Originally published in the Bird’s Eye

There’s a genre of music you’ve probably never heard before, and it’s coming to Quadra on July 16.

Morgan Toney calls it Mi’kmaltic — a word he coined himself, built from Mi’kmaq and Celtic, that describes exactly what he does and who he is. Toney is Mi’kmaq, a proud member of the Wagmatcook First Nation on Cape Breton Island, and he grew up surrounded by two musical traditions that have shared the same East Coast shoreline for centuries: the fiery, relentless fiddle music that defines his island home, and the ancient songs, stories, and language of his own people, the L’nuk. For most of history, those two traditions have run alongside each
other, each intact and separate. What Toney has spent his career doing is something genuinely different — bringing them into direct conversation, not as a novelty act or a fusion experiment, but as a natural expression of a life that has always belonged to both. The genre he’s made is called Mi’kmaltic because that’s what it is: Mi’kmaq and Celtic, woven together at the root. It sounds exactly as rich and alive as that combination suggests.