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As usual, the coolest acts the recent Vancouver Folk Music Festival were people I had never heard of.

Elisapie had not been on my radar. She was touring Inuktitut , an album of Inuit-language covers of songs that, as she would quip from the stage, she “stole” from white people: Metallica, Queen, Cyndi Lauper, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin. Songs were defamiliarized, exoticized, and Indigenized, and fed back to a mostly white audience as shimmering, gorgeous, but still very recognizable pop.

I was definitely curious and keen to hear it, and enjoyed her Friday Main Stage set, especially her haunting take on “Goin’ to California”, when she did something I didn’t see coming: she covered

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