Married musical duo gets to heart of complicated matters

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This article was published 20/06/2024 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Burnstick’s new album is the band’s most intimate and personal release yet.

“I gotta tell you,” says Jason Burnstick, seated next to his wife and bandmate Nadia. “I didn’t want to write these songs.”

The couple is speaking over a video call from their home in St. Claude. Their scruffy white dog, Olivia, is running excited laps around the cosy home studio where many of the songs on Made of Sin, Burnstick’s sophomore album, were recorded.

The album’s title track was written following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021.

“It definitely triggered some pretty intense emotions,” says Jason, who is a ’60s Scoop survivor. “A lot of things have changed for the better, but some things haven’t.”

For a long time, Jason didn’t want to talk about his experiences in the foster care system, let alone write about it.

At four years old, he was taken away from his family and sent to live in a foster home, where he was regularly dehumanized by the people charged with caring for him.

Things improved, comparatively, at a boarding school in Edmonton and while living with another foster family, but he was left with lasting physical and emotional scars from the abuse and neglect he suffered.

“I was a kid … I should have felt things that were on the opposite end of that spectrum — I should have been celebrating life and feeling love. And that’s just me, that’s one story. There’s thousands and thousands of stories like this across the country,” he says.

More than 20,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their homes and adopted into non-Indigenous households during the government-led child welfare scheme.

Made of Sin became a way for Jason to chronicle his own childhood trauma and journey to overcome the lingering shame, anger and responsibility he felt in adulthood.

It was also an opportunity to honour the experiences of other ’60s Scoop survivors, as well as those who didn’t make it home.

But the album doesn’t dwell only on painful histories.

Through haunting folk duets, the Indigenous couple — Jason is Plains Cree and Nadia is Métis — aimed to capture the wide gamut of human experiences. Songs such as Closer and Moonlit focus on love, family and their experience as first-time parents.

“It’s important to touch on those darker moments in order to better understand the world and our lives within it, but we need to heal and we need love and we need light,” says Nadia.

The album artwork — which depicts the couple standing together with hands bound — gets at the overarching theme of shared history and finding common ground, even in difficult times.

“We’re all connected in some way, even when those relationships are really difficult. We have to try our best, in some way, to understand each other,” says Nadia.

As an example, Jason points to the public awareness that has followed the further discoveries of unmarked gravesites at residential school grounds across the country.

“Despite all the darkness, there is some love and support and humanity in it all. People are coming together to recognize how devastating (these systems) were,” he says.

Made of Sin, released at the end of May, is not only Burnstick’s most personal album, it’s also the band’s most cohesive project.

“When we released our first album back in 2019, we hadn’t done all that much together musically,” Nadia says, referring to their Juno-nominated record, Kîyânaw.

“But this time, we wrote together, we worked together and we connected. I think we really nailed it.”

This weekend, Burnstick is set to perform at several local celebrations for National Indigenous Peoples Day. Find them at Red River Ex’s Red Barn Stage at 5:30 p.m. Friday, followed by an evening concert at Centre culturel franco-manitobain. Catch them at the Lyric Theatre in Assinoboine Park at 1 p.m. on Saturday.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

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