AMANDA RHEAUME FINDS A NATION’S STORIES IN THE SPACES BETWEEN
- Bernard Zuel
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
MAYBE IT’S THE HECTIC TIMES in Canada and Australia, what with elections, upheavals, leering American influence and sportsball dramas, or maybe it’s simply sensible, but Ontario businesswoman, Indigenous leader and singer/songwriter, Amanda Rheaume, is downing a club soda to fortify herself for this conversation as the call begins. Even though, as she says “I’m moving into the wine part of my day”.
Sober reflections can’t hurt, as I venture a little cross-border comparison. As a songwriter she works in a similar style in terms of tone, music and character-based storytelling to Kim Richey, the American folk/country veteran of serious quality. Each of them can tell a complex story simply, and last time around Richey was singing about navigating memory and the repercussions, much as Rheaume (pronounced rey-um) is on her latest album. Though it turns out the American’s name means nothing to her, for now.
“I actually don’t listen to a ton of music just whenever, because I’m doing so many different things in music,” says Rheaume (which is pronounced rey-um), apologetically. “So I appreciate an independent suggestion.”
To be fair to her, she does have a few things on beyond her own recordings, which saw her sixth album released last month, called The Truth We Hold, and which prior to this has earned her the 2024 Spirit of Folk Award, 2023 Canadian Fold Music Award for Indigenous Songwriter of the Year and the 2023 Capital Music Awards’ Album of the Year.
Off the turntable, Rheaume, who introduces herself as a citizen of the Metis Nation, is the co-founder – with ShoShona Kish of the Ojibwe and Anishinaabe nations, and half of the blues-based duo Digging Roots - of the label Ishkode Records, female run and dedicated to first nations artists. She’s also a founding member of both International Indigenous Music Summit and the Indigenous Music Office.
Which is a lot, and the reason we’re able to hear astonishing voices like Aysanabee, and the blending of traditions in the country rhythms of Morgan Toney, who played at Woodford Folk Festival in late 2024.
When does she find the time to think about music that isn’t work?
“Really early in the morning, sometimes,” she says, or maybe the car.” But sometimes it’s also just quiet.” She pauses, then adds with a note of excitement that says everything about a very full life: “Quiet. Yeah.”
Speaking of quiet, in 2022 she opened her album, The Spaces In Between, saying “I’m just trying to find my place, trying to find some empty space where I’m comfortable enough to say the things I need to say … I’m finding my own voice in the spaces in between”. This new album opens with a story hundreds of years old but also absolutely contemporary, and she sings “I got seven generations, got no time to spend a wasting, I won’t hide”. The messages are similar but now firmer. There’s a harder line drawn.
“I never would have thought of that connection but the song I Won’t Hide is actually a true story about the Powleys, a Metis family fighting for their right to hunt for food [a 10 year fight which in 2001 saw the supreme court declare traditional hunting protected right under the constitution] which was a really big win for Metis people right across the homelands,” Rheaume says. “It is certainly a firmer line: this is who I am, and here I am.
“In The Spaces In Between, I was talking about this to a friend today, everyone’s trying to find what side they are on, or know what side they are wrong, and there is nothing in the middle. But that golden stuff is really in the middle: all the growth happens in the middle, in the spaces in-between things. I guess it’s a different way of kinda talking about the same thing.”
These are issues which are familiar to Australians of course, which like Canada is still reckoning with centuries of Indigenous maltreatment, displacement and consequent intergenerational trauma. How difficult is that to explain the complexities of culture and background to people who see only “I want the right to hunt”?
“What comes up for me is hunting for food to feed your family, a lot of Metis people were, are, poor. Not everybody, but the story we are touching on here it wasn’t just this is fun, let’s go get a moose and pile it on top of our groceries,” she says. “The idea of sovereignty is really interesting: interesting to me but really foreign to a lot of non-Indigenous people. That sovereign nation discussion can be confronting for people, and confusing, but it’s so important to keep talking about it, and the dialogue is what has been missing the way social media is now where we are not listening to each other anymore.
“As an artist, my way is through storytelling and singing and talking about things that have happened in the past, things that are happening now.”
It’s in some ways not surprising that this conversation happens as a bunch of booing Nazis and then politicians on the make travelled on the right wing highway from Anzac Day to welcome to country to outright racism. Not listening to each other anymore? Tell us about it!. But how tiring must it be for those here or there or anywhere to have to relitigate this, seemingly endlessly.
“That’s horrific,” Rheaume says of the dawn service protests. “I’ve never experienced an Elder being booed. First and foremost it’s disrespectful and rude. Whether settlers feel threatened by not being from the land they are extracting from and getting the privilege to live on, that’s a whole other story. I can’t even tap into, for my own body, why people would want to boo when an Elder is acknowledging the land. That’s really sad and a symptom of this sickness that I’m seeing globally. And frankly is one of the reasons why being an artist and doing this level are even more important it seems.”
A First Nations company, a female-driven company in the context of the music industry and western cultures, requires constant work just to be on equal footing. I was thinking about this in the context of a message I received overnight from a friend of mine in Glasgow where she is negotiating a divorce, a pre-teen son, a new relationship and her own business, and she was telling me how she was alternately invigorated and exhausted: loving the demands and looking at the never ending list of those demands with dread. Best and worst of times basically. Is that what it’s like for Rheaume?
“That’s really funny,” she laughs. “I’ve been an artist for 20 years, or over or something – I stopped counting – and it’s definitely a ‘must do’. That’s how it feels for me, but it’s such a great privilege. It’s also kind of a responsibility, I look at it like that, but such an honour. These moments we get to have with our family of artists, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Which is great, but how does she find the time in her writing to remain her and not just a representative, spokeswoman or example?
“Because I am doing many different things, at this stage of my life writing isn’t currently one of those things that I just wake up and do.” But, she goes on to explain, she still gets the nuggets of ideas while driving or out and about, and – like any multi-tasking CEO – while working on the songs that would end up on the new album she would schedule specific writing times devoted purely to it.
“It’s a lot easier to respond to an email than to write a song,” she says ruefully. “Especially telling other people’s stories it’s an interesting challenge to make sure I am not using words that I would never use, yet staying true to that specific story. It’s a fine dance really.”
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Amanda Rheaume’s The Truth We Hold and Morgan Toney’s Heal The Divide are out now. Aysanabee’s new album Edge Of The Earth is out on June 20. All on Ishkode Records.