Miesha and the Spanks bring healing through songwriting

Miesha Louie is a mixed Secwépemc singer/guitarist, the high-powered frontwoman of the duo Miesha and The Spanks.

Louie’s special brand of honest songwriting brings together post-punk, dreams, garage rock and healing.

Louie writes most of the lyrics, collaborating on arrangement and instrumentally with percussionist Sean Hamilton and producers.

The duo’s latest album, Unconditional Love In Hi-Fi, has been nominated for the 2024 Western Canadian Music Awards in three categories including Break Out Artist of the Year and Rock Artist of the Year. Also, their music video So Mad is up for Best Video Director.

“There was so much of identity in this album and how to unconditionally love yourself and all of your experiences,” Louie said. “And so that's where that title came from.” 

Miesha and the Spanks have been touring all summer, from the International Indigenous Music Summit in Toronto, 2Rivers Remix moveable feast in British Columbia, Run As One/ Siksika Nation Pow Wow in Alberta to Folk On The Rocks in Yellowknife.

She’s also busy with BAM! Building Allied Music, an inclusive rock camp for teens in Calgary. 

Growing up, Louie was always performing, playing guitar since she was 11. She was in a high school punk band, performing at community centres and booking bands from Calgary.

“Once those bigger bands started coming, I saw that that was something that you could do for real, not just in your town,” Louie said. “I was on that path. One hunderd per cent, I was in for music.”

Sharing her story and life experiences through song has “opened all of these doors to that culture that I've been missing and wanting my whole life. I found that in the Indigenous music community.” 

Louie knew her Kinbasket family’s history of joining the Ktunaxa Nation. Living off reserve, and away from her larger family, created some disconnect.

Her Secwépemc father had “a harsher childhood, where I think he needed to make that separation for his safety, and I think he thought for mine.” The lyrics to Mixed Blood Girls explain, “I lived on stories instead.”

Performing at 2Rivers Remix at Tk̓emlúps, brought a deep recognition of the Secwepemc’u’lecw, her ancestral lands. “These hills look like home,” Louie said. “I was so blown away by how familiar the land looked.”

The 2Rivers Remix festival was “so warm, and really wanted me to bring my kids,” Louie said. “That was a really special one for me, I got to get my kids involved not only in what I do, but with where they're from.”

With Knowledge Keepers, Elders, hoop dancers and bear dancers, the festival holds a strong core of culture. Her sons are almost five years old, and Louie knows “this will stand out to them. They're still talking about the bear dancers.”

Louie’s twin boys have bear stories intertwined with their birth, and the grandfather who passed before they were born.

“When I was pregnant with my boys, I was having these bear dreams,” Louie said, adding a female grizzly was trying to tell her something in specific locations.

One was a ridge her father had taken the family to often. And the other was the river her prospector father Arthur Louie would stop to call her mom from.

“The last voicemail that he left her was from this river,” Louie said. “And he was talking about the river and ‘I'll see you soon.’”

In 2005, he was leaving a claim, heading home, when “he had a flat tire about seven kilometers outside of the camp. Not a big jaunt back for him to get back to the camp, but he ended up between grizzly sow and her two cubs. And he didn't survive that.”

Louie didn't know at the time about the Secwépemc belief that twins are “bear children,” and come from Grizzly.

“I learned about the twins and the gift from Grizzly, and I was like ‘Wow, this idea is enough to help me reconcile this grief,’” Louie said. “Imagine that these beautiful kids I'm carrying are a gift, an apology … maybe apology is the wrong word, but the cycle of things.

“It made me feel better about it, and it made me feel like they were connected to my dad as well. Just such a mythology to that, a different type of story.”

For her that meant songwriting, so she took time to “piece together the music, the tone, the words.”

The song that emerged was Bear Kids, a song of great beauty and power – so much that Louie wasn’t sure if she could sing it. The result is partly spoken word, except from the choruses, with language incorporated with support from language teachers at the Chief Atahm School, where Louie took an online class.

…she said to me

Me7 kecstin tek stem

I will give you something

When Siksika dancer Sherry Woods brought a jingle dance into the recording studio for Bear Kids, things shifted for Louie.

“The whole thing felt like a ritual, like a healing ceremony and really finished it off for me,” she said. “And I haven't had an angry chip on my shoulder from my grief since then. Of course, I still miss my father and there's a residual grief that I think will always be there. But there's a much more positive light to it and there's some joy there now.

“I am not great at talking about what I'm going through, what I'm feeling, and I'm definitely someone who pushes things aside or inward.”

Dig Me Out was written to process the news of the first 215 unmarked graves at T’kemlups and her grandmother surviving that “school.” All proceeds of the song are donated to the Indian Residential School Survivors’ Society.

“For some reason when I am writing in music, I can actually express those things,” she said. “So, it is a natural way that I songwrite. That's just kind of how I've always done it. And when I try not to, I always feel like it's not as valuable of a song, because I’m not as close to it.”

Part of her process includes “a lot of my own inner critiquing and editing and stuff before I even share it with my drummer.”

That includes considering family. “I did share a lot with my sister and my mom before I did anything with Bear Kids - to be aware that this is what I'm writing about,” she said. “And this might feel hard to hear sometimes. We are all still grieving.” 

For Louie, her creative self and spiritual self “are definitely intertwined,” she said. “I think I have to access that in order to do so much of my writing … because it's my connection to myself, and so that is how I write.”

Louie sees artists and musicians as having a significant role, “especially in a society like this where everything is the grind and people are pushed to their limits every day. Everybody needs a release, and not everybody is artistic, so they have to tune into some kind of art … unwinding people and helping them recentre.

“Music is meditative, whether you want it to be or not, whether that's your intention, listening to it. I think art keeps people sane, especially in a world that pushes us to be so insane.”

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Miesha and the Spanks’ website is at https://mieshaandthespanks.net/

Upcoming performances includes:

Luna Sound Festival, Revelstoke, BC, Sept 20.

Breakout West Awards Afterparty, Amigos, Saskatoon, Sept. 27.

National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Oct. 4.