Francis Baptiste — Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity, spelling, and readability. Music excerpts are noted where they appear in the episode.

Cold open

Francis Baptiste: Wife, son, family, house, car, mortgage, payments, you know, all that kind of thing. And then to be like mid-30s and realize like, “Oh, I gotta kind of start all over,” was very kind of devastating. And music was the only thing at the time that could kind of pull me out of it, I think.

Music clip: “In the immortal world” Francis Baptiste “I’m barely surviving here” “The inescapable” “Rising cost of living” “And threatening me of my humanity” “And I’m hoping for” “A little more”

Eric Chan: I’m Eric Chan, and you’re listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists. For Francis Baptiste, music did not just come back into his life. It also brought him back to language, family, and heritage.

Francis Baptiste: So about six or seven years ago, I started playing music again. I returned to playing music and left my career in e-commerce and found that it was a very good change. In the end, a good change for my mental health and for my life.

I think the whole process of shifting gears was very painful because it accompanied the end of my marriage, and then a couple years of really challenging single-father years. Plus, I’d become a musician full-time, which meant I had very little income. So Ben and I were very poor, and I was struggling a lot with substance abuse and alcoholism and stuff like that.

And luckily, though, I feel pretty good and healthy, and with the support of my loving partner, Brittany, everything is kind of working out these days.

But for someone like me, who always used substances to deal with emotions, I found that music was really the only positive, non-substance way for me to work through my feelings and work through my depression. And I think you can hear it a lot on the first and second album. It really helped me, I think.

Music clip: “If I’m screaming” “I’m just dreaming” “Another day that I don’t hate this life” “Don’t try to save me if I’m drowning” “I’m just clowning”

Eric Chan: For Francis, coming back to music was only part of it. The songs were changing too.

Francis Baptiste: Yeah, a couple things. I mean, I’ve kind of had a little more perspective in terms of choosing what I want to talk about. I think when you’re younger, and especially because I used to play in a lot of bands in my early 20s and my teens, you tend to write things stream-of-consciousness. You’re just like, whatever angsty thing you’re feeling, or you’re mad about some breakup or whatever, and you write a song about it.

Nowadays, I feel like I have the benefit of choosing what’s important to me, especially through these tough years, having to reevaluate what my values are and what’s important to me. And one of those things was my heritage, my Indigenous heritage.

I’m from the Osoyoos Indian Band, and my father’s from the Osoyoos Indian Band. My mother’s from the Penticton Indian Band. So I grew up on the rez at the Osoyoos Indian Band, or OIB as we call it. And I’ve lived here in East Vancouver for about 21 years. So I’ve been kind of removed from my community, removed from that kind of rez culture. By choice, I mean, I came here to go to school, and then I met someone and got married and had a kid, and life just kind of tumbles that way.

But realizing, especially after the death of my grandma and the birth of my son, family is very important, and heritage is very important, and understanding where you come from is really important.

Music clip: “Not trade suffering any day” “Trade a heartache for a hangover” “There ain’t no aspirin for your soul” “Oh no, ain’t no fixin’ what’s been broke” “Not trade suffering any day”

Eric Chan: And over time, the songs started carrying something else too: heritage, language, and the question of what gets passed on.

Francis Baptiste: So around the time that my grandmother died, and my son was learning how to speak, I realized it was really important that I reconnect with that part of myself. I started to try to learn the Okanagan language, which is called Nsyilxcən.

Very few people know how to speak it. My parents didn’t speak it. My parents’ generation in general didn’t really speak it, mostly due to residential schools. The last fluent speaker was my grandmother, Leonie Tacan, and she was very near and dear to me. It was her passing, and attending her funeral, where the constant theme was the loss of language and loss of culture through loss of language, and how these ripples of residential school are still affecting us. We have a lot of work to do to reverse the harm that’s been done.

Eric Chan: For Francis, it did not stop at reconnecting. It became something to pass on.

Francis Baptiste: Just how selfishly I’ve lived my life in a sense — you’re just doing your own thing, building your own family, building your own path, and not really thinking about the community, not really thinking about heritage or my parents’ legacy or my grandparents’ legacy or anything like that.

I mean, even my name — I’m named after my grandfather, Francis Baptiste, who was an artist and a rodeo man — and thinking like I kind of owe this to my lineage, to try to preserve things.

And so I started incorporating bits of the language into songs as a way to teach it to myself, teach it to my son, and also to kind of document it. So that even after I’m dead and gone, there’ll be bits of this language in these songs, and hopefully future generations of Osoyoos Indian Band kids can listen to these songs and be like, “Oh, that’s Uncle Francis, Grandpa Francis,” and now it’s kind of solidified this little bit of the language.

Music transition

Eric Chan: And once he knew what he wanted to carry, the next question was how to shape it into song.

Francis Baptiste: Basically, I have language tutors back home. Shout out to my buddy Levi Bent, who’s younger than me and took a couple years to focus his energy on learning the language. And now he’s one of a few fluent speakers.

I’ll write a short poem, basically, and send it to Levi and ask him to translate it. He’ll translate it, and then he’ll send me back audio files, like voice memos on his phone. So he’ll send me the written part and the voice memos, and then I’ll spend a couple of weeks practicing it, basically, just to learn it.

Because my language level is still very beginner. It’s very difficult. There are not a lot of resources. Plus I’m 41, and it’s hard to find time to learn a dead language. [laughs]

Eric Chan: And one song in particular stayed close to all of this.

Francis Baptiste: The first song from the first album, which is called Snəqsilx (sneh-silk), which translates loosely to “family” or “relations,” has always been really important to me, and has always been the centerpiece of my performance because it was the first song that started this whole journey of learning the language.

And the lyrics to the song are basically just a vocabulary list. It’s like brother, cousin, father or parents, grandparents. It’s like teaching your child the family tree. So it’s been a really good educational tool for myself and my son.

And I don’t know, it just has a special place in my heart because it kind of reminds me of home, reminds me of my family.

Eric Chan: For him, these songs are not only about the present.

Francis Baptiste: It’s funny, it’s a process. I feel like I’m really comfortable using music as a documentation tool, and I want to continue doing that. I was talking with my son about it, actually, and talking to my partner about how I kind of imagine each album as a snapshot of my life that year.

And I’d like to think that in 100 years, someone will be like, “What was it like being Indigenous in Canada in 2025?” And they’ll be able to listen to this and read the liner notes and be like, “Oh, well, this is this particular man’s Indigenous experience in this country.” So I try to keep everything kind of mindful of the context.

Eric Chan: And that was Francis Baptiste. I’m Eric Chan, and you’ve been listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

Outro music