’iljuus) of the Haida Nation left the IFC after not being allowed to use Film Board facilities to edit self-funded footage about regalia, art, residential schools, and the placement of sacred artifacts in museums instead of their original communities. “We faced lots of struggles because of our protests, but the main thing is that we stuck together,” said Wilson, who went on to become a specialist in coastal climate change solutions. Red Power Meanwhile, to the south, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was rising. Led by Mohawk activist Richard Oakes, LaNada Means, and close to 100 Native Americans and assorted supporters, the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 was a defiant moment of reclamation. The 1973 seizing of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota by approximately 200 Oglala Lakota people and AIM members with leaders Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Leonard Peltier was another galvanizing juncture. Both actions generated global support for the rights of Indigenous peoples on their land. Walk on Through the Snow German author, producer, and activist Claus Biegert visited Turtle Island for the first time after the events at Wounded Knee to try and raise awareness in Europe about what was happening in the States. Both Biegert and his travelling partner, Carl-Ludwig Reichert, had book deals in Germany and wanted to become involved in the Native American resistance first-hand. “When we arrived, we did not know that Indians do not want to be a part of the North American mainstream,” concedes Biegert from his home in Munich. “Blacks fought to get a part of the cake, and Indians fought for, ‘No, we want to keep our own cake…’ I only had heard about Akwesasne Notes through a professor of chemistry who had travelled there before, and she had the paper imported and given to people who were interested… We wrote a postcard [saying], ‘Can we come?’ and a postcard came back, ‘Yes, please come!’ We asked, ‘Where is Akwesasne Notes?’ and they pointed to a house. It was called the Nation House, and there, a young man was taking down his socks from the clothesline. We said, ‘We are from Germany, and we are looking for Akwesasne Notes.’ And he said, ‘Well, come in, there are a lot of freaks inside.’ And so we followed, ‘My name is Willie,’ he said, and he was getting ready to go into the woods. He talked about fasting and being alone for a while, and then he gave us his album. ‘Take this home to Germany for me.’ “We travelled with backpacks,” continues Biegert, “so the album arrived not as flat as an LP is supposed to be. We played it to Trikont [Records] and they said, ‘We’ve got to publish this!’” After receiving the master, the recording was released in Germany under the name Akwesasne Notes, reflecting Willie’s association with the community, newspaper, and his shared admiration of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations confederacy. The album became a staple

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in record collections of anyone in Europe with even a passing interest in Native American folk-rock. Growing up in the city center of Montreal helped to spare Willie from the residential school system, a cultural genocide by church and state designed to assimilate Indigenous youth into mainstream Canadian society. Beginning in the 1870s, the last residential school was shut down in 1996. In total, over 150,000 children were forced into this barbaric and neglectful system and over 5,000 were reported to have died and many more abused, not to mention the after-effects to survivors, their families, and communities. Conceived to raise awareness about this atrocity, the feature-length film, Cold Journey, was released by the NFB in the spring of 1975. Years in the making and up against bureaucratic and institutional odds, Cold Journey stars Buckley Petawabano, known for his groundbreaking role in Adventures in Rainbow Country (1970-71), Johnny Yesno, and Chief Dan George, an Academy Award nominee for his role alongside Dustin Hoffman in 1970’s Little Big Man. Cree singer-songwriter Morley Loon, Noel Starblanket, and Dunn make brief cameos in the Martin Defalco-directed movie. Willie also contributed songs to the soundtrack, including the anthemic “We Are One” and a re-working of “Charlie” that removed any direct mention of Chanie Wenjack in the lyrics. Defalco explains: “It wasn’t Charlie, and that was the point that we had to make. It wasn’t one person. It was the system.” With much needed support from Dunn, Alanis Obomsawin, and others, Cold Journey had a limited theatrical run and drew a mixed reception from colonial mass media critics. In the July 5, 1975 issue of the Ottawa Journal newspaper, journalist Frank Daley regarded the whole undertaking as “a waste of time and money.” Despite stating that the residential school experience is a story that needs to be told, Daley went on to say, “the majority of Indians obviously can’t act,” and that a problem with the sound during its eastern Canadian premiere at the National Arts Centre “at least eliminated Willie Dunn and his dumb song.” Shame. “The thing about Cold Journey is you think about what’s happening with the residential school today. This was something 40 years before, and it was raising awareness,” says Rarihokwats. “Who at the time was doing that? Nobody. I think the role of those people who were more actively involved needs to be honoured and brought forward. They set the stage in many ways, causing people to question the value of residential school. At the time, it was an extremely radical film. You have no idea how radical that was.” Adding to the challenges, in the early 1970s, Robert Bourassa’s Quebec Liberal Party government (1970-1976, 1985-1994) started advancing a series of hydroelectric projects that would significantly affect the northern lands and its Indigenous population by damming a number of rivers and tributaries. In typical government fashion, and still occurring today, this was done without proper Indigenous consultation and consent. In 1973, The Quebec Association of Indians sued the provincial government and won an injunction in Quebec Superior Court that would block any proposed hydroelectric development until the province had negotiated a binding agreement with the Indigenous nations of the James Bay region. These undertakings caused great stress and factionalism within the Native communities

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involved, dividing families over their traditional ways of life against an encroaching flood of modernity and destruction of their environment for corporate financial gain. Both Native and non-Native supporters helped to raise awareness for this pivotal struggle against the colonial behemoth. In 1973, a week of concerts and events were held in Montreal including the “Save James Bay Fund” benefit featuring Gilles Vigneault (“Mon Pays”), Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joni Mitchell. In addition to performing, Alanis Obomsawin was also present to film the gathering’s Indigenous programming, later featured in her 1977 NFB documentary, Amisk. Highlights include an incendiary poetry recitation from Duke Redbird (“Old Woman”), an a cappella performance by Sugluk, and Dunn singing and strumming “Buffalo Song” with unparalleled fervour. Underground Throughout the 1970s, Montreal’s Boiler Room was a focal point of underground resistance for creative folk and political thinkers. Ideas big and small were hatched there with hushed plans of revolution held and traded like cards alongside empty glasses of beer and broken peanut shells. Dunn’s songs provided a soundtrack and were sung and spread as rallying cries and land acknowledgments surrounding the power plays at hand. Both Dunn and Bob Robb were involved in anti-government and RCMP protests, and it has been thought that Willie may have been caught in the crossfire. Despite being a singer-songwriter, artist, filmmaker, leader, and activist of increasing strength, he was ultimately not involved in the final decision-making process for what was a multibillion-dollar venture with the future of the land at stake. One night at the Boiler Room, Dunn and a group of resistors became mysteriously ill. Some believe that they were intentionally poisoned. In fear of Willie’s institutionalization, a fate received by two of his comrades, Dunn was taken north by friends to the central lake lands of Mistassini to heal through ceremony and a moment of respite amidst all of the madness. It was not to be. With mounting tensions surrounding the James Bay struggle, unsettling energies, and whispers of bad medicine, Willie felt compelled to leave the community for his safety with nothing more than a broken piece of flint. His abrupt departure turned into a 500-kilometer journey through the bush chancing further injury or death. Weeks later, Dunn surfaced in the town of Val-d’Or and was brought into care. He was never the same. The Rough Road Not long after, on November 11, 1975, representatives of the James Bay region Cree and Inuit signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. Decimated by this news, Dunn settled back in Montreal for a spell where he took consolation in the bottle. Willie’s razor-sharp edge was now blunted and his creative strength and activist ambition completely extinguished while he soldiered on in survival mode. His guitar sat up against the corner, untouched for weeks. One stabilizing presence was Liz Moore, a receptionist at the Native Council of Canada in

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Ottawa. In time, the pair became a couple, and she helped Willie to regain his composure and gradually got him back on his feet. “You can only buck the system for so long; then you put your hands up and move on to a different place,” feels Barbara Wilson about Dunn’s transition. The second half of the 1970s was fragmented for Dunn professionally, though he continued to perform and was immortalized on the Mariposa 1976 double LP alongside Alanis Obomsawin, Duke Redbird, Winston Wuttunee, and Floyd Red Crow Westerman, as well as another CBC broadcast-only recording featuring “Down by the Stream (Starlight Maiden)” and “Rattling Along the Freight Train (To the Spirit Land).” Still unbalanced and drinking heavily, Dunn hit the road with Glen Campbell, Shingoose, and Duke Redbird, which ended up in an onstage meltdown with Willie smashing his guitar and kicking the pieces out into the audience in frustration. He was also involved in a heated altercation with the Governor of Maine during an artist reception after taking a historical stick from a display case at the Maine State House out into the streets as retribution for what the American government has done to Indigenous peoples. Needless to say, State security guards followed in pursuit. The tour was over. “They’re a bunch of phonies,” said Dunn to Bob Robb about Campbell and many of the commercially-minded recording artists that he rubbed shoulders with. A New Beginning Thankfully, raising children was a positive focus for Willie, who started a family with Liz in 1976. Lawrence was the first to arrive, followed by Kalloosit Pamela in 1981. “You want to roll back the darkness,” says Bob Robb, “but the act of living with it is hard. I’m so happy that with Liz and Lawrence and Pamela that he had the security of a family and Liz making a home, and he mellowed into where he had the time and freedom to read and explore and express himself in very great dimensions of human kindness in that era of post-sort of turbulence, catatonic in the corner, and the idea of looking into the face of how brutal that life can be.” The weight of action and history can be debilitating to even the strongest of souls. More Roots… Like Willie, Claus Biegert was extremely moved by the James Bay struggle and returned to Turtle Island in 1979 to present a land-based, multimedia exhibition with an artist friend and collaborator. “That’s when I met Willie again, and he was kind of desperate,” informs Biegert. “Lawrence was two and Liz had a job. Willie had house shoes on. He was not leaving the house… I realized he needs a kick. He needs a push. I called Trikont and said, ‘Can I ask him to go into the studio? Can you back me up?’ And they said, ‘Well, we don’t have much money, but we have a little, and yeah, tell him to go into the studio.’ In those days, no Internet, you know, and then I went back to Germany, and the back-and-forth [of letters and telegrams] began. Eventually, a delivery arrived with tapes.” The tapes contained a masterpiece. Eight years after Willie’s White Roots of Peace LP, The Pacific was released by Achim Bergmann’s Trikont label in 1980. The album featured a more eclectic deck of songs, starting with the lengthy title track, replete with ocean sounds, subtle

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guitar picking, bass, piano, cymbals, words borrowed from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and quenacho by Argentinian flute player and friend Dario Domingues (1954-2000). “Pontiac,” harkens back to Dunn’s honouring songs like “Crazy Horse,” equally stirring but with a wistful and more subdued feel. The last piece on each side of the record combines two high arts: English literature in the words of William Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot and traditional Haudenosaunee songs performed by Dave Jock with the Akwesasne Singers. These original fusions express the duality of Dunn’s ancestry and interests—more than 30 years before A Tribe Called Red’s revered pow wow step. Like the cut-and-paste pioneers of New York hip-hop active during the same late 1970s/early 80s era, Willie was fully in the moment and well ahead of his time. By now, Willie’s influence had affected younger generations of Indigenous musicians including Willy Mitchell (“Call of the Moose”) and Inuvialuit road warrior Willie Thrasher (Spirit Child). Just prior to The Pacific’s release, Dunn was asked by Mitchell and Jeanne Poirier of the Quebec Native Women’s Association to participate in the Sweet Grass Music Festival. The concerts were held on January 25-26, 1980 and featured performances by Mitchell, Thrasher, Morley Loon, Roger House, Johnny Cooper, and Cheryl Chief. Advance tickets were three Canadian dollars or four at the door, and the handcrafted poster brandished a message to “Support Native Artists!” The music was recorded by Guy Charbonneau of Le Mobile recording truck, but unfortunately an overtly squeaky chair prevented Dunn’s set from being included on the privately-pressed Sweet Grass Music LP, subsequently issued by Trikont overseas. Willie also channelled his energy into teaching, mentoring youth at the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa, where he had collected images for The Ballad of Crowfoot short film in the late 1960s. “I taught some Native students at the archives about photographs and acquisition, and it was good for them,” explained Willie. “It opened a door. That’s the way I was taught by Rarihokwats, who more or less exposed that avenue to me. I thought I’d do the same for them. I don’t know where they are gonna go or what they’re gonna do with it, but I think it’s essential for Native children to really get into the archives and not only do photographic acquisition, but also study, first-hand, their history, from Indian Affairs agents, ministers, whatever, going back a long time. If you were making a film, you can almost think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to put together some photographs and first-hand history?’ Not something that you can read from a book but something you can actually research yourself and apply to the Canadian scene.” “When I saw Willie again in ’79, he said, ‘You know, I’m a good fisherman, but there are no fish,’” recounts Biegert about the lack of gigs for Dunn at home. But with The Pacific doing well in European record shops, Trikont decided to bring Willie and Dario Domingues over for a tour. It was the first time that Dunn had left Turtle Island since his army days, and now he was travelling on the international strength of his music, poetry, and film. The European audiences were keen to absorb the breadth of what Willie was offering as he travelled across Germany and, later, Switzerland and Italy. Willie was adamant about being recognized as an artist first and foremost. “He wanted to get a gig, an assignment, as an artist, and not because he’s Indian,” continues Biegert. Like any true artist, Dunn refused to be pigeonholed.

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“Stay Ready.” Upon return, Willie delved deeper into his English roots than ever before through literature and poetry. What was revealed on The Pacific was even more audible on his next full-length, The Vanity of Human Wishes, released by Trikont in 1984. Words by William Cullen Bryant, Richard Parsons, and Samuel Johnson were partnered with a modern folk pulse across the first side of the album while the flip saw original compositions, words and music, including “Wounded Lake,” “Métis Red River Song,” “Son of the Sun,” and “The Lovenant Chain.” Of these songs, “Son of the Sun” stands out as a heartbeat staple. “A peace song,” noted Willie, written after his first German tour. The LP’s closer is “The Lovenant Chain,” a play on words of the Covenant Chain, a series of alliances and treaties between the Haudenosaunee, other individual Native American tribes, and the British colonies of North America in the 17th century. It is one of Dunn’s most poignant compositions. As the decade advanced, Dunn performed whenever possible while focussing on helping to raise his family. He also branched out into painting on canvases, drums, and talking sticks. “He’d be like, ‘Ah, I get no respect, you know?’” said Bob Robb about his old partner’s treatment by the Canadian music scene. It was a topic that Willie discussed with Sudbury-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Eric Landry at an Ottawa pow wow in the mid-1980s. “They still don’t want to hear you,” said Landry. “What are we supposed to do about this as Native musicians?” “Well,” replied Dunn, pausing for a moment to ponder the question. “We just wait. Stay ready.” It’s a valuable teaching that Landry heeds to this day. Refusing to explicitly commodify himself, Willie Dunn’s artistic vision remained pure and undiluted with age. According to Gloria Martin Dunn, her brother was “not gonna pick up a pen and write a song for the popular singer of the day… He’d rather starve to death than sell his soul, you know? Willie wrote what he was passionate about and what he believed in, and that was that.” Innu folk-rock heroes Kashtin were quick to praise Dunn for his influence and contributions, both musically and lyrically, alongside fellow trailblazers Morley Loon and Innu great Philippe McKenzie. Resistance In other news, Elijah Harper’s unwavering position during 1987’s Meech Lake Accord and the 78-day 1990 standoff between Mohawk community members of Kanehsatake and Kahnawake against the RCMP and Canadian Armed Forces in Oka, documented by Alanis Obomsawin in 1993’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, demonstrated that Canada was continuing to disrespect the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island through policy, aggression, ignorance, and greed. Though the country of 37 million people appears to have a respectable worldwide reputation, in many ways, Canada’s stance in regards to Indigenous peoples has changed little since the release of Willie Dunn back in 1971, showcasing its true colours. Racism, violence, and challenging living conditions are everyday realities for many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. At the time of writing, there were nearly 100 drinking water advisories in First Nations communities across Canada and resource extraction/environmental damage remains rampant.

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Thankfully, there are new generations of peaceful activists and radicals joining the good fight with their elders for a “better tomorrow” and an increasing amount of non-Native awareness and solidarity. Looking to the Future Though distanced from the frontlines, Willie was still raising awareness and leading by example into the 1990s, pushing through the loss of his mother Stella in 1992 and mentoring Winneway’s Raven Kanatakta, later of Digging Roots, whose father, Gordon Polson, was a close friend of Dunn’s: “Willie always had something brewing, some idea, and wasn’t scared to go after it. It felt like he had nothing to lose. He only had things to gain from creating. He was very experimental in that way. And it was really great for me because when I was coming up as a guitar player and playing with him, I was able to explore my musicality… It was the kind of situation where he gave me room to grow, too. It’s not just like, ‘Don’t play it like that, or play it like that,’ it wasn’t that kind of mentorship. It was a very open one of, ‘You do your thing and then bring that thing over here, and let’s create something.’” After living in Canada’s capital city for years and working for the people on a socialist grassroots level, it wasn’t a curveball to see Willie running a door-to-door campaign with help from his son, Lawrence, as the representative for the NDP’s (New Democratic Party) Ottawa/Vanier riding in the 1993 federal election, a race which saw Jean Chrétien, former Minister of Indian Affairs (1968-1974) and White Paper agent, become the Prime Minister of Canada. “Without political support, there is very little you can do,” said Dunn, in retrospect. “It’s just one thing against another.” Although Willie finished fourth against Liberal incumbent Jean-Robert Gauthier, he was happy to receive the majority of the black vote: “For me, man, a good thing.” By the dawn of the new millennium, many of Dunn’s peers had already gone onto various forms of political service, both in and outside Native organizational groups. It was Willie’s first and last official attempt at entering the mainstream political arena. “He was a better poet than a politician,” thinks Gloria Martin Dunn. With a long-running string of institutional backing, Dunn now had trouble receiving subsidies for his art and faced rejections from Canada Council on a series of pitches. In 1994, he did write “Children of the World,” an all-star Indigenous music project supporting stay-in-school advocacy sponsored by the Canadian government. The song and accompanying video, which received regular rotation on MuchMusic, also featured Shingoose, Susan Aglukark, Fara, Don Ross, Sylvie Bernard, and a children’s choir. Contemporary Indigenous music was gaining more mainstream acceptance during this period, reflected in the Best Music of Aboriginal Canada Recording category at The Juno Awards in 1994, won by Moose Cree First Nation member Lawrence Martin for Wapistan is Lawrence Martin. Willie contributed music and a cameo to director Shelley Niro’s Honey Moccasin (1998), an entertaining and thought-provoking comedic thriller featuring Tantoo Cardinal, Florence Belmore, and Billy Merasty. Indigenous media outlets and communication networks were also

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expanding. In 1999, APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) became the first national Indigenous TV broadcaster, providing news, dramas, and documentaries. And though traditional folk music was becoming less prominent in the greater cultural landscape, a small west coast label released a greatest hits collection of Dunn’s called Metallic, a tribute to Willie’s mother and Mi’gmaq community. He also captured a selection of demos and assorted recordings with friend and collaborator Ron Bankley, a talented guitarist from the Montreal scene. And in 2004, Trikont released Son of the Sun, a compilation of unreleased and live material including “Bear and Fish,” a song originally written in the mid-1970s for a film about the late Anishinaabe painter Norval Morrisseau. After another trip to perform in Berlin for the WOMEX world music festival in 2000, Dunn’s rough road was beginning to smooth out. In 2005, he was honoured with a “Lifetime Contribution to Aboriginal Music” award by the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, an event also noteworthy for the emergence of Tanya Tagaq, who received three nods for her debut album, Sinaa. Today, the Inuk singer and author is known for telling it like it is, not unlike Dunn. Willie was also celebrated, this time for his film work, by the 2005 Dreamspeakers International Film Festival on their Aboriginal Walk of Honour in Edmonton, Alberta. During these moments of recognition, the struggle, once so vivid, seemed further away. “It was like beating your head against a wall,” said Dunn about his efforts. “The 60s and 70s, man, were really tough. I had a lot of problems, you know, with different people. They just wouldn’t understand what I was singing. It was there in black and white. It was there in voice and in music. They just didn’t see it.” “I understand when people are dealing with depression and how hard that is,” acknowledges Raven about his mentor’s challenges and self-medication. “It’s a disease, but it’s also a symptom of something quite larger. People numb themselves so they don’t have to feel that pain and whatnot that you’ve been exposed to in this life or how you’ve been treated, or continue to get treated, and Willie was on his own personal trip, you know. He was doing his thing, and I supported him where I could.” Even the love of family and close friends couldn’t help Willie during his most inconsolable moments. Rest Well Despite the joy, love, and laughter in the Dunn household, decades of tough living finally led to serious health complications for Willie and a general slowing of pace as he faced the second decade of the new millennium. Songs like “The Ballad of Crowfoot” that required supernatural amounts of mental and physical dexterity were becoming difficult to perform. There was also the psychic weight of the material itself, present on numbers like “Charlie.” “It’s just too sad,” replied Willie when I made the request for him to play the song while assembling the Native North America compilation in 2013. Later that evening, he told me a story: “I was at a performance [in Germany in 1980], and this young fellow brought this old woman to see me. She shook my hand. She was over a hundred years, a hundred and two or three or so. She wanted to see a Native person. Well, I gave her a hug [laughter]. That’s the best I could do, but I

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was thinking about it later on, what she had been through in her lifetime, man. The first World War, the second World War, the Korean War, the Depression. I didn’t know what to say. It’s good to meet old people, man, but you have to think about what they’ve been through.” With time, I understood. Even in his weakened physical condition, Willie was still vibrant and full of ideas. Observing the current Indigenous music community that he helped to usher in, he was happy to hear more contributions from women than ever before: “They are coming out with some real great lyrics, and they’re knocking things aside, man.” He was also following the Idle No More movement, invigorated by his grandchildren, actively writing, excited to have his music and film shared through the Native North America series, and hoped one day to meet fellow Light In The Attic artist Sixto Rodriguez, a like-minded soul. On August 5, 2013, William Lawrence Dunn passed on to the spirit world with his partner Liz Moore and her sister by his side. Desolation followed shock. The absence felt eternal. “When he passed away, I had to get off of the boat,” recounts Bob Robb. “I said, ‘I’ve got a death in the family.’” Raven Kanatakta, who performed at Willie’s celebration of life, noted, “a loss to the community.” Old friends like Alanis Obomsawin and Willy Mitchell were present at the gathering, as well as Albert “South Wind” Dumont, who conducted the service. Recently appointed Liberal party opposition leader and future Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, sent his condolences via email and a public online guest book. Let Us Never Forget… “I’ve felt that Willie didn’t get the recognition and the respect in his lifetime that he should have,” maintains Jeannette Corbiere Lavell. “And then, even afterwards, especially this last little while with Gord Downie and the recognition of Chanie and his story and his family. Willie should have been recognized as part of that ‘cause Willie’s the first one who saw that and put it to song. I feel strongly that he was at the forefront of bringing those issues into the music realm.” “People’s memories are short,” adds Claus Biegert, who was not surprised that the colonial mass media would leave out such an important factor in the awareness of Wenjack’s story to not only Canada, but the world. “Willie was a man who was never afraid of challenges. He was what all of us wanted to be,” shares Barbara Wilson. “He had a lovely voice, wrote songs, made art. These are the dreams that young people have.” “He made us feel good to be Indian, to be First Nations people,” relates Lawrence Martin. “Made us feel proud. And to hear our stories being sung on radio and recordings, that gave us a real boost and it really inspired us musicians as well.” Shingoose remembers, “We viewed him as the best. He had the voice, the intellect, the humour. He was always very humble. What a privilege to have known him. I loved him.”

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“The role of the bard in any society is defining and celebrating,” says Bob Robb about his dear friend. “It’s so important for people to have heroes, and he celebrated all of those heroes in a sense, like Pontiac… Folk heroes like Johnny Cash, who, not to say anything disparaging about him, but it was more of a manufactured image. Willie was a real guy.” David Lavell declares, “He was a very important Canadian artist as well as a very important Indigenous artist and especially important in my view because he transcended the two cultures, the two worlds. He was a half-breed. He was the guy from one culture who could get it across to the other.” “I think that Willie was on a mission more so than developing a career as an entertainer,” believes Robert Nickford. “He was a messenger.” Tony Belcourt asks, “Where are the Willie’s of the world? We need Willie back, you know? He stood out amongst everybody.” “It’s amazing how honourable Willie was and how much dedication and commitment he had to make things better for his people,” adds Corbiere Lavell. “He was so engrossed in it. It was a part of him, and I believe he made a big difference.” Rarihokwats recalls, “Willie really captured a whole era of history from the point of view of the people experiencing the history, not as a historian and going year by year and event by event—but the personal impact on an entire people; he really captured that in a way that was intuitive. This wasn’t an intellectual plan. This happened… A lot of people like to take credit for doing that. ‘I’m founder of this movement or that movement,’ but Willie, there was just something in there that spoke to him, and he responded. I think that most of his music will strike a chord amongst modern people, it’s just that most of them have never heard it. Willie has really gone in the background and never became the personality, say, that Buffy did. He didn’t commercialize himself in that way.” Giving Thanks There should never be any judgement for coming to things when you do. All that matters is that one remains open to receive important messages. Once you’ve heard “I Pity the Country,” “Charlie,” “Louis Riel,” “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” “The Pacific,” and “Son of the Sun,” it’s safe to say your life will be forever changed. Willie Dunn honoured truth through songs and film as well as poetry, writing, and art—all expressions of his being. His creations and spirit, still so very alive, have brought us here together to listen and learn. We can’t forget to give thanks and share. Music is an endless connector, and Willie knew this better than anyone: “It’s everywhere. Music is a forever thing, man.”

Kevin Howes (Voluntary In Nature) is a Grammy-nominated producer, journalist, DJ, filmmaker, musician, and artist of settler/immigrant heritage, humbly and respectfully working out of the traditional territories of the Wendat, Anishinabek Nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, Métis Nation, and the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.