WAKAW — Two Saskatchewan artists submitted their work to be part of The Lunar Codex. Nigel Bell, a multiplatform musician from La Ronge, is one of the Indigenous artists already selected to be part of the project. The second, Teagan Littlechief, a singer/songwriter from White Bear First Nation, said that including Indigenous people is another step towards reconciliation.
“The recognition that Indigenous people work so hard every day in their artistic ways and just to be recognized in such a manner is a humble [sic] experience.”
Teagan Littlechief’s name is familiar, not only because she is a rising artist who appeared on the province-wide Telemiracle 2024, but she also sat down with Funky Moose Radio’s Joel Gaudet and Mark Poppin for ‘The Sit Down Podcast -199’ recorded in Bellevue in December 2023. Gaudet and Poppin are the people behind Bellevue’s annual music festival, Moosefest. The podcast which can be viewed on YouTube is the pairs’ effort to bring ‘indie’ Saskatchewan artists, those who produce music without the support of a record label, to listeners’ attention. Littlechief performed three selections for those who attended the filming, A Song We Can Sing To, Vulnerable, and Heartbreak Song all written by a former Saskatchewan songwriter, Sean Hogan. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hILDAtg4Qc8)
Littlechief has been singing and performing since she was five years old, both in private and public. She is open about her past struggle with addictions and took a hiatus from recording to get clean and sober and to free herself from a negative relationship. She came back focusing strongly on her music and is celebrating seven years of sobriety. She has received the SCMA Indigenous Artist Award three years in a row, in 2024 she became the first Indigenous musician to win Female Artist of the Year, and in 2022 was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for Art.
Consistently topping Indigenous music charts and finding success on SiriusXM-Indigiverse, her most successful singles, including “Need You To Go,” “Scar On My Heart,” and “Every Child Matters,” reflect her ability to connect with listeners on a personal and emotional level. The fact that she drove from Carlyle to Bellevue (a five-hour drive), in December, for a one-hour podcast speaks to her belief and desire to connect with rural communities. “I want to start where I am from and branch out from there…small towns are where you build your fans, this is where you meet people,” she said. “I love singing for people and in small communities because not everyone can get to the city…being invited to a smaller community, it’s so much fun.”
The Lunar Codex is a curated archive of cultural works from across the globe, launched from Earth via NASA Artemis. The initiative known as the Artemis Program is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) plan to land humans on the Moon for the first time in over 50 years and establish a permanent base on its surface. NASA's Artemis III manned mission is scheduled to launch in mid-2027. To prepare for this, NASA is launching unmanned missions with lunar landers via rockets developed by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and the United Launch Alliance (ULA). These missions carry NASA’s instruments and commercial payloads, including time capsules that form the Lunar Codex which embodies 250,000 cultural artifacts from over 40,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers representing 261 countries and territories, and 149 Indigenous nations. Essentially, the Lunar Codex is a collection of time capsules… messages in bottles for future generations. It is particularly noteworthy that, alongside the Artemis Program, which aims to land the first woman on the Moon, the Lunar Codex will be the first project to send the works of women artists to the lunar surface.
“Our hope is,” says curator and founder of Incandence Corp, Samuel Peralta, “that future travellers who find these time capsules will discover some of the richness of our world today... It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and climate upheaval, humankind found time to create art, found time to dream.”
When asked to describe the project, Peralta has publicly said The Lunar Codex is a passion project. “It started as a project to spread hope during a dark time - the lockdown, the years of pandemic, a time of economic upheaval, war, the realization that climate change was upon us. It attempts to instill the Moon with some of the heart of humanity, our art so that when we look at the sky, the Moon might become a tangible symbol of hope and of inspiration.”
Since the Lunar Codex does not receive payment, the curators are free to select works that fit the project’s vision. Creators know that their works are selected for their significance to the cultural vision, not because of any payment.
Although still waiting to learn if her song is a part of the project, Littlechief submitted her single Need You To Go, a song about parenting, sobriety and making hard decisions when needed. “I hope that they get a little bit out of my story, that they know that everybody kind of has the same story, but hardships are manageable when we work on it,” she said of the song.
Littlechief said as a little girl she wished to travel outside of Earth and experience the universe to see what is out there. “For me, if this happens ... it would be a dream that I never thought would ever be possible.”
