Years before Windshear was completed, composer Michael Bussewitz-Quarm encountered a startling scene while traveling through the Great North Woods of New Hampshire. Amid miles of living forest was an enormous swath of destruction: mature trees snapped, uprooted, and thrown across the ground as though some immense force had swept suddenly across the land. There was no sign of fire or logging. A local resident told her that what she had encountered was likely the aftermath of a wind shear. The image stayed with Michael for years.
That experience became connected to another question that had begun occupying her during her travels through northern New England. Names connected to the Abenaki people appeared on rivers, roads, towns, and historical markers throughout the region. Michael began wondering about the people behind those names and why their presence seemed so much less visible than the evidence of their history.
What she learned was not a story of disappearance. European diseases caused catastrophic loss of life among Abenaki communities, followed over generations by warfare, colonial expansion, displacement, and loss of land. Yet Abenaki people, culture, and language endured.
Michael and Shantel Sellers, already friends and creative collaborators, began developing Windshear. It became one of the early collaborations in what would grow into a long-running artistic partnership. Shantel, who is Anishinaabe-kwe, and Michael shaped the work around a cycle of flourishing, sudden destruction, survival, listening, and renewal.
Sung largely in Western Abenaki, Windshear begins in a landscape alive with relationship. The river wanders. The forest breathes. A gentle wind moves through the trees. Rain gives life. Day rejoices and night brings rest.
Then, without warning, a violent wind tears through that world.
Trees are struck and broken. What had seemed permanent is suddenly transformed.
And then comes a single command:
Kita! — Listen!
The violence passes. Stillness returns. Listening becomes the beginning of healing.
The destroyed forest became a metaphor not for a people who vanished, but for what can happen when a living community is subjected to overwhelming forces — and for what may nevertheless survive those forces. That led Michael and Shantel toward another source of hope: the people working to sustain and reclaim Indigenous languages that colonialism had pushed toward silence.
The Western Abenaki language itself became part of that hope within Windshear. Michael and Shantel were assisted by members of the social-media community Western Abenaki – Abénauis de l'Ouest, who helped with translation and pronunciation. They asked not to be individually credited, describing their work as a labor of love, but asked that their teachers and all they had learned from them be acknowledged. They encouraged singers and audiences to study the Abenaki language and help keep it alive.
Windshear ultimately asks what happens after devastation: what remains, what can be heard when the violence has passed, and what human beings can choose to nurture back into life.
Recording Link - Windshear
Years before Windshear was completed, composer Michael Bussewitz-Quarm encountered a startling scene while traveling through the Great North Woods of New Hampshire. Amid miles of living forest was an enormous swath of destruction: mature trees snapped, uprooted, and thrown across the ground as though some immense force had swept suddenly across the land. There was no sign of fire or logging. A local resident told her that what she had encountered was likely the aftermath of a wind shear. The image stayed with Michael for years.
That experience became connected to another question that had begun occupying her during her travels through northern New England. Names connected to the Abenaki people appeared on rivers, roads, towns, and historical markers throughout the region. Michael began wondering about the people behind those names and why their presence seemed so much less visible than the evidence of their history.
What she learned was not a story of disappearance. European diseases caused catastrophic loss of life among Abenaki communities, followed over generations by warfare, colonial expansion, displacement, and loss of land. Yet Abenaki people, culture, and language endured.
Michael and Shantel Sellers, already friends and creative collaborators, began developing Windshear. It became one of the early collaborations in what would grow into a long-running artistic partnership. Shantel, who is Anishinaabe-kwe, and Michael shaped the work around a cycle of flourishing, sudden destruction, survival, listening, and renewal.
Sung largely in Western Abenaki, Windshear begins in a landscape alive with relationship. The river wanders. The forest breathes. A gentle wind moves through the trees. Rain gives life. Day rejoices and night brings rest.
Then, without warning, a violent wind tears through that world.
Trees are struck and broken. What had seemed permanent is suddenly transformed.
And then comes a single command:
Kita! — Listen!
The violence passes. Stillness returns. Listening becomes the beginning of healing.
The destroyed forest became a metaphor not for a people who vanished, but for what can happen when a living community is subjected to overwhelming forces — and for what may nevertheless survive those forces. That led Michael and Shantel toward another source of hope: the people working to sustain and reclaim Indigenous languages that colonialism had pushed toward silence.
The Western Abenaki language itself became part of that hope within Windshear. Michael and Shantel were assisted by members of the social-media community Western Abenaki – Abénauis de l'Ouest, who helped with translation and pronunciation. They asked not to be individually credited, describing their work as a labor of love, but asked that their teachers and all they had learned from them be acknowledged. They encouraged singers and audiences to study the Abenaki language and help keep it alive.
Windshear ultimately asks what happens after devastation: what remains, what can be heard when the violence has passed, and what human beings can choose to nurture back into life.
Recording Link - Windshear
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