National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
SUPPLEMENT TO THE FREE PRESS • FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2022
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PHOTO BY DARCY FINLEY
Spoken FROM THE HEART Anishinaabe musician Leonard Sumner shares a smile with his two-year-old daughter Isabella.
By Wendy King W ithout language, there are no words. And without words, there can be no stories. Leonard Sumner, an Anishi- naabe singer, songwriter and guitar player, is passionate about words and the truths they carry about his people. Sumner, 38, is from Little Saskatchewan First Nation, where he honed his art and musicianship on the stages of local talent and treaty day shows in the In- terlake region of Manitoba. “My mom gave me my love of music — she always listened to KY 58 — so I listened to a lot of oldies and a lot of country music like Dwight Yoakam, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, stuff like that,” says Sum- ner. He also listened to Motown R&B and his older brother got him listening to rap. All of it influenced him and he taps into these sources to create his music, his storytelling platform — where truth lives. “I do see myself as a bit of a storyteller. I’m a writer and I do spoken word, I write songs and tell stories, and I communicate through those songs,” he says. "But it’s also not up for me to decide. I think the community decides who their storytell- ers are." The role of storyteller amongst Indig- enous people is key to carrying culture and the medicine to heal the injuries of the past, which live on as open wounds in the present lives of Indigenous people. “It’s a responsibility, absolutely. Who bet- ter to share the Indigenous experience than an Indigenous person?” he asks.
One of the consequences of colonialism is the near elimination of Indigenous languag- es. Sumner grew up speaking English but is learning Anishinaabemowin in the Saulteaux dialect.
ters were punished. My granny told me that when she went to school — she didn’t clari- fy whether it was residential school or day school — when she got back, she didn’t know how to speak the language and the other chil- dren would ridicule her in the community,” he says. “She had to relearn how to speak the lan- guage from my grandpa, is what she told me.” She passed it on to Sumner’s father, and his mother could speak as well. “Because they were punished in school for that, they thought we would have a bet- ter life if we could speak English first — that says to me that they were taught not to value their language,” he says. Trying to learn the traditional language is not easy. “I have a song where there’s a full verse in Anishinaabemowin, but because I’m not flu- ent, it’s often quite difficult to perform live. I haven’t ever been able to fully memorize it because the language is supposed to be spo- ken from the heart; it’s not about memoriza- tion,” he says. For Sumner, music is an effective way to reach out to people. “I think it’s an easy-to-digest format of the truth because music is used in everything — celebration, death, ceremony. There’s a song for every occasion, and if you can have a mes- sage within that, it’s a very powerful tool to help educate people,” he says. He has seen it firsthand at a powwow in Brunswick House, Ont. “I was playing and I had the young people for about 20 minutes and then they all kind of scattered. But all of the older people sat
down and listened until the end to a younger guy in his 30s speaking about what I speak about, including the culture in that, and they’re showing appreciation for that. It meant a lot for me that they stayed till the end and listened,” he says. “And I’ve always kind of thought that it’s not the kids that need to hear this stuff — it’s actually the Elders because they were the ones that were taught to devalue it when they had it. I think our language speakers that are left, our cultural leaders, understand our old stories and it’s time for them to see value in that, and those things are so vital and so important for our identities.” Sumner sings about truth — but he isn’t so sure about reconciliation. “Where I’m at, personally, I’m not really writing songs about reconciliation because I feel like it’s just the word-of-the-day kind of thing and it’s essentially meaningless with- out any action behind it,” he says. “When you think about our languages and how our culture was forcibly removed us- ing every single resource that the Canadian government had — they had the police, the church; they enforce laws that banished cul- tural practices; they remove children from their homes and abuse them or sometimes murdered them — it’s really hard to think of a reconciliation right now.” Maybe that’s part of being a storyteller of the community — being an observer, he adds. "I see an injustice and I want to speak on it and I want to do something about it,” he says, “and I think that’s what I’ve done with my mu- sic.”
I see an injustice and I want to speak on it and I want to do something about it and I think that’s what I’ve done with my music.”
Leonard Sumner, an Anishinaabe singer, songwriter and guitar player
“If our languages were valued as much as French, then maybe we wouldn’t be worried about our language dying,” he says. Sumner adds that even in communities where Indigenous languages are spoken, they are often heavily Christianized to the point where any remnants of pre-colonized culture is “considered to be like voodoo or devil worshipping.” “I remember my mom told me she was pun- ished for speaking the language, and her sis-
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