Having worked with artists like Björk and Mike Patton in the past, Tagaq is renowned for her modern take on Inuit throat singing, and has long been embraced by the very institutions she rails against. It's an almost unimaginable, shameful tragedy whose shadow casts over Tongues, an album that boldly points its finger-and righteous words-at the country and society that allowed it to happen. The First Nations genocide has become a focal point of Canadian cultural discourse following the discovery of unmarked mass graves at schools across the country, hundreds of bodies of dead children who were never found by their families. The lyrics make oblique, if not literal, reference to Canada's long (and recent) history of residential schools, which separated Indigenous children from their families, tried to erase their language and abused (and often killed) them. It's a song about processing past trauma, finding strength in protecting others from what you once went through yourself. "We were taken too young / I was entered too young," Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq repeats on "I Forgive Me," in a particularly harrowing snapshot of her new album, Tongues.
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