If you grew up anywhere near Vancouver, you might remember hearing about the classic story of how Raven, a common trickster figure in the area, stole the light and eventually put the Sun in the sky. The Syilx nation, hailing from the Okanagan, however, tends to tell tales about Coyote instead. The idea of a character who often fails, but still wins people over with his charm, was a big inspiration behind the latest set of tunes from Syilx folk-rock singer-songwriter Francis Baptiste.

Titled Sənk̓lip, the Trickster, Baptiste explains the title on his website: “[Coyote’s] desires get him into troubles that are often comedic. And yet the Creator favours him. Syilx children are entertained by his foibles, but they also learn from his mistakes. As Sənk̓lip learns from his failings, so do the Syilx children.”

While you might not find Baptiste’s own foibles particularly comedic, he might disagree. The album takes a deep dive into Baptiste’s journey to recover from addiction and step into the fatherly role that his young son needs. Often describing himself in promotional materials as a “washed-up, divorced recovering addict,” quite a few tracks on the project find Baptiste taking a deep dive into a troubled past with alcoholism, the societal systems that didn’t offer him much help, and striving to move forward into a healthier new life with his supportive partner and son.

Another running theme finds him coping with these things through a trickster-esque sense of humour, since, as he’ll tell you, “Indigenous families tend to joke about a lot of dark shit, because a lot of bad things have happened to us. If you’re not joking about it, then you’re just sitting in the misery of it, I guess. If people can laugh about it, that’s for the best for everybody.”

Of course, the telling of Coyote stories also involves the centuries-old tradition of using narrative tales to pass down knowledge to the younger generations, something that Baptiste is also reflecting with the cover art. It finds him with hands outstretched, seemingly deep into explaining something important to his son, gazing up at him from the bottom right corner. With his son born in East Vancouver, miles away from Baptiste’s upbringing as a part of the Osoyoos Indian Band, he’s been thinking about how to best impart the Indigenous experience to him.

“He’s very disconnected from what I perceived as what it meant to be Indigenous when I was his age. It was entangled with being on the rez – not just that connection to the land and family, but the connection to social struggles,” he says. “There’s kind of an us versus them mentality; leaving the rez made me think it made me a bit of a sell out, living this East Van city boy hipster life. How do I help my son know and understand what his heritage is, and what his people are?”

If you check out Baptiste’s social media feed, you can see one way pretty clearly – Baptiste has a series of videos called the “Nsyilxcən Word of the Day,” where he simultaneously teaches his son and the audience a vocabulary word in his native language – you can see him bounding along behind as they go on a walk together, repeating something like “patáq,” the word for “potato.”

“My son’s in grade four, and they have these open-ended weekly projects, they just give you a word. Two weeks ago, it was ‘fur trade,’ and his idea was to teach his class the names of all the fur trade animals in our language,” Baptiste says. “What impressed me was that he came to his idea on his own. I’m like ‘Oh, you do care!’ Especially with kids, they tend to complain a lot, so you’re not sure how much is actually getting into their brains. But I find that really encouraging, really, heartwarming. That’s kind of the whole point of this album. And it feels like it’s served its purpose, at least in that respect.”

Baptiste’s dedication to preserving his language extends to his music as well. While Sənk̓lip, the Trickster doesn’t have quite as much of the Nsyilxcən language as his previous album, Sneqsilx (Family) – a decision Baptiste made so that the words he does use are more accessible and in context to outsiders – the album does have some scattered words throughout, many in titles and central moments of choruses. With less than 100 fluent speakers left, it’s a mission that Baptiste took up after the passing of his grandmother.

“I’m feeling really optimistic about all the growth I’ve been seeing for the language, and for people being so enthusiastic about picking it up and trying to preserve it, because when I was young, it felt like kind of the opposite!” Baptiste says. “It’s something we took for granted. You’re such an ungrateful little kid, like ‘Why are you making me learn these words that nobody in the world knows?’ Almost like learning Latin, right? ‘There’s no practical use for this!’ It wasn’t until my grandmother died that I realized we’re on the cusp of losing this integral part of our heritage. So, I started taking it a lot more seriously.”

Just like the restoration of the language, Baptiste has a track on Sənk̓lip, the Trickster titled “Work in Progress,” referring to his work in recovery from alcoholism. He’s definitely a little hard on himself in the song, but in simply having the courage to acknowledge himself so publicly as a work in progress, he’s probably farther ahead than most people trying to work on parts of themselves. Baptiste has often kept vigilant on online “Sobriety Diaries,” something that he says is a major catalyst for that progress.

“It adds a layer of social accountability – anytime I run into anybody, people are like, ‘Hey, are you still doing that sober thing?’ The more open you are about it, the more it kind of solidifies in your mind that this is what you’re doing,” he says. “It’s almost like a public oath. I think addiction thrives in secrecy. My partner is very anti-drug, anti-alcohol, and a big part of me trying to make that relationship work was deceiving my friends and family and my partner, not being honest with how often I was using or how often I was drinking.”

For all the tumultuous road to getting Sənk̓lip, the Trickster released, Baptiste is actually already well on the way to getting another one finished. In addition to Baptiste’s personal struggles, you can tell why he calls the album’s creation a “nightmare” when he tells stories of the debts of coming from the kind of place he did and trying to make it work as a musician. You could often find him busking on Granville Island.

“You get a lot of sympathy tips, because people can see how cold you are,” he says. “I had all these credit card debts and one of the credit card companies got legal access to my bank account, which I didn’t even know they could do. I had funding for the album, and then Visa came and took 10 grand from my bank account. It was just like, gone overnight. So, what should have taken a month to do took 12 months or something. It was very piecemeal, bit by bit.”

Now, Baptiste has already recorded his third studio album, and is just waiting on the mixing and mastering. He credits the process of creating Sənk̓lip the “ultimate learning lesson,” giving him motivation to get the pre-planning, accounting, and everything else in his life in order so he can get it done “as painlessly as possible.” Whether using music as a personal outlet or a small help to save the Nsyilxcən language, it makes sense that he names “How Turtle Freed the Animals” as his favourite Syilx story – the message is, essentially, follow your dreams, and Baptiste is putting in a lot of work to do so.

The gist: an authoritarian eagle exercises his dominion over the other animals of the land, so Turtle challenges him to a race, after being inspired to do so by one of his dreams. Turtle outsmarts Eagle by devising a race that he could win, and Eagle agrees to Turtle’s terms that he would free the animals if he lost.

“I try to ask my son every morning what he dreamt about,” he says. We try to be cognizant of it, because your mind communicates with you in a way. A lot of the things that are happening are happening subconsciously, and the dream world is where you connect to that deeper way of seeing, that your conscious mind doesn’t necessarily pick up on. It’s the story that he took to the most, it’s got a clear moral – listen to your gut.”