Jully Black, a Canadian singer-songwriter, sang different lyrics for O Canada, Canada’s national anthem, during the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday in Salt Lake City, UT.
O Canada opens with, “O Canada! Our home and native land!”
Black sang the following altered recitation, “O Canada! Our home on native land!”
Fox News described the one-word shift as “an effort to acknowledge indigenous people” instead of rejecting the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty.
CTV News similarly characterized Black’s lyrical changes as a decision “to recognize the Indigenous peoples who lived on the land before European settlers.”
Black said:
That’s a good word: — responsibility — because we’ve been singing this anthem since kindergarten. Now, in the last three years especially, with indigenous rights and what’s going in our country and the history and the learning — I, too, am learning — so I recached out to some indigenous friends, to say, ‘First of all, how do you feel about e doing this anthem?’
And I got some feedback, so I really dissected the lyrics to really sing it with intention, because I know it like my name. Because now I’m singing it in a whole other meaningful way.
Recent years have seen growing use among politicians and other government figures prefacing public remarks on Canadian territory with declarations of land being “unceded” by various Aboriginal Canadian tribes.
In 2018, the Canadian government changed its official composition of O Canada to remove the word “sons” as part of an effort to make the anthem “gender neutral.”
Breitbart News reported at the time, “The offending line in the tune O Canada reads, ‘True patriot love in all thy sons command.’ Critics insisted that ‘thy sons’ was not ‘inclusive’ enough, so a bill was introduced to change the line to read, ‘True patriot love in all of us command.’ The song was originally written in 1908 and made the national anthem by an act of Parliament in 1980.”
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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