For Ts’msyen musician Wil Uks Batsga G̱a̱laaw, translated in Sm’algyax as “where the cedar tree sticks out on the point facing the ocean” also known as Jeremy Pahl, music is never “just art.” It is tied to identity, memory, and ancestry. Today, his most important work is Bringing Back the Songs, a community-led project to rematriate recordings held in museums and return them to the families and Nations they belong to.
Jeremy describes the work of rematriation as different from repatriation: it’s not only about returning items, but about restoring life and relationship. “A song can’t live in a drawer or on a hard drive. It lives when it’s sung, when kids hear it, when it’s part of ceremony and everyday life”, says Pahl.
This perspective guides his work transcribing and translating songs with fluent-speaking Elders, often cross-referencing with several voices to ensure accuracy. The journey on this project began while digitizing fragile wax cylinder recordings at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. Restoring these century-old recordings led to community listening gatherings, inspired by Dr. Robin Gray’s work on data sovereignty, and ultimately to the Bringing Back the Songs project led by Ts’msyen matriarch and curator Joanne Finley of the Gitwilgyoots (Raven) clan.
The goal is simple and profound: return historic songs to their rightful communities. This means retrieving recordings from institutions, restoring and translating them, and ensuring they are given back in ways that align with cultural protocols.
Jeremy describes the return of songs as a ceremonial process without a museum-made model to follow. To ensure the songs return to the right hands, meetings are arranged with the rightful owners, with all clan pillars present. Families and clan leaders gather. Recordings, translations, and lyrics are placed in a cedar basket and offered as a gift, never as a transaction. Inside the cedar basket is a USB stick containing the restored audio files, translations, transcribed lyrics, and even recordings and pronunciation guides of individual words to support learning. “Nothing is asked in return,” Jeremy explains, “the act itself is the gift, a way of restoring balance and bringing the songs back to life in the community.”
While the full impact of this song reclamation work is yet to be realized, those who have received songs connected to their lineages have been extremely enthusiastic about the work. They have shared that through this project, they have gained experience in understanding what their traditional music sounded like centuries ago, noting its significant difference from music shared in their community today.
And the emotional impact of this work is profound. Last September, the Eagle clan of Hartley Bay performed one of these songs for the first time in more than 40 years. “I cried the first time I heard the tape,” Jeremey remembers. “Now it’s a part of our repertoire again. These aren’t just recordings. They’re our ancestors’ voices. Hearing them again can bring back memories and feelings we didn’t know were missing.” For Jeremy, witnessing these moments affirm the importance of this work, not only for the present, but for future generations.
Yet, this work hasn’t come easily. Jeremy notes that while European museums have long developed repatriation practices, Canadian institutions still lag behind, especially with audiovisual materials for which they claim to lack a model for this work. Concerned about potential repercussions for mishandling these materials, Pahl says that even though we have emphasized that our community’s traditional methods of identification, such as asking community members to confirm lineage are far more effective for verifying rightful ownership than museum protocols, we still face barriers in our work. “We don’t have a model of this kind of transfer, either,” Jeremy says. “So we created one that fits our teachings.”
While challenging, the work has sparked a larger vision. Jeremy hopes younger generations of musicians won’t only reclaim songs but will also blend them with new compositions in their own languages. “I hope future generations are writing new songs in our languages. With the state our languages are in, we need as many voices as possible.”
His advice to others in the Indigenous Music Office community considering similar projects is simple but urgent: “Don’t wait. Our Elders who carry the language and the knowledge won’t be here forever. Ground yourself in love, respect, and community, and just begin.”
Jeremy’s story is part of a wider resurgence in Indigenous music, where songs are not only created but reclaimed, remembered, and re-rooted in community. Their journey shows that while institutions may hold recordings, the true home of those songs will always be in community.
For the Indigenous Music Office, this is the kind of work we are here to stand beside, breaking down barriers so Indigenous music creators can reclaim, protect, and share the sounds that carry our languages, histories, and futures.
And as he reminds us: “It’s never about one person. Collective action is always more powerful than individual efforts. And perhaps most importantly:”the songs were never gone. They were simply waiting for us to sing them again.”