Celeigh Cardinal

When Celeigh Cardinal was just four years old, she was performing in front of large audiences at her church, drawn in by the joy she saw on the faces of those watching from the pews. For Cardinal, it was an early glimpse of music’s power to heal — though at the time, she also felt a quiet shyness and shame, rooted in her disconnection from her own Indigenous heritage. 

Today, that healing power of music is reflected in her own journey. Cardinal is now as confident and strong as the voice that resonates on stages across Europe, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Dubai, the United States, and Canada.

She is known for writing and performing soul-searing songs that speak to love, loss and resilience, and has earned multiple awards, including a 2020 Juno Award for Indigenous Artist of the Year for her album, Stories from a Downtown Apartment. 

Early in her music career, she found that most hosts viewed Indigenous music through a stereotypical lens as a narrow genre with no room for individuality.

Since starting her singing and songwriting career full-time in 2016, Cardinal has helped change that perception. A few years into her career, while attending a music residency run by Manitoba Music, she met and built a community with other Indigenous artists doing similar work. It was a life-changing moment.

That community helped her reclaim her identity — something lost through intergenerational trauma caused by her family’s experience with the Sixties Scoop. That sense of connection carried into her own work: between 2020 and 2022, Cardinal hosted a CKUA radio show called Full Circle where she highlighted Indigenous performers across a variety of genres.

Next year, she’ll be releasing her fourth full-length album, and on November 28, she’ll release her first-ever Christmas album, A Very Celeigh Cardinal Christmas, at Festival Place. 

celeighcardinal.com