We Spoke with Beatrice Deer
About Strength, Vulnerability,
Inuit Legend, and Rewriting Trauma Through Music
About Strength, Vulnerability,
Inuit Legend, and Rewriting Trauma Through Music
Trauma is louder today than ever before, but not necessarily deeper. It’s discussed in interviews, turned into storytelling, packaged into visuals and short formats where pain has to register in three seconds. At the same time, the data points to a much larger scale. According to the World Health Organization, around 970 million people worldwide are living with mental health disorders, and levels of anxiety and depression have increased by tens of percent in recent years. Research from the American Psychological Association shows that up to 70% of people experience some form of trauma at least once in their lives. This isn’t a niche topic or a passing trend. It’s the baseline most audiences are living in.
The problem is that the public conversation around trauma often stops at the point of acknowledgment
The pain is named, the story is told, there’s a sense of catharsis, and that’s where it ends. But there’s a real distance between talking about trauma and actually working through it. Psychological research, including findings from the National Institute of Mental Health, consistently shows that revisiting traumatic experiences without a safe process of integration can reinforce symptoms rather than reduce them. In simple terms, telling the story is one thing. Not living inside it anymore is something else.
Within that context, music has moved far beyond being just an emotional outlet.
For some artists, it becomes a way to structure experience, not only personal but collective. This is especially visible when the work engages not just individual emotion, but cultural memory, where trauma is not a single event but an ongoing condition shaping identity.
For some artists, it becomes a way to structure experience, not only personal but collective. This is especially visible when the work engages not just individual emotion, but cultural memory, where trauma is not a single event but an ongoing condition shaping identity.
This is where Beatrice Deer operates on a different level. Her album Inuit Legend doesn’t aim to simply tell stories in the conventional sense. It takes folklore, personal experience, and contemporary reality and builds a new language out of them, one that is not archival or decorative, but active and functional. The legends are not preserved as artifacts. They are used as a way to speak about the present, about violence, survival, vulnerability, and the decision not to remain defined by them.
To understand how that actually works in practice, we spoke with Beatrice Deer about strength, vulnerability, and what it means to not just tell a story, but reshape it. In her case, these ideas come from lived experience, from cultural memory, and from a very deliberate refusal to stay defined by trauma.
What makes her perspective compelling is not just the subject matter, but the clarity with which she speaks about it. There’s no attempt to soften or aestheticize the experience. Instead, she frames vulnerability as something active, something that allows movement forward rather than keeping you stuck in the past. Across the conversation, that tension between pain and agency becomes the central thread, one she returns to again and again, whether she’s talking about heritage, survival, or the process of making music itself.
— Your album is largely about female strength and survival. How do you personally understand that strength — is it about resilience, resistance,
or the right to be vulnerable?
Beatrice Deer: I come from a long line of resilient, self-reliant, self-sufficient women who made their own clothing for themselves and for others around them in order to survive the harshest environments on earth. That mentality, creativity and ingenuity is ingrained in us as Inuit. We as Inuit have endured colonisation, and tremendous amounts of grief from losses stemming from intergenerational trauma because of colonisation and yet we still get up, and we move forward through our difficulties, still providing and nurturing those around us. The only way to heal is to be vulnerable about our pain, to talk about them to people we trust so the shrapnels from our childhood traumas within us can come out and stop cutting us inside.
— On Inuit Legend, you don’t just retell traditional stories — you essentially rewrite them through your personal experience and modern themes like violence and survival. At what point did you realize these legends could be used not just as heritage, but as a language to talk about your own experience?
Beatrice Deer: It happened organically. I didn’t really have a plan on making the songs about my own personal experiences. I just did what naturally came to me. My people have survived extreme weather, famine, colonisation, violence. I have survived violence in all forms, extreme weather at times, colonisation, depression, and hopefully I’ll survive from Trump.
— Many female artists today speak about trauma and violence through music. For you, is that more of an act of release, or a risk of reliving those experiences every time you perform the song?
Beatrice Deer: It’s an act of resistance, defiance and freedom from trauma and violence. I’ve lived through trauma after trauma in my 43 years of life but I refuse to wither in sorrow and instead chose to live life to the fullest, as cliche as it sounds. Life is meant to be lived and with purpose.
— There’s a sense of calm on the surface of your music, but underneath it are quite heavy themes. Is that a conscious choice — to speak about difficult things softly — or is that your natural way of dealing with them?
Beatrice Deer: I think it’s my natural way of dealing with pain and trauma. I’m a healing workshop facilitator and I also teach grief-support training. With many years of therapy and counselling, I’ve learned to be tender with my self with my pain so that’s what I teach others.
— How does working with these themes affect your mental state during the creative process? Is there a point where making music stops being therapeutic and starts becoming draining?
Beatrice Deer: Making music with these themes is healing for me and not draining at all. It’s a release me so it feels good. It also allows listeners to see that we can and we should talk about heavy subjects. It’s not easy but it’s certainly necessary at times if we want peace.
— When deeply personal stories about trauma and survival become part of a public release, what changes for you? Does it still feel like your story, or does it start to belong to other women who hear themselves in your music?
Beatrice Deer: I know that my story can help someone who’s struggling so that’s what gives me the courage to be vulnerable publicly. If more people were able to be open up about their trauma and be vulnerable, the world would be a more peaceful place.The songs are my stories but many women (and men) come to me to tell me that they relate to my songs and that the songs help through difficult times in their life.
In the end, this is the distinction that’s easy to miss. There’s a difference between a culture that is learning to talk about trauma and one that is learning how to work with it. In Deer’s case, music doesn’t fix pain in place or turn it into an aesthetic object. It gives it a form that allows engagement without collapse. It’s less performative than the familiar emotional peak, but far more honest, and that may be what actually matters in this conversation.
What makes her perspective compelling is not just the subject matter, but the clarity with which she speaks about it. There’s no attempt to soften or aestheticize the experience. Instead, she frames vulnerability as something active, something that allows movement forward rather than keeping you stuck in the past. Across the conversation, that tension between pain and agency becomes the central thread, one she returns to again and again, whether she’s talking about heritage, survival, or the process of making music itself.
— Your album is largely about female strength and survival. How do you personally understand that strength — is it about resilience, resistance,
or the right to be vulnerable?
Beatrice Deer: I come from a long line of resilient, self-reliant, self-sufficient women who made their own clothing for themselves and for others around them in order to survive the harshest environments on earth. That mentality, creativity and ingenuity is ingrained in us as Inuit. We as Inuit have endured colonisation, and tremendous amounts of grief from losses stemming from intergenerational trauma because of colonisation and yet we still get up, and we move forward through our difficulties, still providing and nurturing those around us. The only way to heal is to be vulnerable about our pain, to talk about them to people we trust so the shrapnels from our childhood traumas within us can come out and stop cutting us inside.
— On Inuit Legend, you don’t just retell traditional stories — you essentially rewrite them through your personal experience and modern themes like violence and survival. At what point did you realize these legends could be used not just as heritage, but as a language to talk about your own experience?
Beatrice Deer: It happened organically. I didn’t really have a plan on making the songs about my own personal experiences. I just did what naturally came to me. My people have survived extreme weather, famine, colonisation, violence. I have survived violence in all forms, extreme weather at times, colonisation, depression, and hopefully I’ll survive from Trump.
— Many female artists today speak about trauma and violence through music. For you, is that more of an act of release, or a risk of reliving those experiences every time you perform the song?
Beatrice Deer: It’s an act of resistance, defiance and freedom from trauma and violence. I’ve lived through trauma after trauma in my 43 years of life but I refuse to wither in sorrow and instead chose to live life to the fullest, as cliche as it sounds. Life is meant to be lived and with purpose.
— There’s a sense of calm on the surface of your music, but underneath it are quite heavy themes. Is that a conscious choice — to speak about difficult things softly — or is that your natural way of dealing with them?
Beatrice Deer: I think it’s my natural way of dealing with pain and trauma. I’m a healing workshop facilitator and I also teach grief-support training. With many years of therapy and counselling, I’ve learned to be tender with my self with my pain so that’s what I teach others.
— How does working with these themes affect your mental state during the creative process? Is there a point where making music stops being therapeutic and starts becoming draining?
Beatrice Deer: Making music with these themes is healing for me and not draining at all. It’s a release me so it feels good. It also allows listeners to see that we can and we should talk about heavy subjects. It’s not easy but it’s certainly necessary at times if we want peace.
— When deeply personal stories about trauma and survival become part of a public release, what changes for you? Does it still feel like your story, or does it start to belong to other women who hear themselves in your music?
Beatrice Deer: I know that my story can help someone who’s struggling so that’s what gives me the courage to be vulnerable publicly. If more people were able to be open up about their trauma and be vulnerable, the world would be a more peaceful place.The songs are my stories but many women (and men) come to me to tell me that they relate to my songs and that the songs help through difficult times in their life.
In the end, this is the distinction that’s easy to miss. There’s a difference between a culture that is learning to talk about trauma and one that is learning how to work with it. In Deer’s case, music doesn’t fix pain in place or turn it into an aesthetic object. It gives it a form that allows engagement without collapse. It’s less performative than the familiar emotional peak, but far more honest, and that may be what actually matters in this conversation.
