In order to share their culture and also with a view to making it survive, Aboriginal language artists and musicians are demanding a 5% quota on the airwaves of Canadian commercial radio stations. A brief to this effect has been filed with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
To support this claim, the record company Makusham Musique produced a memoir documenting the tiny space of Indigenous language music on the Canadian airwaves. Ironically considered foreign languages, songs in indigenous languages represent only a few percentage points of the tracks played on the air.
“Although the Indigenous music industry is booming in Canada, the presence of our artists on commercial radio remains more than marginal,” lamented Mathieu McKenzie, director of public relations and co-owner of the record company.
Himself a musician, he deplored the more than timid return of the stations to which he sent tracks from his album to be released later this week. He also said that many Indigenous Canadian artists are turning to English in hopes of being heard on the radio.
His father, singer-songwriter Florent Vollant, recalled that his Kashtin band was at the height of its glory in the early 1990s, when the Oka crisis hit. Since then, songs in the indigenous language have been boycotted and have never made a comeback on the air, he laments.
The study also reports on an unscientific poll in which almost 95% of respondents believe that a quota for Indigenous music should be imposed on stations across the country.
