Canada’s national orchestra to honour Mi’kmaw music during Nova Scotia shows

The last time Canada’s national orchestra performed in Eskasoni First Nation, Mi’kmaw singer-songwriter Emma Stevens was a young teenager volunteering at the show.

Almost nine years later, as the Ottawa-based National Arts Centre Orchestra embarks on its 100th tour, the 23-year-old musician will be performing original music alongside the prestigious ensemble.

“You’re going to be able to see our culture in full light, and see how amazing and beautiful the Mi’kmaw language and Mi’kmaw music is,” Stevens said in an interview Monday, reached at her home in Eskasoni in Cape Breton.

The singer-songwriter gained international attention for her music in 2019, when her Mi’kmaw-language cover of the Beatles’ song Blackbird went viral. The song was translated by Katani Julian and Albert Golydada Julian and produced by Stevens’s music teacher Carter Chiasson.

Her high school posted the Blackbird video to YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 1.9 million times. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney shouted out her “beautiful version” of the song while he was on tour in July 2019. McCartney met Stevens before his Vancouver concert that summer, then later told the crowd her version “is so beautiful I’m going to be nervous singing my version.”

Since then, Stevens has performed widely and spoken at multiple United Nations events, highlighting issues facing Indigenous people in Canada.

“I talk about language loss and missing and murdered Indigenous women, and that’s where I love to put my focus,” she said.

Stevens said she has been working hard to reconnect with her Mi’kmaw language, and recently wrote a song in Mi’kmaw by herself for the first time.

“It was very surreal, and I was very proud of myself. But I know there are some inconsistencies in [the song] because I’m not as educated in my own language … I want to make sure that the younger generations continue to speak it and hold their language close to them,” she said.

Stevens grew up speaking Mi’kmaw at home, but she said she began to lose her fluency after learning English in school.

“I can hold a conversation, but writing is very difficult … now that I’m writing [in Mi’kmaw] I feel more connected,” she said.

The young musician said she’s elated to be performing two songs at the concert in Eskasoni on Tuesday evening, and then at the orchestra’s other two Nova Scotia stops in Halifax on Thursday and Wolfville on Friday.

She will perform the Mi’kmaw cover of Blackbird and The Ballad of Shubenacadie — an original song she co-wrote with Chiasson about the Canadian residential school system. The song was released on Truth and Reconciliation Day in 2023.

Also featured in the orchestra’s tour is Wolastoqiyik composer and singer-songwriter Jeremy Dutcher, a member of Tobique First Nation in northern New Brunswick and two-time Polaris Music Prize winner. Dutcher is also the 2025 recipient of the NAC Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards.

Stevens said she’s thrilled to be joining Dutcher, who she looks up to.

“He’s an amazing artist. His voice is amazing. The way that he brings himself and he tells his story. It’s so beautiful,” she said.

Dutcher, who also said he’s a big fan of Stevens, said the orchestra’s audience should expect a celebration of music, language “and the resilience of our melodies and our people.”

The musician said it was his mentor, elder Maggie Paul from Peskotomuhkati Nation, who encouraged him to champion traditional Indigenous music.

“It was her dream to hear our old songs lifted up by symphonic voices … it is so meaningful to bring an ensemble as fantastic as the NAC Orchestra to Wabanaki Territory, and to have our songs and language underscored by Canada’s orchestra, in our language, in our homelands.”

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