Digawolf targets October release for Tłı̨chǫ album

Digawolf’s latest album – Įnı̀ (Spirit), the NWT artist’s first all-Tłı̨chǫ album in a decade – has been given an October 28 release date.

The title track from the album, Įnı̀, was published on Thursday. In a press release, the band said Įnı̀ is a song about love for family from an album that aims to bring Tłı̨chǫ “to a new level through sound.”

“Sometimes it feels like the world has gone a little crazy and is drowning out language and culture,” stated Diga, the band’s frontman.

“We need to go into the atmosphere to get some perspective on how much we love those things: family, culture, and the love of who we are. It’s about straddling two worlds.

“Sometimes you have to use technology to preserve your language and culture. The ancient collides with the future.”

The music video for Įnı̀ shows the track’s Tłı̨chǫ lyrics alongside English-language translations as they are sung.

Data from the 2021 census released earlier this year suggests Tłįchǫ is, by some distance, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the NWT, and also the territory’s most-spoken Indigenous language among young people.

More than half of Tłįchǫ speakers recorded in the census were aged 44 or younger, an exception among the territory’s Indigenous languages.

There were 1,670 NWT residents with Tłįchǫ as their mother tongue in 2021, the NWT Bureau of Statistics reported. The same census recorded 1,475 NWT residents with French as their mother tongue and 970 residents who list Tagalog as their mother tongue.