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On a sunny, breezy August afternoon in Mani-Utenam, a reservation on the Quebec coast for the Innu people, a powwow ceremony is under way. Two sets of drummers beat out a steady rhythm while chanting in tandem, as dancers sway in their traditional, colourful regalia, ringing with the sound of small bells attached to their clothing. It is part of Innu Nikamu, one of the largest Indigenous festivals in North America, but this joyful performance is taking place on troubled ground.

This was once the site of a residential school where children were taken away from their families to force them to assimilate to western culture and forget their heritage. Active from the 1800s, such schools were run by the Canadian state and the Catholic church, who would inflict severe punishments on children who spoke their Indigenous languages and practised their customs. Beyond the thousands of traumatised survivors, 3,200 children are documented to have died (unmarked graves have also been discovered), and in 2022, Pope Francis made a “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada to atone on behalf of the church.

There have been numerous reports of physical and sexual abuse carried out by staff at the Mani-Utenam school before its demolition in 1971. And until 1951, powwow ceremonies were banned by the government as part of the push for assimilation, which led to them being held in secret.

‘Revitalising our traditional dances’ … Ivanie Aubin-Malo. Photograph: Maria Vartanova

Today, there is music, dance and community spirit out in the open as First Nations artists try to preserve this hyper-diverse culture. “People need to archive, record, and film their songs and dances as they are starting to lose them, to forget them,” says Ivanie Aubin-Malo, a contemporary dancer and artist belonging to the Wolastoqiyik Nation. “They don’t have enough interest to gather people to maintain them, to keep them practised and alive.”

The cruel irony is that while the province does all it can to preserve the French language, surrounded by anglophone Canada, Indigenous languages are endangered. There is provincial and national funding to support them and according to the 2021 Canadian census, Quebec had the largest share of Indigenous speakers nationally, but only 33,590 people knew a language well enough to hold a conversation. Other factors have contributed to the decline beyond the residential school abuse, including Quebec’s mass media being in French, and these communities being so widely dispersed.

Aubin-Malo is from L’Islet, an hour from Quebec City, and her ancestral language is Maliseet, which is no longer spoken in Quebec but survives in the province to the east, New Brunswick. By bringing contemporary dance to a powwow context, she says she is dedicated to “revitalising and re-practising our traditional dances. Maybe the next generation will take [film] archives and watch them, and it will be possible to revitalise them, to incorporate them, to embody them. That is art to me. To go back to these documents and bring them back to life.”

By doing so, Indigenous people can perhaps also confront the trauma of the forced assimilation years. Singer-songwriter Ivan Boivin-Flamand is part of the Atikamekw Nation in western Quebec, who sings in Atikamekw, French and English and performs at Innu Nikamu with the band Maten, wowing the crowd with shredding guitar solos. “My grandparents went to a residential school and I thought, ‘Nah, that’s bullshit, how could it affect me?’” he says. But, he adds, “I’ve seen in my own behaviour that …” He tails off. “I did a lot of introspection, and found that my parents had trauma too.”

‘They say my music helps them heal’ … Ivan Boivin Flamand. Photograph: © Ivan Boivin Flamand

Boivin-Flamand sees himself as a “flame which draws a lot of moths”. The 27-year-old made history in 2025, marking National Indigenous Peoples’ Day by singing a song called Kwe! (meaning hello) with other native musicians in all 11 of the province’s Indigenous languages – including some phrases from extinct languages in Quebec such as Maliseet and Huron-Wendat – in front of the National Assembly of Quebec. For First Nations people, among whom the suicide rate is three times the national average, this has huge social value. “A lot of people approach me and say ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me’, but they say my music helps them heal,” he says. “So that’s pretty cool.”

A one-hour plane ride to Montreal takes me to the International First Peoples’ festival, showcasing First Nations arts from around the world through music, short films, literature, and visual art. There is also satire and activism with a clear message to the US government: Canada is not for sale.

In the festival’s Captain America-inspired poster, an Indigenous superhero named Captain Assi Nukum punches Elon Musk in the face, depicted as Hitler. Donald Trump, as a despairing red-tinged Hulk, looks on next to a decapitated statue of Canada’s first prime minister, John A Macdonald, the architect behind the residential schools.

According to the creative director, André Dudemaine, Captain Assi Nukum “heralds the inevitable triumph of the immemorial spirit that shaped the cultures and civilisations of America’s First Peoples, and the coming doom of the barbaric Maga lords”.

Trump’s recent grandstanding about the US annexing Canada “is not taken seriously”, says Dudemaine. “Everybody is laughing out loud. And we all know that Trump is hostile to First Nations by renaming Denali or the Gulf of Mexico. So when he opens his mouth, everybody is already ready to oppose what he will say, even before he articulates something insane.”

But other issues aren’t so easy to mock or brush off. The Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 to better the lives of Indigenous people harmed by the residential schools system, and today’s Indigenous rappers such as Samiam and Q052 use their lyrics to keep the topic of reconciliation at the forefront of the national conversation.

‘Music gives us the platform to share’ … Manitou Singers at the International First Peoples’ festival. Photograph: Montréal First Peoples’ Festival

Over at the Place des Arts in downtown Montreal as part of the International First Peoples’ festival, Sedalia Fazio, an elder with the Kanien’kéha Nation, is doing the same, telling the crowd how Mother Nature is angry with humans for abusing our rights on Earth, before delivering a prayer for healing and making amends for our mistakes, referring to Montreal as Tiohtià:ke, the Kanien’kéha name for the city, meaning “where the currents meet”.

These are values shared by Indigenous people right across the Americas, such as Pedro Diaz, a half-Indigenous Peruvian whose powwow singing and percussion group Manitou Singers are also performing today. Diaz tells me “there are a lot of similarities with the struggles in Quebec and Peru in terms of fighting for land rights and reconciliation”. He says that in the face of inequality, he wants “to teach respect, to work together, and for no one to feel discriminated against, no matter their culture. Music gives us the platform to share that with our audience.”

Powwows and Indigenous festivals are keeping alive cultures that began about 40,000 years ago. “We have a lot of trauma and wounds, but some of us don’t even know that we’re still carrying them,” Boivin-Flamand says. “It helps to create music to put names on how we felt. It’s always going to be there for us as a people to heal.”

Listen to Yousif Nur’s playlist of Indigenous Canadian music.