Trapline is a collection of distant stories and how they speak to us today. It’s a response to finding ourselves grappling with the tools we’ve been given to survive while trying to understand to the places we find ourselves now. Trapline doesn’t tell us how to survive, that’s a story for another day, but it certainly expresses the madness and frustration of existing in a fractured world.
Diga grew up in the remote community of Behchoko, the capital of the Tłı̨chǫ Nation, located in Canada’s Northwest Territories an hour outside of Yellowknife. His first and only language until the age of nine was Tłı̨chǫ, and his songs are often inspired by his father’s stories of life on the land, as well as his own experience of navigating two worlds.
Thanks to older brothers and their passion for music, the sounds of iconic artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the soundtrack of Diga’s childhood. Yet, Diga’s first artistic passions fell firmly in visual arts and cartooning. It wasn’t until Diga found a discarded copy of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs that he developed fascination with music, which led him down the journey he has been on since.
A multi-instrumentalist, Diga finds musical inspiration from an eclectic range of artists, including Kashtin, Tłı̨chǫ Drummers, Enigma, Caribou, Bob Moses, and Indigenous Siberian folk-pop band Otyken. Diga studied audio recording in Ottawa partly in response to the expense of traveling south to record, and now produces and writes out in his home studio. “The North is a very small town,” he says, “you have to wear a lot of hats.” And so he is a producer, engineer, songwriter, musician, and film composer.
Considering his roots in visual arts, the music Diga writes is full circle: “I paint with audio now,” he says. “I want to explore sounds and ideas and take people on a journey through the North.”
Awards:
Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, Best Male Artist of the Year, The Earth is Crying, Diga - 2005
Nominations:
Junos, Indigenous Band of the Year, Yellowstone - 2020
Western Canadian Music Awards, Rock Album of the Year and Indigenous Artist of the Year, Yellowstone - 2019
Indigenous Music Award, Rock Album of the Year, Great Northern Man - 2017
Canadian Folk Music Awards, Aboriginal Songwriter of the Year, Great Northern Man - 2016
Western Canadian Music Awards, Aboriginal Artist of the Year, Great Northern Man - 2016
Junos, Aboriginal Album of the Year, Distant Morning Star - 2010
Influence:
Tom Waits, Kashtin, Sacred Spirit, Roy Buchanan, Neil Young, David Gon and The Tlicho Drummers