'For All Tomorrows' is Georges E. Sioui's debut album.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
In an entry dated February, 1999, on the inside front cover of a well-used notebook, Georges E. Sioui wrote out a brief note about what happens when he composes music.
“I found songs hidden amongst and beneath chords,” Sioui reads, sitting on a couch at home in Waterloo, Ont. “The chords are trees, the notes are leaves, the silences are air and the music is sunlight.” Saying the words slowly, the 77-year-old Huron-Wyandot polyglot, poet, essayist and songwriter expresses the same reverence, wonder and gratitude for the natural world that appear throughout his debut album, For All Tomorrows.
The songs that comprise For All Tomorrows were written between the early ’70s and the late ’90s. But before that, the seeds of his relationship with music were sown in the house of his grandmother – “a kind of psychologist,” Sioui says – in Wendake, Que. (formerly Village-des-Hurons).
There was a piano at the house, and even in the final decade of her life, with arthritis in her hands, Sioui’s grandmother would find a way to play something for people before they left, ending “on a note of joy and piano and singing.” That musical environment, in which there was also a loose canary that flitted around warbling, made a lasting impression.
Sioui points out a picture of his mother on a board full of family photos.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
“I grew up feeling that music was a form of healing because I saw people being brought back to joy and hope,” Sioui says.
Sioui spent the intervening years between musical awakening and debut record building an impressive academic career. He was the first Indigenous person in Canada to get a PhD in history, following in the footsteps of his mother, Éléonore, who was the first Amerindian woman to earn a PhD in First Nations philosophy and spirituality; he has published five books, including Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy (2019); for 13 years he was the co-ordinator of the Aboriginal Studies program at the University of Ottawa until 2017. Then he left formal academic life to devote himself more to music.
“I am fundamentally an artist who became an academic through the force of circumstances in our Huron-Wyandot family, where we questioned deeply the history that had been written about us, First Peoples,” Sioui writes in a statement in the press materials for the album. “Accordingly, I devoted my energy and talent to that rewriting.”
The decision to make an album now had to do with serendipitous timing and connection. Liz Hysen of Toronto band Picastro was deeply affected by a performance of Sioui’s on The Bill & Jesse King Show and reached out to him to ask about playing together, but the idea dissolved in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hysen eventually met fellow musician and producer Michael Cloud Duguay and relayed her love of Sioui’s music. When all three of them went to visit Sioui in Waterloo, things clicked immediately.
Sioui’s wife, Barbara, adjusts an old portrait of the couple in their hallway.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
“I’ve never met a musician who, the first time we met, said something so confident: ‘This music deserves to be heard,’ Duguay says, referring to the songs Sioui had written and wanted to record. He would wind up becoming very close with Sioui, who lives with Parkinson’s disease, driving the songwriter to and from the studio and helping with medication.
It’s not reaching to say For All Tomorrows is a singular project. Through its dozen tracks, Sioui sings in English, French and Huron over Duguay’s lush production on arrangements that shift between country, trad, folk and sophisti-pop. It is heavily concerned with the Earth – the buoyant track Nature Works! celebrates the planet’s life-giving properties (“she is your mother, and she cares for you,” Sioui sings), as does the melancholic, Huron-language Eatenonha.
Sioui’s deep voice often floats gently on its instrumental accompaniment, but it also booms or strives. Singing in Huron (a language classified by UNESCO as critically endangered) is part of a decades-long sentiment Sioui developed as a young person.
Sioui's handwritten lyrics for 'Ahouantahan Nes Yeein.'Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
“I wanted to learn the language, and I felt it was like a last homage to my ancestors, to bring back, at least, the sounds of their language and eventually share it with the world,” Sioui says.
After their initial meeting, Sioui sent Duguay more than 100 recordings. Some of those have snuck onto the record in barely noticeable ways – the gorgeous, glacially-paced Ahouantahan Nes Yeein ends with a snippet of its demo – but elsewhere it’s more obvious. At Sioui’s request that water begin the album, Duguay dug up a field recording of Lake Huron from Killbear Provincial Park for opener Huronia.
The album’s final song, Huronia 1990, is Sioui’s original demo recording from 36 years ago, and features the songwriter in robust form singing the dreamy melody alongside a vigorously strummed acoustic guitar It’s an affecting, full-circle moment, to find Sioui’s singing from the past in conversation with his present-day voice and hear the way time alters a body.
It’s also moving to think that the water Duguay recorded lapping at the shores of Lake Huron in the opening version of the song would have likely sounded indistinguishable from those same shores 36 years ago, or a century ago, or a millennia ago. The trees, leaves, air and sunlight of Sioui’s beloved wilderness may be shifting, but they are still filled with chords, notes, silences – music. Listening closely may help ensure there are more tomorrows.
“Bringing this album of music to society, to the world, it’s an act coming from belief in our common humanity and the need to translate for each other what we are truly feeling,” Sioui says. “And that’s one of the most beautiful things that can happen between human beings.”