There’s a nominee who’s a straight-up country musician. There’s a bluesman. And a duo that blends traditional powwow music with decidedly non-First Nations house music.

So what exactly makes an act eligible for the Junos’ Aboriginal Recording of the Year category?

And considering the history of native peoples in Canada, is having such a category perpetuating apartness?

“It’s not a racial category, it’s a musical category,” says Brian Wright-McLeod, a Dakota-Anishnabe and chair of the Junos’ aboriginal category. Eligible styles include all traditional forms, hand drums and traditional flutes, Inuit throat singing, and Métis and other fiddling. Also eligible are fusions of all genres of contemporary music that incorporate the eligible styles and/or reflect the aboriginal experience in Canada through words or music.

And at least 50 per cent of an album’s listening time has to meet the above criteria.

The judges are First Nations people involved in music, arts and culture.

Interestingly, notes Wright-McLeod, while traditional artists such as throat singers and flutists have been nominated, none has ever won. Instead, it’s been performers like folk/country singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, a two-time winner in the category.

Donny Parenteau, that straight-up country singer, is competing in the category for the second time. The Métis singer and fiddler who for years played in U.S. country musician Neal McCoy’s band submitted his album To Whom It May Concern to several categories including country but got the nod for his aboriginal submission.

“I feel honoured to compete,” says Parenteau. When asked if he feels pigeonholed in the aboriginal category when there’s little about his music that’s identifiably “native” and when the country music market is so much bigger, he answers, no.

“I just consider myself an artist who steers toward country.”

The aboriginal category was created in 1994 after aboriginal performing arts activist Elaine Bomberry, an Ojibway/Cayuga from Six Nations on Ontario’s Grand River, rounded up some interested people including Sainte-Marie to spring native music from the Junos’ world category.

“We needed to have our own space,” says Bomberry, who had been a judge in the world category. “Our intent was to show we had our own professional musicians.”

The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS), which operates the Junos, jumped on the idea, she says. Bomberry adds that Sainte-Marie’s “eloquent” presentation, in which she compared below-the-mainstream-radar aboriginal music to black music in the 1940s and ’50s before that music went massively mainstream, was the clincher.

Since then, the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards and the Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards have appeared.

In the U.S., the Grammys last year cut Native American Albums as a separate category as part of an overall reduction in awards. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) dropped its indigenous category in the late 1990s.

Both countries have separate native awards organizations.

With more than 40 submissions this year, the Junos’ aboriginal category is healthy, but there is disagreement about the implications of the award.

Wright-McLeod says the Junos have heightened awareness of aboriginal music among other Canadians. He hopes it will eventually foster greater interest in aboriginal culture and life.