Francis Baptiste plays his part in cultural revival

By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle

Separation comes in many shades and for musician Francis Baptiste various forms of disconnect figure prominently in his musings and indeed in his music.

Baptiste, who is from the Osoyoos Indian Band (OIB), has been living and working in the Lower Mainland for the last 17 years.

As we discuss his music and his first solo album there are a couple of clear and present threads that run through our conversation. One that revolves around separation from his family and another larger estrangement from his culture and almost irrevocably, his language.

Add to this, two years of COVID-19 isolation and pressures that hit his music livelihood hard, a difficult existence in the most expensive city in the country, relationship troubles and the gargantuan challenge of being a single parent.

We share a short chuckle over the idea that through the crucible of personal suffering great artistic products result – well, according to theory anyway. But one thing is for sure, his first solo album is absolutely intertwined with the ebb and flow of the current in his heart and mind. Snəqsilxʷ in the nsyilxcən language of his Syilx Okanagan roots means ‘family’.

“The album is very much inspired by family,” he says. “It’s something that weighed a lot more on my mind as I’ve gotten older, especially incorporating language into the songs it makes you think about heritage, it makes you think about family, about where you come from especially for me living so far away from the Osoyoos Indian Band.”

For Baptiste this separation raises crucial issues of identity. “What does it mean to be a member of the Osoyoos Indian Band when you’re not physically there, when I’m out here and I’m raising my son out here? My son is six and we’re in Vancouver, is he going to grow up feeling any kind of identity with the Osoyoos Indian Band?”

This is clearly a slippery metaphysical slope. Should he be raising his son so far from his cultural centre?  These are important formative years for his son, should he move closer to his family, his culture, heritage and language?

“And my own personal struggles. I’m a single parent now and obviously the process of that has included separation and divorce which came with a lot of its own drama. And just the past couple of years trying to survive out here it just feels like my son and I are kind of in a survival mode.

“Vancouver is a very expensive city and especially since the pandemic came along I haven’t had reliable steady work since the start of the pandemic so we’re very much living month-to-month just trying to get by and that’s factored a lot into the question whether we should go home.”

All of these questions have weighed heavily on Baptiste while he was writing songs for this album. “The last couple of years has ultimately focused and circled around family. Thinking about my son, raising my son, trying to do a good job of that in the face of adversity as I’m thinking about my family back home, I’m thinking about heritage,” he says.

And as part of the deep think, language has also bubbled to the surface. “Lately I’ve been focused on this kind of journey of reclaiming the nsyilxcən language.” This was prompted in part by the death of his grandmother a few years ago, he says.

“I had the realization that she was one of the last strongly fluent speakers in our community and the realization that this language could be gone very soon, especially for generations like my son, by the time he’s my age who knows what state the language will be in or what state our culture will be in.”

This prompted Baptiste to take an interest and start doing research into what sort of resources are available to help him learn the language. And as he does, he’s teaching little bits to his son.

“I found one of the things that helps as a musician was putting it to music and starting to incorporate in songs. It’s a learning tool that people have used forever whether you’re teaching your son their ABCs, nursery rhymes, simple melodies are great ways to impart knowledge so I started this project, started this album writing songs that incorporated our native language into it,” he says.

I ask Baptiste how much language ability he had before he started this and he replies: “oh like none!” and we both laugh. “And I still don’t have much! It’s a very, incredibly difficult language to learn and I find it hard because I’m so far removed from my community living here in Vancouver and my family and my community are out there in Oliver and Osoyoos and Penticton.

“I don’t have the opportunity to partake in a group learning environment and I don’t have the ability to kinda reach out to an elder or reach out to someone in the community who knows more than I do,” he laments. This has meant pretty much learning through PDFs and sound files and whatever few resources he can find online.

He’s gotten some help from the OIB community who have helped to steer him in the right direction, “but it’s difficult and it’s hard to do at this age I think, especially being a single parent I don’t have a lot of spare time!” he laughs. “So whenever I can take a little bit of time I try to sit down and do some learning and I try to teach my son little bits of vocabulary.” The OIB language house is continuing to develop and Baptiste says he’s recently started doing lessons over Zoom. “I’m really looking forward to getting into it,” he says.

In this solo album three of the songs are sung in nsyilxcən and the rest are in English. “It was kind of one of those things where I knew at the very start of the project that I wanted there to be songs with nsyilxcən in it but a lot of it was limited by my difficulties learning it.”

He laughs as he recollects the revelation that hit him as he was writing the nsyilxcən songs. “It was like ‘wow, this is really difficult!’ and at the same time just as a songwriter the songs just naturally come out in English.”

Baptiste is under no illusion as to the extremely limited audience for these songs, but “it not only benefits me in trying to be a part of a cultural revival, but hopefully it will inspire other people in the Okanagan or other Indigenous people to not give up on our language and to give it a shot,” he says.

“I would like to think that if there were other Indigenous people in the Okanagan who listen to this album they may think ‘oh, maybe it’s not so hopeless to hold onto this language it may be something worth doing’,” he says.

I’m curious as to whether he asks for any feedback from the small number of fully fluent nsyilxcən speakers in the Okanagan nation. “I share it with them and they definitely give me some feedback like ‘oh that was a little bit iffy!’ but at that point there’s really not a lot I can do about it.”

He adds that there are some letters that are really not sing-able. “I guess for some you kinda have to take it with a grain of salt. There will be parts of certain words that I just can’t sing, it just doesn’t work because I can’t make a note out of it.

“I feel like it’s kind of like shoehorning an old language into modern music,” he says because his music tends to a more modern indie folk style, which is then applied to the traditional language. “So it’s like a clashing of worlds, they don’t necessarily blend together appropriately all the time.”

Baptiste’s first solo album Snəqsilxʷ (Family) was released earlier this year and can be accessed along with his previous work on various streaming platform. Baptiste will be performing at the Venables Theatre in Oliver on Friday, Nov. 25 at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased from the Venables Theatre website or at the Box Office one hour prior to the event.