Aysanabee
Canadian Oji-Cree singer-songwriter
Aysanabee is an Oji-Cree singer-songwriter from Canada, whose debut album Watin was released in 2022.
Background
A member of the Sandy Lake First Nation, he was born Evan Pang, with a non-inherited surname his mother chose in an attempt to protect him from anti-indigenous racism by portraying him to the community as Asian instead of indigenous, and raised in Kaministiquia, Ontario, outside of Thunder Bay. He reclaimed his grandfather's surname, Aysanabee, as an adult. He worked for a mining company as a teenager, later studying journalism and working as a digital content creator for CTV News.
He played in various bands as a sideline, and began actively creating his own original music as an outlet during the COVID-19 pandemic. He submitted his music to the International Indigenous Music Summit after making enough money on a cryptocurrency trade to cover the submission fee. He was the first outside artist signed to Ishkōdé Records, a new label launched in 2021 by singer-songwriter Amanda Rheaume and ShoShonna Kish of the band Digging Roots.
Career
Watin was released November 4, 2022. Named for his grandfather's first name, the album features several recordings of his grandfather, recorded in phone conversations during the pandemic, as spoken interludes. The album was preceded by the single "Nomads", which reached #1 on the CBC Music Top 20 and charted on the Canadian rock radio airplay charts, reaching #1 on the Alternative Rock chart in March 2023 and becoming the first indigenous Canadian artist ever to top that chart.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Aysanabee” is canadian Oji-Cree singer-songwriter. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Aysanabee, Canadian and Oji-Cree, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q115485165. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2021 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aysanabee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.