She soothes her sisters, then turns, once more, to condemn the complicit. “You can’t take our blood.” And then, dipping into her guttural register, she sings, “Inuuvunga/Tukisivunga”-I am an Inuk I understand. “You can’t take our tongues,” she says, on the album’s title track. Throughout her career, and long before last year’s reckoning, she has advocated for herself and other victims of the system. Tagaq, now 46, recalls leaving home at 15 to attend one such school. Last year, Canadian authorities discovered the unmarked mass graves of nearly 1,400 Indigenous children on the grounds of five former residential schools. Her low growl holds the power to terrify, but often, it is her pronouncements in plain, spoken English that most chill the blood. On Tongues, Tagaq is her own duet partner, by turns warm and wrathful. This is a far cry from traditional Inuit throat-singing, which is usually performed in friendly competition by two women, each trying to outlast the other. In Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune, the director cast a throat singer to preside over a grisly bloodletting and prepare an army for extraterrestrial slaughter. To outside listeners, the guttural tone of throat-singing can sound otherworldly. Tagaq is a maestro of Inuit throat-singing. On Tongues, Tagaq’s fifth studio album, which borrows many of its lyrics from Split Tooth, the line between woman and monster is gossamer-thin.
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