Atticus Mercredi is the vocalist for local psych-punk band Prophecy Club, who released their five-song EP called Mushum (Cree for grandfather) on Jan. 1.
“My sister was showing me pictures of my family members that I hadn’t seen before, and there’s a picture of my mushum Harvey, and he’s holding my mom, and he’s leaning against his car and he looks really cool. He’s got the greaser haircut, so I thought that would be a really good cover,” Mercredi said.
Prophecy Club grew out of a previous visual arts project by Mercredi about his mother at The View Gallery at Vancouver Island University. When he got funding for a second project, he was jamming with his friends and decided to make the next project based around music.
“I just felt compelled to do some angry Indigenous political music,” he said.
Mercredi said the song P.O.B.G. (Pissed Off Brown Guy) “wrote itself pretty quickly for me because I have experienced a lot of racism in my life. I grew up in a small farming town around little farm kids and they were all pretty racist towards me, so I was just using that as motivation. I’m yelling at them almost.”
Another song that didn’t make the EP was one about Colten Boushie and Tina Fontiane “who were both murdered by white people” Mercredi said.
When Boushie — a 22-year-old Cree man — was killed in 2016 in Saskatchewan, and the farmer who shot him was later found not guilty of second degree murder and manslaughter, Mercredi was living in Saskatoon.
“There was a lot of outrage and I was angry. It was around the time of the Idle No More movement and there were a lot of marches happening. That’s when I became more politically aware, because back then I was drinking a lot so I didn’t pay too much attention. But when things started really happening, that’s when I would go to the protests, I would read articles,” he said.
Mercredi grew up with white adoptive parents, who said he considers his real family, after being taken away from his biological mother by the province when he was born.
When he spoke at the Indigenous Takeover of Making Waves at the Nanaimo Art Gallery last fall, Prophecy Club performed a song called Indian Agent.
“It’s about two kids running away from home to get away from an Indian agent, and they don’t see their mom again. That would be almost about social services in a way,” Mercredi said.
“Kids get taken away from their parents all the time, it still happens.”
Mercredi said he’s still affected by inter-generational trauma but feels fortunate to have been able to ground himself and receive help to quit drinking six years ago.
“There’s a lot of people that are my age that I knew in my 20s that are kind of just gone now because they couldn’t get it together,” he said.
While the band went through some early line-up changes it is currently Mercredi on vocals, Mark Sequeira and Dave Proctor on guitar, Gabe Beneteau on drums and Atana Mae on bass.
Mercredi said that the positive reception for the band has been surprising.
“I was just trying to get a message out through the EP, but then people wanted us to open for them, or play shows in other cities.”
When Prophecy Club recently played a show in Victoria, Mercredi wasn’t sure how they would be received.
“When we went to an entirely different community where people didn’t know who we were as people or what the music sounded like, they all loved it. So, that was a huge relief. Everyone was super into it.”
The band plans to record and put out a full-length album in the future. The Mushum EP is currently only available on Bandcamp.
