#96: Ombiigizi: "We're being loud, but we don't always know everything that we're speaking about"
Sounding it out with the Anishinaabe duo.
First of all, it’s pronounced “om-BEE-ga-ZAY,” as we learned back in BNB #72.
Second, it’s not often that a name provides the crucial path to understanding a band, as is the case with Ombiigizi. As we have exhaustively chronicled in Band Name Bureau, names are often chosen with minimal consideration. You can practically see the band shrugging and saying, “That’ll do, I guess.” That’s how we end up with the congealed-oatmeal of names like Trapt, fun., and various Li’ls.
But Ombiigizi does nothing without consideration, beginning with the group’s name. It means “he/she is noisy” or “they are noisy” in Anishinaabemowin, a language spoken by the Anishinaabe people indigenous to much of Canada and the northern Midwest. Anishinaabe identity heavily informs the music Adam Sturgeon and Daniel Monkman make as Ombiigizi (and in their respective solo projects, Status/Non-Status and Zoon).
It’s indigenous music, even though the band’s albums, Sewn Back Together (2022) and the excellent new Shame, could easily segue with Animal Collective, Spiritualized, or Broken Social Scene—whose Kevin Drew produced both albums. Such company isn’t where you’d necessarily expect to find First Nations or Native American music. That can be a frustrating experience, as Monkman explains below.
It’s one of many things he and Sturgeon spoke to Band Name Bureau about shortly after Shame’s release.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length blah blah blah.
Band Name Bureau: How did you settle on Ombiigizi as a name?
Adam Sturgeon: I remember a little bit that this idea of being noisy was something that I wanted to explore. A lot of our work sometimes is like, “Let’s ask indigenous people the hard questions,” and “Let’s ask them everything about their culture.” Sometimes as artists we’re like, “Well, we don’t know everything, either.” So a lot of our journey is learning.
So I think Ombiigizi means to be noisy in the way where it’s like we’re exploring ourselves, we’re being loud, but maybe we don’t always know everything that we’re speaking about.
Daniel Monkman: Yeah, exactly. Just to add on to that, Adam, my dad always explained it to me as just like when we’re a baby, we cry when we need something like nurturing, food, anything like that to our parents, our caregivers. Then when I got a little bit older, my dad was telling me that when we play pow-wow, it’s a cry to the Creator, almost like a communication. That gets louder and louder now that you’re an adult and you’re more sentient, I guess. For Ombiigizi, we got into Sonic Youth and Nirvana throughout all those years, and our message now is to make noise with our guitars. It’s our cry to the Creator or anyone who will listen.
BNB: It’s almost surprising when bands put a lot of thought into their name, as opposed to like, “Oh, we got really baked one night and this made us laugh. Now we’re stuck with it.”
AS: I mean, there is some good stuff in that, but it does start to feel a bit homogenous sometimes. There’s nothing worse than the local band having an inside joke that no one at the show understands, right? I think with our name, it puts a challenge on people to try a little bit.
DM: I love that aspect of it.
AS: I think that draws in the right type of community, even though maybe there’s this small aspect where people are like, “Oh, I’m not going to play that band because I can’t say their name.” I think most people are over that. They’re just willing to try, and it’s a good little thing to just put forward as part of our culture and representation. It’s like, let’s make sure the language is present. We don’t get too upset with anybody, either. We could waste a lot of energy doing that, but we want to call people in on it too.
BNB: What do people usually say when you tell them the group’s name?
AS: “Whoa!” Nowadays people have their phones, so they can just look it up or whatever. Who knows, maybe we’ll get the AI apps going soon. We’ll just translate as we go. But I think a lot of people think of a band like Fugazi, right?
DM: Or Eazy-E. Early on it was a lot of Eazy-E, Ombiigizi. I can’t remember how Kevin [Drew] used to say it, but it was—
AS: So many ways! We even have the little pronunciation chart, but even that’s probably still a little confusing.
BNB: I found it so helpful, like, “These guys get it.” How have you approached names with previous projects? Status/Non-Status originally had a different name, right?
AS: Whoop-Szo, and then also Zoon or whatever. I suppose our names are a part of our personal growth and our ability to change too. I was always really into bands like Microphones, Mount Eerie and the trajectory of how a project unfolds. I think that we work very project-to-project, so they take on their own lives. So as far as branding is concerned, you want to have this one name all the time, but as an artist you want to move through your experience. I think as an indigenous person and as indigenous people, I think we both felt that movement through our work. Because even Zoon had another name for a little while as well.
BNB: It was originally called Bloom, right?
DM: Exactly. I was going to say, I think we were kind of rebranding, maybe not at the same time, but it was the same kind of circumstances. It was like we needed to change our name to get away from the past.
For me, I was trying to get signed to some label in the States. I remember the guy was just a crazy alcoholic. In one of his meetings that I was having with him, I think he was on his 15th beer, and he was just like, “Oh yeah, one last thing, Bloom is like 20,000 flower shops on Facebook, so maybe try change your name to something special because you want to get to the top of the Google searches.”
I went into a sweat ceremony and was given my traditional name. All my native friends call me Zoon. It’s becoming less and less Daniel and more just Zoon, and then later people will be able to pronounce the full name [Zoongide’ewin]. But that’s how that came about for myself.
AS: Then just for me, Status/Non-Status. My family are non-status indigenous people.1 We have the right to be [status]. I wanted to explore more of the community work that’s kind of necessary to raise awareness. Everyone thought it was kind of catchy, I guess. [Laughs.]
DM: I love it.
AS: There’s a lot to navigate there potentially too, right? In Canada, they teach our ancestry a little bit, but it’s still implemented by a system that’s designed to dismantle us. That’s still happening to this day.
DM: They hire a lot of people who don’t really know the actual history too. When you go to some of these political places, it almost seems like a non-native teaching some of these things. But that’s the world we live in. If I have a child with my partner, it’s going to be mixed as hell. And that’s why Status/Non-Status is actually very powerful. Because not only on one side it’s like status or non-status, but it’s also if you’re status and you marry someone and have a kid, it slowly gets diluted until the government is like, “Okay, we're not responsible for you guys anymore because there's none of you pure bloods left.” Which is such a crazy and dystopian view.
AS: But also outside of those policies are people’s lives and relationships and stuff. So it creates those divides between communities as well when we actually actively need to bridge some gaps. But it makes people very wary and needing to be careful.
Ultimately we understand that as well. I’ve learned over the years my job is to tell my family’s story. That's my responsibility. I know who I am and where I come from, and it’s like, I don’t speak for all of my culture, and I don’t speak for Zoon. It’s nice that together we speak similarly, and that's a big part of why we started this project, because we understood each other more inherently. That’s not something that we always had, and we found each other through putting ourselves out there, and it maybe even felt vulnerable. We still do feel vulnerable together as well.
“Canada definitely tries to push some indigenous people in this box, then there's us that's outside of it doing the grind and proving that our music stands on its own.”
BNB: As First Nations artists, it feels like creative choices carry extra weight, like band name, song titles, album titles, etc. Does it feel like something that both represents you and also boxes you in a way?
DM: Zoon got nominated last year for contemporary indigenous artist, and so I went to the Junos. But when I was there and I saw the indigenous people that were represented and the kind of music that was pushed. You could clearly see that they were pushed into this box by the label that they’re on and the music that they make. Just from my personal experience of being friends with them and just hearing their stories of them being like, “Oh, I couldn’t do this because it wouldn’t get on blah, blah, blah.” What I love about our music is that it's indigenous, but we're not in this box.
We’re taking on our own thing and inventing our own genres at the exact same time that people from Sonic Youth or Broken Social Scene are noticing and being like, “Wow, this is not the generic Canadian indigenous music” that's being pushed on the radio and at the forefront of, say, the Junos.
Canada definitely tries to push some indigenous people in this box, and if you are in that box, there’s just confetti and Ronald McDonald and all this praise and happiness and you get pushed up. Then there’s us that’s outside of it doing the grind and proving that our music stands on its own and is something special.
AS: And to your ask [about] the cultural weight and stuff, I think we still feel that. Our teachings are still in the music, and so it is interesting to just put it forward into new or different ways. I didn’t always feel connected to the teachings in the way that I had perceived it to be. I had this idea of what it was supposed to be and how I could participate in this or not that, or use the drum here or not use the drum there, or go to my sweats and keep my cultural teachings separate of my music a little bit. But I think now it’s more blended and maybe it was actually just there all along. It was just a matter of time that it would become its own vehicle.
Yeah, we are putting the weight of our ancestors in there, but they’re pushing us to do what’s necessary to find the new way. And maybe part of that’s just because of how we were connected or not connected or whatever, but we love the music that we love, and we want to do that stuff while also just being who we are as indigenous people exploring the world.
BNB: I was going to ask if you felt like there were guardrails on what you could do artistically, because you’re still coming up through indie rock, for lack of a better term. It sounds like you’re able to expand upon what's out there without being hemmed in by it.
AS: I think so. Maybe simply too, sometimes the music is different than the words you speak. I’m pretty good at going on just weird rants about things. That's kind of where I find my lyrics and stuff. So they’re not always the ABCs of our grandfather’s teachings or whatever, but it’s all just mixed and muddled with the way that I see the world. We see the world through the experience of our ancestors in a lot of ways. They're also guiding us in a lot of ways.
We have to remember that they too are our power because we’re so lucky that we have something that we can look to. I feel like in the world right now, there’s a lack of shared values. Everyone’s very individualized. And for us, whenever we’re hurting, we go back to that healing place and it reminds us who we are and what's important to us, our families.
Our first album was about our families, and as much as it was all this pain and weight, we totally used it as a tool to just create as much positivity through survivance and perseverance and stuff like that. We came out on top of that feeling really good about learning from our past. We weren’t staying in the pain as much.
BNB: Because of that, did you feel more confident that you could go into darker places on Shame?
AS: We started looking at the rest of the world and we were looking at it together, and we hadn’t done that yet. We were seeing a lot of the pain unfold, the world coming down as we were pushing through. I think the dark places are saying it’s okay to feel this way, and we all have those dark corners or that hard path or something.
DM: Before Ombiigizi had even started, it just was me and Adam sending demos back and forth together. I remember in Canada we found those, I think it’s 50 unmarked graves of children that were found at this residential church or school, whatever you want to call it. It just shook me because my dad, my aunties, all my uncles, they all went to residential schools and day schools. I’m the first generation to not go to that school, but I'm the first generation to take on a lot of the hurt that the Canadian government would supply to these indigenous people. Because once they turned 18, they just kicked their ass out and were like, “Find your own way home.” Sometimes they’d go home and it'd be devastated, be just gone.
So we found that out, the 50 unmarked graves, and I immediately wrote the song called “Ogiin,” which is on the record. Ogiin means “mother.”
For many years I resented my dad because I didn’t understand what happened at these schools. I left them out of my life for a long time. When I found out about this stuff years later, I felt like we just needed to really make a stand in our own way of sharing with people.
So I feel like the first album had this dark element to it as well, just from the beginning. Then the second one was just diving deeper into it, into more of the abyss of this messed up situation that this government put us in.
BNB: Before we wrap up, I’ll ask you the question I ask everyone: Is it better to have a bad, memorable group name or a more generic one that kind of blends in but isn’t necessarily memorable?
AS: Bad’s fine. I think a lot of what we’re talking about is, sometimes in Canada, there’s a milquetoast temperature. The band names feel the same and you can just get lost in that for sure. Anything you can do to set yourself apart is great, I think. You find your people. If it’s weird and polarizing, someone’s going to like it. Hopefully.
Find Ombiigizi on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Instagram.
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How many times did I have to look up how to spell Ombiigizi before I could spell it on my own? Easily a dozen.
Coming shortly: BNB’s Midnight Mass, our annual look at Christmas music.