Manitoba musical royalty feted with star blanket at Burt

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This article was published 19/02/2024 (925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was an evening fit for a king.

The audience that packed the Burton Cummings Theatre Sunday night sought an audience with the King of the North. And Ernest Monias, who has entertained generations of Indigenous music fans from coast to coast to coast for the last six decades, delivered in spades.

The Cross Lake country singer turned 75 on Sunday, so it was an ideal time to showcase his musical talents on a stage befitting his stature.

The evening was more than another opportunity for his fans to hear him sing If I Wanted You Girl, the song he wrote in 1978 that’s long been a crowd-pleaser.

Grand chiefs, band councillors, family and friends from Cross Lake — officially known as Pimicikamak Cree Nation — held a ceremony for Monias prior to his set and swaddled him in a star blanket, an honour with far greater meaning in Cree culture than any lifetime achievement award.

“Many stories are told about the meaning of the blanket,” Eric Robinson, a fellow Cross Lake member and former deputy premier of Manitoba, said during the ceremony.

“When we are born, we are given warmth. They call it the receiving blanket when the child is born … and when we finish our work here on Earth — and I’m not implying for a minute, Ernest, you’re finished — we’re also draped in a blanket to begin our journey home to the next camp.”

Robinson said in Cross Lake tradition that only women, the life-givers, can give a star blanket, so two Cross Lake women, Cathy Merrick, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chief, and Cross Lake councillor Brenda Frog draped the blanket over Monias’s shoulders.

“I wish you many many more happy years, to bring love and joy to people in all directions,” Robinson said.

Long before Game of Thrones’ pretty boys Jon Snow and Robb Stark had the title bestowed upon them on the hit television series and George R. R. Martin books, Ernest Monias earned the crown of King of the North.

He sang at treaty days, hockey tournaments, town halls and bars in remote communities all across Canada, especially in northern Manitoba.

Monias’s records have sold more than 150,000 copies; on Sunday, Errol Ranville of the C-Weed Band presented Monias his first gold record.

While the blanket was whisked away for safekeeping, the gold record remained on display beside Monias and his band during his set, which mixed covers of George Jones and Merle Haggard with his own tunes, such as Stay Awhile, and of course, If I Wanted You Girl.

“My gold record … anyone want to buy it?” he said with a laugh. “All the people who’ve been associated with my music over the years, thank you. God bless you all.”

The evening had a jubilant mood similar to the The Last Waltz, the famous concert film celebrating the Band’s final show with Robbie Robertson in 1976, and not just because the C-Weed Band performed The Shape I’m In and Evangeline, two hits by the Six Nations’ songwriter, who was 80 when he died last August.

As in the film, many bands played throughout the three-hour concert and ceremony. Ranville and his band, including a cameo by MKO Grand Chief Garrison Settee, had the crowd dancing in the Burt’s aisles until their finale, Run as One. The song began with the powerful beat of a drum circle followed by the Spirits Sands Singers, dressed in ceremonial regalia, dancing amid the crowd and to the stage for Monias’s moment in the sun.

Three other acts, all with longtime connections to Monias, were also on the bill. Delaney Monias, Ernest’s son, rocked out with Blue Highway, and Murray Porter, a blues pianist from Six Nations who has performed at shows with Monias over the years, was joined by Winnipeg’s Billy Joe Green on slide guitar.

Another longtime friend, Keith Secola, an Anishinaabe folk singer and scholar from Minnesota, opened the show with an Anishinaabe song set to the melody of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land.

He also sang NDN Kars, from the Norman Jewison film Dance Me Outside, to great applause, but began his set mentioning it was the first time he’d entered Canada as a Canadian citizen, adding he had struggled for a long time with government authorities to prove his mother was born north of the 49th parallel.

“Play the long game, cause we’re still here,” Secola urged the mostly Indigenous audience.

But the evening was Monias’s, and prior to a cake presentation and a rendition of Happy Birthday performed by the crowd,he played Midnight Special, the Ledbelly song made famous by Creedence Clearwater Revival that he’s probably sung as many times as John Fogerty.

May the Midnight Special continue to shine an ever-lovin’ light on the King of the North.

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall