Ribbon Skirt’s ‘Bite Down’ Is Irresistible Indigenous Futurism – Exclaim!

Apr 11, 2025

“They want 2000s Buffy Marie / They want my status, but they’re getting my teeth,” Tashiina Buswa intones, talk-singing so deadpan you can practically hear her rolling her eyes. This happens within the first minute of “Off Rez,” the third track from Ribbon Skirt’s debut album Bite Down, a post-punk record honouring the Anishinaabe experience.

Unsurprisingly, the genre is the perfect vehicle for all that seethes beneath the already-fraught surface of being Indigenous. Buffy Sainte-Marie — who was recently stripped of her Order of Canada, JUNO awards and Polaris Music Prizes after the 2023 CBC investigation into her ancestry — is perhaps likewise an expected citation, the singer-songwriter and activist’s fall from being an idealistic model of Indigeneity speaking to the way everything we feel made to conform to is, in fact, made up.

Like many of us born on this stolen land, I have an embodied understanding of a nervous system steadfast in its dedication to fight, flight, freeze or fawn, despite having grown up unaware of my own Indigenous ancestry and incredibly far-removed from the culture of the community to which I am connected by blood. The Sainte-Marie news cycle sits on my chest, endlessly looping the question of whether it’s all more helpful or harmful in the end.