Weekend Warrior: Empowering Indigenous people is ACCESS operations director Blair Bellerose‘s jam

ACCESS executive and musician Blair Bellerose goes by the stage name Midnight Sparrows and centres his songs on Indigenous empowerment

Blair Bellerose has been performing in bands since he was a kid in junior high. But the first time he took the stage as Midnight Sparrows, it was just him and his guitar in front of 100 people at the Legion in Prince George.

“It’s not uncommon for people to get up on stage with just an acoustic guitar and do songs, but that’s not me. That’s not the type of artist I am. I’m a hard rocker. So I got up there with my electric guitar and my heavy, distorted guitar sound, and I just played the songs as they were written,” Bellerose says. “It was great.”

Midnight Sparrows is a solo project in the sense that Bellerose is the singer, songwriter and lead guitarist. But it’s also a collective in that he’s supported by session players on an ad hoc basis. As a result, the band’s music is a culmination of Bellerose’s creative influences since childhood: it combines elements of classic rock, power pop and old-school heavy metal.

Growing up in St. Albert, Alberta, a young, shy Bellerose could be spotted jamming to the tunes of Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest in Iron Maiden T-shirts. He first picked up the guitar at 11 years old, and while the bands that he’s played in since—Death by Slinky in high school and Sol 3 as an adult—nurtured his love for guitar, it wasn’t until he started writing and singing his own songs (“just for the sake of being creative,” he says) that he realized he had more than enough material to make an album.

“That’s when I made Midnight Sparrows’ first album.”

He released Rock & Roll City in 2020 and Born in the City two years later. Both albums reflect Bellerose’s life as an urban Indigenous person: on the second album’s eponymous song, he explains, “it talks about how I’m Indigenous, but I was born in the city, and that does not take away from my Indigenous Indigeneity.”

I was born in the city

Do you think that I’d be better off dead?

Like all them Hollywood Injuns

With feathers on their heads

Bellerose supports his community both creatively and tangibly: as the director of operations for the Aboriginal Community Career Employment Services Society (ACCESS), Bellerose plays an instrumental role in helping urban Indigenous people build skills and find work in Metro Vancouver. He first got involved with ACCESS as director of employment services shortly after it was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2002. Now, with a team of 45 and five offices across Metro Vancouver, the organization provides employment and training programs and services, including resources for job seekers, career counselling and funding for skills.

ACCESS operations director Blair Bellerose
Photo by Laura Baldwinson

After 13 years with ACCESS, Bellerose left to pursue a master’s degree in urban studies from SFU in 2015. That experience helped him create “Man on the Mountaintop,” one of his favourite tracks from Rock & Roll City. The album was later nominated for the Native American Music Awards.

“There are elements of that song that are really about loneliness, but also sacrifice and the pursuit of higher knowledge,” he says.

He’s the man on the mountaintop

Well he lives on his own

Sometimes people come to visit him

But then they go home

In 2019, Bellerose started recording his music. He also served stints at Indigenous Services Canada (where he worked on urban programming for Indigenous people) and Lu’ma Development Management (where he worked on affordable housing projects with Indigenous organizations and communities). In 2023, he circled back to ACCESS and stepped into his current role.

Meanwhile, the COVID pandemic delayed his ability to perform live. Despite the album release and NAMA nomination, it wasn’t until that solo show in Prince George in 2022 that Bellerose got to interact with an audience in person. And last summer, Midnight Sparrows made its first appearance as a full band at the Roxy Cabaret in Vancouver.

This April, ACCESS co-hosted the BC Indigenous Apprenticeship Forum in Burnaby. The three-day event featured panels, presentations and networking opportunities. Belle-rose helped coordinate that, and closed things off on a high note with another Sparrows performance.

“I’ve also got a show coming up in my First Nation, Fort McKay First Nation,” he says. “I’m going to the community where my mother was born and where she passed away as well. She was an elder and a residential school survivor, and I wrote [‘Butterfly Wings’] as a tribute to her. It’s going to be a really meaningful show to me.”

Spread your butterfly wings

And fly away

Cause it’s your time

To let it shine