Amuksism. You Really Have to Listen.
Where: Zoom
When: June 23, 2026 |1:00 p.m. EDT
Cost: Free
Language: The documentary will be presented in English with French subtitles.
The Association for Opera in Canada and Orchestras Canada are pleased to announce the first session of Conference365, a new year-round virtual series designed to continue the conversations and connections sparked during our first joint O₂ Conference in Edmonton.
Join us for Amuksism. You Really Have to Listen., a powerful documentary screening and live discussion with Dr. Dylan Robinson exploring the appropriation of Indigenous music, law, and ceremony into Western classical music traditions. The documentary will be presented in English with French subtitles.
In 2017, the COC remounted “Louis Riel” by Harry Somers and Mavor Moore, one of Canada’s few grand operas. Embedded in the opera composition was an appropriated Nisga’a Limx ooy song belonging to the House of Sgat’iin re-purposed and deconstructed as an aria raising serious cultural concerns.
Decades before the opera was written, the song had been collected by ethnographer Marius Barbeau and transcribed by Ernest MacMillan during a 1920s west coast expedition conducted under the Potlatch Ban.
During rehearsals, Dr. Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah) and Nisga’a Nation representatives Keane Tait and Michael Dangeli approached the COC to raise concerns about the use as an infraction of Nisga’a Lisims protocol and law. The documentary brings together Indigenous composers, musicians, artists and scholars alongside COC and CMC representatives to examine what is at stake when settler artists misappropriate Indigenous song and ceremony, and what paths toward reparation and redress might look like.