Love Language

Being both the Indian and the Cowboy is a tall order, but it’s the only way Anishinaabe singer Tashiina Buswa can see as a way to navigate a world that’s infected to its roots with colonial ideals. ‘Indian Cowboy’ takes the old Hollywood trope of Cowboys vs. Indians and injects it with nuance. Growing up with a foot in two worlds (one where Indigenous identity is held sacred and one where colonialism works to tear that idea down), Buswa muses on the duality of organized religion/Indigeneity, and staying connected to your culture in a world designed to destroy it. “You want it? You got your Indian Cowboy” she sings in exasperation at the end of the track, defeated, yet with some secret, triumphant sense of beating the system at its own game. Love Language is the band that’s playing in the bar that all the high school kids are somehow allowed into in your favorite 90s teen movie. Within less than a year of their first show under an overpass in Montreal, they had taken their energetic, often chaotic live show across Canada, sharing stages with Dehd, Ombiigizi, Chad VanGaalen and Julie Doiron. They return with the release of ‘Indian Cowboy’ a song that reckons with a lifetime of navigating organized religion and an Indigenous culture that colonial ideals constantly attempts to erode.