By: Yasmin Hassan, Staff Writer

Content warning: mentions of residential schools. 

On September 9, nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and Scottish/Irish musician Marek Tyler released his self-titled album, ASKO. Tyler graduated from SFU with a masters of business administration, and is a sessional instructor at Grant MacEwan University. Despite this full plate, Tyler is also an entrepreneur, project liaison manager, and touring musician. Even so, he still managed to create such a thought-provoking listening and learning experience.  

ASKO, as Tyler’s uncle and advisor Dale Awasis describes, is derived from the nêhiyaw foundational principle, askôtowin. Awasis says it entails the idea that “we are taught to lead by following and weaving our existence into the web of creation we are a part of.” 

The album, meant to represent a “storied meeting place of the drum and the rattle,” follows an immersive experience as if one is sitting in a teaching lodge. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson described ASKO as “a place that teaches us how to listen to the energies and forces that continually create nêhiyawak worlds in spite of and despite the noise of colonialism.” The album is electronic-forward, which I enjoyed. Some tracks that stood out to me were “pimohtêwin” for its intensely rhythmic beats; “sôhkisiw” which, with its reverberating shifts in high and low tones, sounded adjacent to a SOPHIE song; and not to mention “wâhkôhtowin” with its hypnotizing melody and sound. I later learned that Tyler repurposed the sound of a residential school bell to use in the music.

Wâhkôhtowin means the act of being related to each other, which I saw in the beautifully orchestrated music video. Listening to the music reminded me of Aphex Twin, with the synthy sounds floating in the background, deep bass, and fast-paced beats fading in and out. Ethereal, and yet so effortlessly dazzling. 

“Marek and I looked to tap into that anticipatory energy that builds once the sweat lodge’s door is closed and the darkness, heat and community take over,” director Sebastian Buzzalino says in the press release. With appearances from stunning BIPOC drag queens — Pheromone killz, Pep Per, and Cedar T — as well as appearances from Tyler himself, Buzzalino captured the intimate and raw nature of togetherness. Tyler goes on to say that “tastawiyiniwak, the in-between people, hold significant places within nêhiyaw ways, embodying masculine and feminine qualities,” and that in this music video, he aimed to “strip away the binary and shame and consider what it means to be related.”

Artist Joi Arcand and Tyler collaborated to create a t-shirt for Orange Shirt Day. Arcand is a seasoned artist with various solo-exhibitions, experience co-founding a contemporary Indigenous art gallery in Saskatoon, and much more on her portfolio. In commemorating Orange Shirt Day, Arcand and Tyler help honour and further the impact of residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad’s story. The title of the shirt, “nôkosiw-osâwipakowayân,” means “he/she/they comes into view, becomes visible.” Arcand says this is “inspired by the sounds and the sentiments embedded in the music, these designs reflect the movement of waves.” 

Not only is this art a symbol to honour those who did not survive residential schools, but all profits from the sale of these t-shirts will go to the nêhiyawak Language Experience. It’s a Cree language camp that aims “to produce authentic language engagement in the context to enhance and share nēhiyaw identity, including ways of knowing and being.” This not-for-profit organization helps to educate, and keep the language alive, as they are “committed to learning the language on the land, from the land in a collective process that is seeped in homes for intergenerational transmission of nêhiyawewin.” The importance of organizations and initiatives like nêhiyawak Language Experience, to honour oral traditions, is immense. Art exists in different ways, whether it be music, design, or language, and it is people like Tyler, Arcand, and many others who uphold this compelling value.