Cris Derksen introduced electronic cello music to the Indigenous music scene.Nadya Kwandibens/Supplied
When cellist Cris Derksen walked onto a stage, she was not what symphony-goers expected. She was unassuming and didn’t fit into the norms of the classical music world. Many times she appeared as a soloist in an oversized hoodie, gold leather pants, and a trucker hat with slogans like “Deadly Enough” or “Neechi” (the Cree word for friend). Her feet were tucked inside beaded moccasins as she strode across the stage in front of violinists and other members of the orchestra but then she would slip off her moccasins and play barefoot.
Crystal Dawn Derksen was killed in a car accident on May 15, while travelling from her father’s funeral in Tallcree First Nation in northern Alberta back to Edmonton where she would have boarded a flight home to Toronto. She was 45. Ms. Derksen was in a vehicle with her wife, Rebecca (Bobby) Benson when they were involved in a head-on collision on Highway 44 about an hour’s drive from Slave Lake, Alta., the small northern town where Ms. Derksen was born on April 20, 1981.
Ms. Derksen’s look was an evolution just like her music. When the Cree and Mennonite musician first appeared on the scene, she was going through what she has described as her “femme period.” With longer hair, strapless short dresses, and bare feet, she introduced electronic cello music to the Indigenous music scene. She used looping pedals to create otherworldly sounds that took listeners on journeys to unknown realms and connected them to their ancestors along the way. It was sensual. It was ethereal. It was an awakening.
Laakkuluk Williamson and Cris Derksen.Isaac Strickland/Supplied
Ms. Derksen started playing the cello in elementary school. She had initially wanted to play the stand-up bass, but fortunately for the music world, the large instrument did not fit in her mother’s car, so Ms. Derksen settled on the smaller cello.
She played with the Edmonton Public School Board orchestras from the time she was around nine or 10 years old until her early teens. Erin Welsh, who performed with her in these ensembles, recalls the musicians going on tour to small towns in Alberta and sleeping on the floors of elementary school gymnasiums, which was a testament to Ms. Derksen’s commitment to her craft from an early age.
“Cris was very quiet when we were children. She was dedicated and hard-working, and never missed rehearsals. I am a violinist and there were always lots of us but there were less cello players. She was often the only one and carried that section all on her own,” Ms. Welsh said.
That theme carried through her life. She was punk rock in the sense she broke down doors and didn’t conform to the norms of classical musicians. She changed places and organizations. Orchestras and classical music spaces embraced her, in all of her trucker-hat, barefoot glory.
Celebrated Cree cellist Cris Derksen killed in car accident
Her good friend and fashion designer Sage Paul often dressed Ms. Derksen for her shows. Their collaboration went both ways. Ms. Paul is the executive and artistic director for the Indigenous Fashion Arts Festival in Toronto. Ms. Derksen supported the festival by playing live at each one and even creating new music for the event.
“We didn’t even know she had just created and composed this whole new song for us. And so it just made it even more special because the whole room was silent [when she played],” Ms. Paul said.
Collaboration was important to Ms. Derksen, whether she was performing as a soloist-composer with one of the 15 symphonies and chamber orchestras she collaborated with across Canada (including commissions by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Thunder Bay Symphony), or working with her many talented friends to create new works in the Indigenous arts community.
One of her frequent collaborators and best friends was Laakkuluk Williamson, a Kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) who lives in Iqaluit. She was the recipient of the 2021 Sobey Art Award.
“I was watching a video of [Ms. Derksen] performing the other day and looking at her fingers on the neck of the cello, I could smell her sweatshirt and I could see her as she breathed in order to count. And anticipating where her feet are going to be for all those pedals,” said Ms. Williamson from her home in Iqaluit.
The two first met in person during the 2017 Hnatyshyn Foundation Reveal Indigenous Art Awards, where 150 Indigenous artists received $10,000 each for their art practice. Ms. Williamson described the chaos of receiving it. The artists were lined up in alphabetical order on a staircase at the residence of Manitoba’s lieutenant-governor. Ms. Derksen and Ms. Williamson kept coming face to face with one another as they wound their way through to the reception. While this was the first time they were meeting face to face, Ms. Derksen had already agreed to write the music for Ms. Williamson’s play Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools that she co-wrote with Evalyn Parry. Ms. Williamson is known for performing an uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance.
Cree composer Cris Derksen spotlights new works with major ensembles
“We spent so much time together creating Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools in the writing process, in the rehearsal process, and then we toured all across Canada and so many different parts of the world. We were in complete sync. The way she would breathe would cue my next move. And then she’d find little secret ways of giving me the key that I should sing in. And so we just had this flow of energy between the two of us that existed on stage and then also existed in our everyday lives, just like energy flowing back and forth,” Ms. Williamson said.
Ms. Derksen also wrote a 75-minute score for Cameron Fraser-Monroe’s ballet Cikilaxwm: Controlled Burn for Ballet Kelowna. It was inspired by Ms. Derksen’s own symphonic piece Controlled Burn, which was commissioned by Yannick Nézet-Séguin for Montreal’s Metropolitan Orchestra in 2023. Ms. Derksen played cello when this piece was performed at New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall in 2024. Three movements from her latest choral piece, Mass for Nipiy: A Prayer For Water, were also presented there on Monday.
In 2015, she released one of her most daring and innovative albums. She combined powwow with orchestral music, creating not only a new musical genre but also putting powwow music with its drums and vocables, or chants, in front of new audiences. She called her album, and this new genre, Orchestral Powwow.
In 2020, as the pandemic was hitting, Ms. Derksen fulfilled one of her aspirations – playing the Sydney Opera House in Australia during the Biennale of Sydney as part of aabaakwad 2020 NIRIN, a gathering on Indigenous art co-curated by Wanda Nanibush.
Part of Ms. Derksen’s legacy will be her mentorship of young musicians, Ms. Nanibush said.
“We were out in Banff and I went out to see her with the new class of classical students. She’s like a mother hen. She’s very loyal, very protective, and takes care of them and their talent, but not just their talent. She takes care of the whole human being,” Ms. Nanibush said.
Ms. Derksen founded the Indigenous Classical Gathering at the Banff Centre for the Arts, served as the artistic adviser for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, and chaired the Equity Committee for Orchestras Canada. Through these roles, she worked to make classical music more reflective of this country’s diverse population while opening doors for BIPOC composers and performers.
Ms. Derksen identified as queer, using the pronouns “she/her,” but didn’t mind being referred to as “they.” Ms. Nanibush said the two of them had quiet conversations about this.
“We didn’t feel like we had teachings around two-spiritedness. There’s no pronouns in our languages, in Cree or in Anishinaabemowin. It doesn’t matter what pronoun you call us. We both feel very [masculine], even if we read as female. We don’t mind being called ‘she’,” Ms. Nanibush said.
Ms. Derksen married Ms. Benson on Dec. 21, 2017. Ms. Nanibush was the “best person” at their wedding and part of Ms. Derken’s chosen family.
Ms. Benson was in the vehicle with her wife at the time of the car crash that claimed Ms. Derksen’s life. Ms. Benson is still recovering in the hospital from multiple injuries. Although Ms. Derksen had a strained relationship with her father, she had wanted to be at his funeral to perform for him. Ironically, this was the only time she performed in his presence.
“The last time she did play music was in her homelands with both her parents present. There’s something very profound about that,” Ms. Williamson said.
Her mother, Lisa Derksen, is an organic horticulturalist. Her father, Bernard (Bernie) Meneen, was a former chief and consultant. She was her mother’s only child, and had a stepsister on her father’s side. Mr. Meneen’s family gifted his headdress to her during her time back home for the funeral.
She had with her both the headdress and her cello in its familiar bright blue, hard-shelled case as she left her homelands. The case is covered in stickers from her travels all over the world. The case and cello were part of her. She was prolific in her musical compositions and her music will live on in many forms. Ms. Derksen was a part of many different friend and work circles.
Her dear friend Darlene Naponse’s film Aki will open this year’s ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival in Toronto on June 2. Ms. Derksen scored the film. The film is a beautiful tribute to Ms. Naponse’s home of Atikameksheng Anishnawbek – and it wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for its score.
“There were times when I was creating Aki and I didn’t know how to move forward with the edit. She pushed me through it. Cris would send these beautiful, brilliant pieces and it all started to make sense,” Ms. Naponse said.
“She gave so much wonder to everything she did and I was so lucky to be a part of that. It was fun to dream up ideas with her. It was all so natural – sacred and always with love.”
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