A Reading of Eekwol's "Apprentice to the Mystery" as an Expression of Cree Youth's Cultural Role and Responsibility

Abstract

On a chilly Toronto evening in November 2005, an envelope was opened in a darkened auditorium, and the words spoken reached out across the land to Muskoday First Nation in Saskatchewan.1 No doubt Lindsay Knight’s family was watching the televised Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards that night and would have felt elated to hear her being honored with the award for Best Rap or Hip Hop Album. The poetry of a young Cree woman reverberated with her contemporary listening audience and connected them to current, historical, and timeless realities. Knight, who goes by the name Eekwol in her professional work, presented the album Apprentice to the Mystery, which can be read as an expression of youth’s role and responsibility in Cree culture. This article lays out an appreciation of her artistic and critical contribution by first establishing an understanding of the social context of Cree youth in Saskatchewan, then highlighting relevant points of Cree history, social structure, and values that orient an interpretation of youth’s role and responsibility. The article turns to close readings of two tracks from the album and interprets the poet’s critical social commentary grounded in Cree and Anishinaabe values and experience. At the outset of this exploration, some clarification about identifiers and identity should be made. The terms Aboriginal, indigenous, and Native, though nuanced, are used interchangeably in this writing to identify descendants of the original inhabitants of the territory that is now bounded by Canadian borders. These terms as they are used here include people who are status Indians (federally recognized), nonstatus Indians, Metis, and Inuit. The term Aboriginal, drawn from the definition of Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian Constitution 1982, Section 35 (02), is used in government and academic