Songwriter Christa Couture is an award-winning performing and recording artist, non-fiction writer and broadcaster. She is also proudly Indigenous (Cree and Scandinavian), queer, and a mom. Her seventh album Safe Harbour was released in 2020. Christa is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio and was the weekday afternoon host on Toronto's 106.5 ELMNT FM. 

In this episode, Christa sets out to create a new song that speaks to the harrowing journey the characters face in Cherie Dimaline’s award-winning book "The Marrow Thieves". Inspired by the theme of Indigenous resilience in the book and seeing that play out in the resilient Indigenous people around her she says, “You don’t know if you have resilience unless you need to call on it, unless you are suffering. And then you discover the parts of you that come out to help you survive.”

Métis writer and activist Cherie Dimaline reads excerpts from her book, explaining that it’s important to give Indigenous youth a vision of the future and a hopeful tomorrow. Part of the reason she wrote the book was to empower youth. “I wanted to build a world where they were absolutely everything. Where they were the heroes - where they were exactly what we needed to survive because I honestly believe that. They're heroes, we need them, we desperately need them.”

Part of being resilient is coming together as a community and collaboratively creating things so that all are unified and stronger for it.