Award-winning two-spirit Cree composer and cellist Cris Derksen, who performed across Canada including with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, has died in a car crash at the age of 45.
Derkson, originally from Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta, was known for her genre-defying blending of old and new, bringing together her classical music training and Indigenous heritage with electronic music elements.
In a statement on social media, Derkson’s booking agency AIM paid tribute to Derkson and her legacy after her death in a car accident on Saturday.
“To know Cris was to know a force of nature. She was fiercely authentic and deeply generous,” the statement reads.
“Her art was a reflection of her soul: poignant, powerful, grounded in heritage, and relentlessly innovative,” the agency said.
In Toronto, she was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to create “celebration preludes” for the 2021-22 season to highlight the orchestra’s connection to the city.
Derkson was nominated for a Juno for instrumental album of the year in 2016 and an Indigenous Music Award in 2017.
She won a Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award for her work on the podcast ”Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” where journalist Connie Walker investigated her father’s time at a residential school, revealing a larger story on the abuse of hundreds of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada.
“My extraordinary, gifted, radiant, cherished niece Cris may have left us prematurely, but her profound legacy and enchanting music will perpetually uplift me,” her aunt Theresa Johnson wrote in a post on Facebook.
”There has to be a divine purpose why I had to bid farewell to her merely a week after laying my brother Bernie, her dad, to rest,” she said.
In a post on social media, University of Manitoba assistant music professor Melody McKiver, described Derkson as “a pillar of our Indigenous classical community.”
She said the crash occurred while Derkson and her wife were leaving the funeral of Derkson’s father.
