Ever since creative and life partners ShoShona Kish and Raven Kanatakta began making music together in 2004, the name of their project, Digging Roots, has acquired a double meaning. On the one hand, the Canadian duo lay claim to a gritty, elemental sound—a roadhouse-ready fusion of acoustic-blues grooves, swampy soul, and reggae rhythms that feels very much tethered to the earth. On the other hand, their songwriting is steeped in their Anishinaabe and Onkwehonwe heritage, turning stories of inter-generational trauma and struggle into inspirational anthems of resistance. But on their fourth album—whose title is the Anishinaabemowin term for loving unconditionally—Digging Roots lean into yet another interpretation of their name, through a collection of songs that reflects on both their personal relationship with nature and our collective duty to preserve it.
“We all had this really profound collective experience in the pandemic, where we were all returning to our homes and our most nuclear families,” Kish tells Apple Music. “It seemed really clear that what would get us through these difficult times was our connection with other human beings. And I was reflecting on my relationship to the land—I really had this sense of unconditional love to the place I’m from. There was this real recentering around what’s most important.” Here, Kish and Kanatakta reveal what’s most important to them, as they guide us through Zhawenim, track by track.
“She Calls Me”
Raven Kanatakta: “Growing up in my Algonquin Anishinaabe community, Winneway [in Quebec], I’d go hunt moose with my dad, and when you’re doing that, you really become connected to the land—you’re basically shivering in the bush because it’s so cold and you realize how small and insignificant you are. It’s very humbling, but in that process, it really grounds you. I really got a sense of my identity from growing up on the land—when I do go to the city, I feel like I need to get grounded again. The land is sort of like a mother—she really does keep calling me.”
“Tall Grass”
ShoShana Kish: “There’s a place that I think of when I’m in this song—it’s this beautiful place in unceded Algonquin territory, and it is a place where I feel free. It’s a place that I feel the most myself and it’s a place that knows the whole history of me, and loves me still, despite knowing all my imperfections. It’s just this visceral experience of being somewhere. Sometimes you don’t have all the words for it, but you just know that we are a part of something bigger than us, and it’s humbling and reassuring at the same time.”
“The Healer”
SK: “This song definitely came from a place of grief. I was responding to the [2017] death of my friend Richard Wagamese, who was a wonderful author and poet who contributed so much to the Anishinaabe community. I really took it hard. I was thinking about the role that our struggles played in him being taken from us, and how that related to my experiences of having lost so many before their time, and just the ongoing colonial impacts on my family and my community. I dream of a time when we don’t have to resist and don’t have to fight, where we can be who we are, in our communities and in the greater communities, and have it not be so hard. So, this song is raging against the undertow. Joy is our resistance, and we will dream in our languages again.”
“SKODEN”
SK: “In those early days of lockdown, when the whole world was sheltering in place, it took a very short time to get these reports of these rivers in Europe that nobody had living memory of being anything but cloudy, and they were suddenly running clear. Species were returning. We regained some time on the clock, and it happened within a matter of weeks. We could see how quickly we can effect change when we move together. I understand if folks think that ‘skoden’ is an Anishinaabe word, but it’s actually a colloquialism—‘let’s go then.’ It’s commonly known in Indigenous circles. And that’s what the song is about: This world is worth fighting for. It’s such a gorgeous place, and human beings have the capacity to be so brilliant, so it’s like, ‘Let’s get off our asses!’”
“Light Me Up”
SK: “This is a love song. There are some seeds of this song that come from Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin—but that’s a whole other story! It’s really all about Raven—Raven as a metaphor for the positive forces in the universe.”
“Cut My Hair”
SK: “For me, this song has a personal root—it comes through my great auntie. She is the only surviving member of that generation of our family, and they were all in residential school. And for a long time, in our communities, this wasn’t spoken of—we carried a lot of shame. We internalized the experiences of these schools, and the survivors really carried so much forward. So, I really honor my auntie in breaking that silence and speaking about those things. ‘Cut My Hair’ was something that happened to her upon her arrival in residential school—they lined up all of the wee ones in front of all of their peers and the priests and the nuns, and they unceremoniously hacked off their beautiful, long hair.”
“No Breaking”
RK: “Having grown up on the rez, I felt like, by the age of 12, I had been to more funerals than 10 people who grew up in a city put together. Every month, somebody was dying an oppression-related death. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’d seen my grandpa or mother and father just totally stressed from the environment of your relatives dying. The true history of Canadian colonialism isn’t taught in the schools, unfortunately, and it would be really great because what we need is some compassion to see others as human beings. My best friend died on his 13th birthday from sniffing gas, and I was just so devastated because we were making plans to head off to the city, go to university together, and make a life for ourselves. So, when I met ShoShona, I felt like, ‘Oh, now I feel like a complete human being.’ It’s easier to do things together. There are these elements in this song about connection, and not letting each other down. We have to fight; regardless of if you're coming from a crazy rez or if you grew up in a city, we’re always fighting to have that good life. You can’t let your heart break down—you need to have that direction.”
“AK47”
RK: “In 1990, I was at the Kanesatake/Oka crisis, on the Mohawk rez there, which was my mother’s reserve. I was visiting our family there for the summer, and they were going to plow a nine-hole golf course to make room for an 18-hole golf course—the caveat being that there was a Mohawk graveyard there, and they were just going to bulldoze it. So, of course, the Mohawk people said ‘no’...and that turned into the Canadian army shooting hollow-tipped mushroom bullets at women and children and men in the pines. I was stuck on my mom’s reserve, and they cut off the food, they cut off the water. And so, at some point, after three months, we needed to leave because we were moving from my rez to Ottawa, and during that process, the army and the police surrounded our vehicle and my entire family all had guns placed to our temples for about 15 minutes. I thought I was going to die, but I also felt like, ‘Well, at least I died for something—I stood up for my rights, and I’m part of the fight that’s always been here.’ Around the same time, there were a bunch of AK47s that were brought into the rez. It’s not that people wanted to fight—they just wanted to stand up and protect themselves. That’s what turned into this song. ShoShona penned those lyrics: ‘I wish I could load love into a gun/Peace into a gun/Hope into a gun/Load up my AK47 and fire, fire, fire for everyone.’ And I was just like, ‘Yes!’ We need to reframe the way that we think. We devote so many technologies to warfare and the destruction of human beings and the planet. Imagine if we put our good minds and thought about technologies in a really positive way.”
“Sweetwater”
SK: “To be entirely frank, it’s about lovemaking—not just in the simple way that we think of it, but also manifesting love and spaces, and how that can move oceans through us and around us. We’re really lucky because Raven and I are a couple and we work together, and we’ve raised a family doing this music thing, and we feel really blessed. We are really, genuinely operating from this pretty special place—because Raven and I really like each other a lot!”