Shy-Anne Hovorka has reinvented her music’s political activism and it’s proof that the artistic conviction of hope and angst can burn hotter with age.

On September 25, the Anishinaabe-kwe former pop and country star released “Grandmother’s Song,” a 52-minute, hypnotic combination of spoken word and music, backed by orchestral accompaniment.

Her work as an educator has spawned a radical evolution of her art, combining the relationship with the land into morality – our relationships with ourselves and with each other. Her stories weave from being nostalgic to haunting, from an intriguing brush with Sabe (the Anishinaabe tradition of bigfoot) to jump-scares with bears to the ominous mystery of young, Indigenous people dying in Thunder Bay’s rivers.

A decade ago, the ‘60s scoop survivor quit performing at the height of her popularity. Hovorka won six Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards for her sophomore album “Interwoven Roots “ in 2012. She announced her retirement from performing two years later when she swept the APCMAs again with four awards for her next album, “Bones.”

Hovorka was recognized for her country love songs like “Be Your Girl,” and “The Glue,” but she was also well-known for her blunt activist tracks like “Fire” and “Can’t Change the World” from the Blackstone TV series.

Having spent the years since teaching, raising a family, and gardening, she was centered for what became an epic challenge to her art and politic.

“There’s a maturity that I’ve gone through. I’m very proud of my past work, don’t get me wrong – and I’m still very political – but I also feel I was missing lots of people because it was almost in your face,” Hovorka explains. “It’s walking alongside people, I think. It’s letting people feel, learn, and understand in a way that isn’t judgmental or harmful to either the Indigenous perspective or the settler perspective.”

By 2018, the stage called her back. The prospect of having her old songs backed by the 31-piece Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra pulled her from retirement, especially for the opportunity to build bridges and improve relationships in a city that’s notorious for anti-Indigenous systemic racism. After performing several shows with the orchestra over years, Hovorka was approached by non-Indigenous composer Micah Pawluk with an idea for a musical project about reconciliation.

She had already written “The Granddaughter’s song” in the Anishinaabemowin language and the original track, “Hand Drummer.” The former became the title and finale track for the project, while Pawluk wove the musical motifs of those songs through his entire orchestral interpretation of the material.

Hovorka then pulled experiences directly from their own lives and laid the stories under the Seven Grandfather Teachings. She develops and delivers Indigenous education as her day job, so she insisted on consulting with elders from the project’s inception right through to the end.

The one-track, full-length album follows the story of many Indigenous women in northwestern Ontario, from girlhood through needing to navigate the urban landscape of Thunder Bay to attend high school, and through to adulthood.

Thunder Bay’s orchestra (the only one between Toronto and Winnipeg) was ecstatic to back Hovorka on something so original and the collaboration instantly connected with live audiences.

“The first couple of times we performed this with the TBSO, we had such a huge reaction, whether they were children, adults, Indigenous, settlers. There were a lot of tears. There was a lot of, ‘This helps me understand more,’” she says.

“And when I was talking to some of the audience members who engaged in conversations afterwards, it wasn’t necessarily about the seven teachings. They enjoyed learning about that, but they really loved the girl through her story, really feeling what she felt, and understanding how this was a very similar story to many Indigenous youths across northwestern Ontario.”

Translating the live experience into a permanent art form proved more difficult. The orchestra estimated the cost of its musicians alone producing Granddaughter’s Song in a studio at over $70,000.

Hovorka laid a base track with an app that reproduces the British Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra. She then contacted First Nations and Metis instrumentalists and vocalists across the country, many of whom she has still never met face-to-face. They recorded tracks in their own studios and sent them along.

Even after she managed to procure grants from the Ontario Arts Council and a donation from the Enbridge natural gas company, she had to kick in the last $12,000 herself to make the record, then she released it for free on streaming services.

Hovorka says she receives too many requests to speak about the Seven Grandfather Teachings from schools across the vast north to attend them all. But she knows there’s a need for this curriculum and she knows that non-Indigenous teachers sometimes struggle with confidence to deliver it.

She’s beginning to see school boards understand Indigenous cultural events and practices as education by other means. There are boards, for example who have stopped marking students absent when they’re out on the land participating in traditional harvesting activities. If Grandmother’s Song can serve as a reconciliation piece in the classroom or meeting those of all ages wherever they are, she insists the path to actualizing these lessons will fall on the listener.

“The problem is, we don’t leave enough time and space for these youth to learn. The traditional ways of life are super important parts of who we are as Indigenous people. And what does that mean for us to leave that space? And where does the reconciliation piece come in?

“I can’t tell people what they can do for reconciliation. As an educator, my part in that – whether I’m Indigenous or not – is making space for those traditional ways of life and honouring them as real ways of learning, that are just as important and just as honoured as our regular curriculum – or even more honoured.”

Jon Thompson is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based in Thunder Bay. Contact him with tips and story ideas at Jon@ricochet.media