Powerful voices

During one of Canada’s busiest music weekends, two celebrated musicians stopped in Winnipeg to entertain 100 or so middle and high school students inside RRC Polytech’s auditorium.

On Friday afternoon in the final hours before spring break, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, a hip-hop duo from Kitamaat Village, B.C., paced the makeshift stage, delivering hits such as Boujee Natives while students jumped and chanted.

Many teachers danced too, overlooking the band’s mild profanity and bird-flipping amid the uplifting message of empowerment and fun.

“We were tired, but now we’re rejuvenated,” said band member Darren (Young D) Metz after seeing so many young people get fired up at their performance.

Snotty Nose Rez Kids were nominated for a 2026 Juno Award for Rap Single of the Year and were scheduled to be in Hamilton, Ont., on Sunday for the Juno celebrations. (They did not win, though they picked up Rap Album/EP of the Year for Red Future in 2025.)

The Junos create a flurry of industry events and workshops across the country. One of these was a Winnipeg edition of Your Voice Is Power, a neatly packaged STEM outreach program that allows the e-commerce and tech giant Amazon to flex its philanthropic side.

Before the band hit the stage, students could be seen working intently on laptops, remixing music by Indigenous artists such as former Winnipegger Sebastian Gaskin (also nominated for a Juno this year) and others using EarSketch, a free online code editor.

No one seemed to want to close their laptops until it became impossible to look away from the Kids’ performance.

Participation in Your Voice is Power sweetened by two $5,000 scholarships Amazon is offering to winners of its remix competition, with one scholarship going to an Indigenous student and another to a student “identifying as an ally.”

“The premise of the program is you can learn computer science by remixing music … (students) are able to put their own unique spin on it,” says Kristin Gable, a senior manager of corporate communications at Amazon. “While learning the coding aspects of music, they’re also learning the messages of these artists: social justice and reconciliation.”

Amazon emphasizes that, according to research from The Dais, Indigenous Peoples are 70 per cent less likely than others in Canada to work in tech. Gable suggests that programs like these, by prioritizing hip hop, popular music and self-expression, help bridge the gap between lofty ideals and real-world realities by giving “kids permission to learn in different ways at different stages of their education.”

In Winnipeg, Graffiti Art Programming — incorporating graffiti, art, breakdancing and music production workshops into its outreach for urban youth — is another example of this approach, often called “interest-driven learning.”

What Amazon has, as a company whose revenues rival the GDP of a small European country, are resources only a few organizations in the world have to potentially direct to such causes.

But while Amazon can bankroll laptops, software and well-known guest performers, it also depends on local educators and organizers on the ground to make Your Voice Is Power happen.

One of those people is Winnipeg educator Marika Schallan, one of the curriculum developers of Your Voice Is Power in Canada, who’s helped teach the program in Regina, Vancouver and First Nation reserves.

“It’s free, online, it’s accessible to students everywhere across Canada — including ones in the North, territories and reserves — as long as they have computer access, anyone can do the program. It really does teach them that their voice has meaning,” she says.

“When Michael Redhead Champagne was telling (the students), ‘You could be a future author, a future educator, a future speaker,’ I was sitting there thinking ‘He’s so right,’ because I grew up here in the North End, and if you told little Marika that she would have been a very successful, award-winning teacher, an author, a public speaker … I wouldn’t have believed you,” she adds.

Schallan is referring to Winnipeg community organizer Champagne, who chatted with the band members onstage about their influences and social mission.

“We’re a little rough around the edges, but there’s beauty in that. There’s always beauty in your abnormalities, but there’s also beauty in community,” Quinton (Yung Trybez) Nyce told Champagne.

When it came time for the Q&A, students seemed especially interested in probing Nyce and Metz about what celebrities they know: Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, Drake?

The pair — who have collaborated with a growing list of leading alternative artists, including Princess Nokia and SonReal — handled the questions with humour.

After name-dropping one famous friend, Grammy-nominated singer Jessie Reyez, they gently encouraged students to find inspirations that can help them express themselves, in their own authentic voices.

“We’ve always said, especially with our last record Red Future, that it’s bigger than us, and it’s about setting up the next seven generations that come after us, showing them that it’s possible,” Metz told the audience.

After the performance, Nyce did a near spot-on impression of former U.S. president Barack Obama, remarking, “Our kids can’t all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers.”

Nyce may not personally have taken this advice to heart. But he and Metz stress that when they talk about a “red future” in their music, they mean it expansively.

“It goes way beyond music. You could do it through fashion, coding, education, teaching, tradition, culture, language,” says Metz.

“There’s so many things you could do to express yourself, to say, like, ‘This is who I am.’”

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