Beatrice Deer Band

BEATRICE DEER: AN
ARTIST BIO IN THREE PARTS

Canadian Aboriginal
Music Award-winning singer-songwriter Beatrice Deer hails from Nunavik.
Half-Inuk and half-Mohawk, Deer left her small hometown of Quaqtaq, Quebec
(population: 376) in 2007 for three life-changing reasons:

1) She moved to
Montreal to get serious about making music—and it worked. Deer has now released five albums, a body of work in which she developed a unique blend of traditional Inuit
throat singing with contemporary indie rock. My All to You, her fifth record, marks a significant milestone in
the history of Inuindie music (a genre Deer pioneered), as this is the first
time she composed all of the original music and lyrics. Her themes range from classical Inuit folk tales and legends to the
importance of finding understanding and the search for meaning within personal
growth. She has built a global
following and her songs are especially beloved in
Arctic Canada, where she performs frequently and where audiences sing along to
her songs during concerts. She sings in three
languages: Inuktitut, English, and French. Her collaborators include luminaries
from the likes of Land of Talk, The Barr Brothers, Stars, Timber Timbre, Bell
Orchestre and Suuns.

2) The second reason Deer left the north was
to pursue higher education—and to ensure that her two kids had access to more options to schooling
as well. Deer’s artistic experience manifests itself in countless ways: she has
been everything from a book designer to an actor to a model. A highly regarded seamstress, she also appears on children’s TV
shows and is the voice of safety briefings on First Air: The Airline of the North. But above all, her primary medium is
music, both as a singer, and now, with My All to You, as a
songwriter as well. It’s an album of maturity, of hard-fought wisdom, and of
spiritual depth.

3) The final reason Deer
came to Montreal was to get therapy. “My
All to You is all about owning up,” she explains. “It’s about reconciliation
with your self—which is the hardest thing to do. And I mean that on a personal
level as well as on a national level.” At this moment in the country’s history,
when reconciliation between Canadians and First Peoples has finally become a
central issue, Deer has an important message to share: she believes that
reconciliation begins with each of us. “You can’t be a change maker if you
haven’t gone through it yourself,” she says. “You can’t help if you haven’t
gone through healing yourself. It’s a lot easier to forgive other people than
it is to forgive yourself. To get to where I am today I had to forgive myself many,
many times. I still work on it.”

As a role model for her
community and an advocate for healthy living, Deer is often asked to do
speaking engagements. Her primary message is that each of us must take control
of our own life. “Nobody else can do it for you,” she insists. “You can’t
change what happened. You can only change how you deal with it.” The starting
point for her latest album was the moment in her own life when she decided to transform
her outlook. “I’d struggled for many years, in many ways—until I realized the
change had to come from me,” Deer says. “I know that now that I’m not in
constant pain anymore. I am finally starting to perceive things in a healthier
way. And I want to use what I’ve learned to help others.”