Watin

About

The debut album from the Toronto-based Oji-Cree singer-songwriter Evan Pang—aka Aysanabee—opens with the voice of an elderly man reciting words that will instantly strike a grim chord with anyone who has a passing knowledge of Canadian/Indigenous relations: “I was eight years old when I went to residential school.” The voice belongs to Pang’s grandfather, Watin, and the story he tells is all too familiar among survivors of Canada’s infamous residential-school system for Indigenous children: one of a kid torn away from his family, forced to suppress his culture to a church-run curriculum, and subjected to ridicule and abuse at the hands of his supposed educator. But the school was also the place where Watin met the love of his life, who instilled in him the will to endure the trauma. Pang didn’t intentionally set out to make an album inspired by his grandfather’s storie. The conversations that preface each song on <i>Watin</i> began as check-in phone calls during the early stages of the pandemic, before blossoming into deeper discussions of family history. “And then, one day, I was listening back to the interviews while I was noodling on guitar, and I just wrote a song in response,” he tells Apple Music. “And that song turned into multiple song.” Here, he provides us with track-by-track background on the stories of <i>Watin</i>. <b>“Seeseepano”</b> “This was the song that started the writing process for the record. My grandfather was telling me about his dad, Seeseepano, and then I asked him what his dad’s name meant, and he didn’t know. And it wasn’t that he forgot—he was taken away as a child before he could learn something as simple as what his father’s name meant. That really hit me in a certain way, and I just ended up writing a song, almost in a call-and-response kind of way. That’s a lot of how this album ended up developing: there would be bits of the conversation, which would be the call, and then the response would be the song that follow.” <b>“Bringing the Fire”</b> “In the interlude that comes before thi, my grandfather is talking about how he’d tell the other kids in the school, ‘We’re not allowed to speak our language around the nuns or the priest, otherwise we’re gonna get in trouble. But we got to keep our language—we got to make sure that we don’t lose ourselve.’ There was kind of this defiance to not completely lose their culture and lose their sense of selve. But later in life, my grandfather became a deacon, and I had mixed feelings about it: I was happy that this was something he wanted to do, but I almost felt like something was being lost. I saw this parallel between him being a young person and explaining to these kids not to lose themselve, and then finding myself in this position where I felt like something was being lost. But this is a triumphant song. They tried to erase these parts of u, but we still kept them alive in ourselve.” <b>“Long Gone”</b> “My grandfather met my grandmother in residential school, and he ended up falling in love with her over the course of those 11 year. I think finding love there definitely helped him get through it. ‘Long Gone’ is about finding the light in this dark place. My grandfather actually stayed a little longer at the school than he had to—my grandmother was a couple of years younger than him, so he took a job there and waited for her to finish.” <b>“War Cry”</b> “This song is like a coming-of-age story. My grandfather was taken as a kid and had to learn how to become a man. And after falling in love with my grandmother, he had to choose between going back to his family or starting a new life with my grandmother. So, he chose to start a new life. That school took so much away from him—the sense of family, the foundation, his culture, his teaching, and everything that made him Oji-Cree. So, he had to learn how to build his own home and make his own way.” <b>“Here I Am”</b> “Residential schools were sold with the idea of ‘We’re going to educate the Native people so they can get jobs and integrate into society!’ Obviously, it wasn’t that; all the truth is coming out now. My grandfather only got a grade-four education. And because he wasn’t good at math, they ended up taking him out of school altogether and just had him do hard labor instead. So, he’d be working in the fields and picking vegetable, chopping wood, and doing road maintenance—not quite the education they promised. He was sold this idea of the school and didn’t get any of it and had to do everything himself anyway. So, this song is kind of saying, ‘Yeah, here I am—thanks for nothing!’” <b>“Bones”</b> “‘Bones’ started out as a kind of love song and then evolved from there. The lyric that sticks out to me is the one about believing your words before you shout them out. And that’s kind of a reflection on Canada as a whole. I remember growing up being proud to be a part of Canada, and the idea that Canada was this melting pot of religion and culture, where everyone gets a shot. But there’s this hidden history of intolerance that the government tried to keep quiet. There’s that old [Sir John A. Macdonald] quote about how [residential schools] would ‘take the savage out of the child’—that doesn’t quite speak to a melting pot. So, this is a song of reflection and making sure you own your history and you own your truth before you say otherwise.” <b>“River”</b> “My grandparents didn’t know how to be together—they were still kids themselve, trying to figure out how to stay together. And since they grew up in a school with Christian teaching, I guess they decided getting pregnant was the only way they could stay together: ‘All right, now they’re gonna have to marry us!’ So, they found a way to make it work.” <b>“We Were Here”</b> “My grandfather’s health wasn’t so good, and a lot of these memories were starting to get really fragmented. I was trying to record this little bit of history before it was completely gone. So, ‘We Were Here’ is kind of the crux of the album, of just recording this little bit of history of this Oji-Cree family on this vast continent. My grandfather already had so much taken away, and so I was just trying to save a little bit of him in this record.” <b>“Ego Death”</b> "This is one song where I lean more into where I was at and how I was feeling. Reconnecting has always been a big thing for me, and to go to this place with my grandfather and finally share these burdens with him and these storie, I guess I felt the closest feeling to regret I’ve ever had. I had all this time to talk with him, but it took a pandemic for us to find the time to just sit and speak. And although I was able to record some of these storie, there’s still so much of it that was forgotten. I was happy I was able to get a piece of it and learn more about him and grow from it, but I wish I had spent the time sooner.” <b>“Nomads”</b> .

via Apple Music

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