Jeremy Dutcher & Alanis Obomsawin

Jeremy Dutcher is a Two-Spirit song carrier, composer, activist, and ethnomusicologist from Tobique First Nation in Eastern Canada. He gained international acclaim for his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, which earned him the 2018 Polaris Music Prize and Indigenous Music Album of the Year at the 2019 JUNO Awards. His musical style blends the songs of his community with neoclassical, jazz, and pop influences, and has led him to collaborate with such iconic artists as Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Yo-Yo Ma. Dutcher’s work has taken him to the world’s great concert halls, NPR’s Tiny Desk, and the judges’ table of Canada’s Drag Race.

One of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—50 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “My main interest all my life has been education,” says Obomsawin, “because that’s where you develop yourself, where you learn to hate, or to love.”

Bush Lady is the only recording ever made by Alanis Obomsawin, who began her artistic career as a singer-songwriter in the 1960s. Amidst her burgeoning film career, Bush Lady was born of sessions sponsored by CBC Radio in 1984. Unsatisfied with these recordings, Obomsawin reclaimed the master tapes, remade the album, and issued it on her own private press in 1988. This unique and profound record had been out of print and gaining cult status ever since, until Constellation Records reissued a newly remastered version of the album in 2018.