Sometimes, those words borrowed from others reveal better than your own what is deeply buried within you. This is the singular journey that singer Elisapie Isaac has embarked upon. For her fourth solo album – Inuktitut, released on September 15 – the 46-year-old Inuit singer-songwriter set aside her songwriting to cover 10 1970s and 1980s rock and pop hits, from Metallica and Fleetwood Mac to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

"Paradoxically, these songs written by White people have taken me further than my own lyrics," she explained with a broad smile framed by her long brown hair, during a break in a trendy café in the heart of Montreal. In a few days' time, she will fly to France for a series of concerts before embarking on a tour of Quebec.

Tears were the catalyst for this project. While jogging in 2020, Elisapie received a playlist from a friend on her smartphone. Headphones on, she listened to ABBA's "Chiquitita" and Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." Suddenly, she burst into tears.

These songs had shaped her childhood in the early 1980s, which she spent in Salluit, a small Arctic village of around 500 inhabitants located in Canada's far northern region of Nunavik. "It hit me here," she said, pressing a fist to her stomach. "I had to dig deep inside myself, do emotional archaeological work to understand what triggered such melancholy. What tugged at her heartstrings was the "tangle" of feelings evoked by these tunes from her youth. The levity of childhood superimposed on the despair that gripped the members of her small community.

The "assimilationist" policy pursued by Canada for over a century has wreaked havoc among its indigenous peoples. Their elders, forced into a sedentary lifestyle after having lived as nomads, have turned to alcohol. Children sent to boarding schools to become "good little Canadians," with promises made to their parents that they would become lawyers or doctors – "but I don't know any who have become doctors," said Elisapie – returned to their villages stripped of their identity and disconnected from their culture.

The suicide rate in Nunavik remains more than 10 times higher than the average in Quebec. Every family has had to live with grief and trauma. The singer remembers her aunt, whose face was bruised by beatings, or her cousins, forced to take refuge in her house when alcohol-related violence invaded their own home. But she also recalls the miracle of music, when her musician uncles would get the whole family to sing along to Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" or the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses." "They found in rock'n'roll a way of expressing their fury, this music from elsewhere told them that they had the right to be sad or angry."

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