500 years and counting: Status/Non-Status

Status/Non-Status (formerly WHOOP-Szo) keeps finding stories to tell

Photo: Olde Nightrifter

“When I started making this music, I didn’t know a whole lot about myself or who I was. Métis, they would call me. Part Ojibwe. Part this or that. Which part? Same old story for the mixed breeds. Never saw my true reflection staring back at me,” writes Anishinaabe community worker Adam Sturgeon (Nmé) in Status/Non-Status, an essay his band (formerly WHOOP-Szo) now shares a name with. Telling his ancestral history and the story of the path he’s on today, Sturgeon is caught between worlds. 

“The Sturgeon family is one group of Potawatomi people that made it to Canada, migrating and then homesteading with permission from the Canadian government by way of the Caradoc Indian Reserve,” he continues. “Rights were established and a new way of life began: labour, urbanization, enfranchisement, addiction, and the introduction of the foster care and residential school systems.”

The band’s music has frequently explored Sturgeon’s complicated relationship to his Indigenous identity and the effects of Canada’s ongoing settler-colonial project, often through the experiences of those in his family; adopting the name Status/Non-Status ahead of the release of new EP 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years this past May, he now centres the project as a circumstance of his grandfather’s decision to enfranchise in order to support his family by joining the Canadian Armed Forces and become a Canadian citizen, the government’s term for the legal process of surrendering one’s and one’s family’s legal claim to Indigenous status under the Indian Act.

Speaking over the phone from his home in London, ON, Sturgeon says he’s never felt comfortable incorporating his culture’s traditions in his music. 

“I never thought it was really appropriate for me to play the songs that I would sing in a sweat at a show,” Sturgeon says. Instead, the band has typically deferred to contemporary genres like folk, metal, art rock, psych. On the new EP, opening track “Find a Home” drifts on modern Indigenous dream pop sounds peers like Zoon have coined “moccasin gaze.” “I never really thought it was necessarily appropriate for me to wear a ribbon shirt or even my beadwork out in public. I just thought it wasn’t something that was my place to do. So I explored the politics and the emotions and the feelings of my own family’s story.”

Indigenous experience is nuanced, but Canada’s Indian Act deals in broad strokes that hinge on minor details. An apparatus for legislating out Indigenous people, enfranchising under the Indian Act was designed as a one-way street with lasting effects, denying future generations of one’s direct lineage claim to status.

In an April 2021 article, Exclaim! reported that Sturgeon’s inability to claim status impacted his ability to apply for the SOCAN Foundation's TD Indigenous Songwriter Award.

In a statement, a representatives from SOCAN told Exclaim! the program accepts non-status Indigenous applicants provided they “share a letter of reference from someone in the community (elders, chiefs, etc.)” and in our conversation, Sturgeon clarifies that he went as far as obtaining one from his aunt, but he ultimately decided not to submit the letter “out of principle.”

It’s a revealing glimpse of colonialism’s continued ability to manifest under neoliberalism: instead of responding to the systemic inequity it reaps in any meaningful or material way, the state defers to the private sector to clean up after genocide, reconciliation doled out piecemeal, colonized peoples left to appeal to granting bodies, applicants sorted according to the same oppressive streams their genocidal government coerced them into, all while resource scarcity and federally constructed dialogues surrounding blood quantum sow distrust throughout communities and derail vital consciousness-raising efforts, undermining an already fragmented culture.

“Genocide reveals itself in so many of those nuances of our lives,” Sturgeon says. “In our culture we exist in cycles. Fall, winter, spring, summer. And repetition. The moon cycles. Essentially, a circle. So when we gather, we stand in circles. When you stand in a circle, you can share your mind with other people, no one is hiding from one another, no one is in opposition of another. Often in an intro we say let’s put our minds together and think as one.”

The band's new name reiterates the collectivist value at the core of those circles, juxtaposing mutual circumstances: status and non-status Indigenous people have shared histories, shared futures; they are stronger together. It draws attention to a harmful bureaucratic division that has been imposed on Indigenous peoples throughout settler Canada, but it also reverses it in a way, suggesting it can be overcome.

For Sturgeon, maintaining connections throughout the community eventually becomes a question of cultural sustainability.

“I’ve never been able to deny my whiteness because I am very white, I’m very white-looking and I was using art as a tool to explore my culture, to represent my family and my family’s story and to respect my culture, heritage and ancestry. And so, what does that look like for the future, as we continue to be multigenerational, as we intermingle with one another. What will that look like? And how do we define those experiences?” he asks. “It’s not about taking up that space, it’s about making more space. I would love to smash open the door and have other artists be able to follow. To create retention and create that experience.”

That allied spirit fuelled the process behind the 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years EP. 

Recorded in Guadalajara while WHOOP-Szo was touring Mexico under a music exchange via the Grizzlar label in 2018, it’s a radical smattering of influences, Sturgeon and bandmates Kirsten Kurvink Palm, Andrew Lennox, Eric Lourenco, and Joe Thorner joined by local guests Jose de Jesus Ruiz Gonzalez and Jesus Canibales. 

At its centre, Guadalajara and London, ON’s colonial histories meet in a psychedelic mindmeld meltdown on “Genocidio,” a retooled version of live show staple “Genocide” that now opens with defiant whistle blasts, sounding like a pressure release valve blowing full tilt, inspired by artifact precolonial whistles friend, musicians and tour guide Alvaro Marino introduced the band to through his parents’ collection. Marino himself appears on the EP’s sort-of title track “500 Years,” heard describing the ways colonialism has manifested in extreme class divide in his city. That situation’s further illustrated by field recordings of down on their luck organ aleros churning out happy-sad sounds on sound collage “Untitled travelogue,” while “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy,” a song inspired by the brain trauma Sturgeon and his father carry with them to this day as a result of time spent playing professional hockey. It’s a reckoning with damage, but through reckoning, recognition too.

Dualities everywhere. 

Like the new Status/Non-Status banner the group now operates under, the years counted in the EP’s title reflect the lasting legacy of colonialism and its attempted genocide, but they also account for perseverance. It’s been 500 years, but we’re still here, still going. Like the artifact whistles that inspired some of the album’s sound, there are new stories to tell, new connections to make.

Status/Non-Status performs Sept. 24 alongside Fiver and LAL as part of Together Apart’s outdoor rooftop concert series at the Garrison in Toronto. Tickets $15 in advance (reserve a spot) or PWYC at the door. More information here.

1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years is out now via You’ve Changed Records and the Grizzlar.