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Wake the Giant Music Festival Goes Live

Organizers of the Wake the Giant music festival say they’ve been really pleased with how ticket sales are progressing for what looks to be Thunder Bay’s first large-scale, live, in-person concert since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The outdoor concert is slated for September 18 along the Thunder Bay northside waterfront, with a lineup featuring

Jessie Reyez, Third Eye Blind, Loud Luxury, William Prince, iskwē, DJ Shub, Northern Cree, and Nick Sherman, along with local jingle dress dancers. The event returns for its second go-around after going on hiatus last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic; this year, organizers say they’re releasing tickets and setting capacity based on current public health rules.

Despite last year’s break, planning for this year’s event went smoothly, says Sean Spenrath, one of the Wake the Giant organizers. “We’ve been super lucky. We booked these [acts] probably like a few months after the 2019 show, and they’ve just kind of stuck it through the entire time,” he says. “The only one that we added was iskwē, because when we tried to book her originally, she was touring in Europe at the time so she couldn’t make that commitment, and then COVID actually freed up her schedule.”

The music festival has quickly become a key part of the whole Wake the Giant initiative—an anti-racism and cultural awareness project aimed at making Thunder Bay a more welcoming and inclusive space for Indigenous people, including the students who come to the city from their communities in order to attend high school. The 2015–2016 inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations students from remote communities who were in the city for their education laid bare the racism many Indigenous people face in Thunder Bay. The festival component, according to organizers, is an opportunity to celebrate inclusivity and the cultures of the region’s Indigenous peoples, and it’s that thrust, Spenrath says, that has allowed it to catch on so quickly.

“People want to support Wake the Giant because of what it stands for,” Spenrath says. “I mean, you have potentially one of Canada’s largest orientation for First Nation youth, you have 300 kids coming here that week to learn about Thunder Bay, to experience Thunder Bay, and then we get to come together as a community, and celebrate them being here, and really make them feel like rock stars too.”

Visit wakethegiant.ca and follow Wake the Giant on Facebook @wakethegiant807.