Northern Dial Artist Profile

The Halluci Nation

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

The Halluci Nation grew out of the Ottawa project A Tribe Called Red, whose members built a new kind of Indigenous club space through the Electric Pow Wow parties launched at Babylon nightclub in 2007. Their music brought powwow singing and drumming into direct conversation with electronic dance music, hip-hop, dubstep and bass production, not as a novelty crossover but as a contemporary Indigenous cultural language. The self-titled debut and Nation II Nation carried that sound from Ottawa parties to international stages, with Nation II Nation reaching the 2013 Polaris Music Prize Short List.

We Are the Halluci Nation expanded the idea into a larger political and collaborative statement. The album brought together voices including John Trudell, Tanya Tagaq, Lido Pimienta, Yasiin Bey, Saul Williams and Black Bear Singers, and it reached the 2017 Polaris Short List. The project's performances likewise made space for Indigenous dancers, singers and visual language within festival and awards-show settings that had rarely centred them. After lineup changes, Bear Witness and Tim "2oolman" Hill reintroduced the project as The Halluci Nation, taking the name from Trudell's concept of a global community grounded in a deeper sense of human connection.

The Halluci Nation's significance reaches beyond genre. Their work helped establish a widely visible model for Indigenous artists using electronic production on their own cultural and political terms, while the JUNO Awards has cited the group among artists who fuse contemporary forms with Indigenous narratives, instruments and singing traditions. The later album One More Saturday Night turned back toward the communal roots of the Electric Pow Wow era, connecting the current duo to the Ottawa gatherings that started the movement. Across those phases, the project has made dance music function as celebration, resistance, futurism and community-building at the same time.