Northern Dial Artist Profile

Jeremy Dutcher

Neqotkuk, New Brunswick, Canada

Jeremy Dutcher is a Wolastoqiyik singer, composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist and Two-Spirit song carrier from Neqotkuk in New Brunswick. Classically trained as a tenor, he began the project that became his debut album by studying century-old wax-cylinder recordings of Wolastoqey ancestors held at the Canadian Museum of History. Rather than treating the archive as static documentation, he brought those voices into new piano-led compositions and sang the resulting work entirely in Wolastoqey.

That 2018 debut, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, tied contemporary composition directly to language revitalization and won both the Polaris Music Prize and the JUNO Award for Indigenous Music Album of the Year. Dutcher's second album, Motewolonuwok, widened the musical vocabulary through jazz, classical and pop elements and included English alongside Wolastoqey. It won the 2024 Polaris Music Prize, making Dutcher the first artist to win the award twice.

Dutcher's significance goes beyond awards. His work places endangered-language revitalization, archival recovery, queer Indigenous identity and contemporary composition inside the same artistic practice, refusing a separation between preservation and experimentation. That approach has led to orchestral collaborations, international performance and a broader public role in conversations about language, Indigeneity and cultural continuity.