Jully Black's national anthem change hitting home for Ottawa-area Indigenous leader

When Algonquin Anishinaabe elder Claudette Commanda saw Jully Black's recent rendition of the national anthem, it brought back memories from her childhood.

"I sang the national anthem and I said 'O Canada… on Indian land,'" she said. "The national anthem played on a regular basis, so then my grandfather always said to make sure to say 'on Indian land' because this is on Indian land."

Commanda praised Black for changing one word of the anthem at the NBA All Star Game on Sunday.

Black changed the opening line of "O Canada! Our home and native land!" to "O Canada! Our home on native land," emphasizing the word "on" when she sang.

"She spoke the reality, the truth. Canada is on Native land."

Black said she was surprised by the reactions, both positive and negative.

"This is something I didn't expect to have this much activity around," she said.

She added that she made the decision to alter the lyric carefully.

"I didn't do it without consulting with various people who are in the Indigenous community," she explained.

The lyrics of O Canada have been the subject of debate before. Changing them officially requires an act of parliament, but experts say there is also the matter of free expression.

The official lyrics were most recently changed in 2018 due to the efforts of late Ottawa-area Liberal MP Mauril Belanger, making the line 'in all thy sons command' to the gender-neutral lyric 'in all of us command.'

"The national anthem is protected by an Act. If you want to change the words, you need to amend the act itself," said Frederic Berard, co-director of the National Observatory on Language Rights. "But we have freedom of speech and she has the right to express it."

Black says she isn't sure what, if anything, will come of her decision, but she feels strongly she did the right thing on a very large platform.