Diga grew up in the remote community of Behchoko, the capital of the Tłı̨chǫ Nation, located in Canada’s Northwest Territories an hour outside of Yellowknife. His first and only language until the age of nine was Tłı̨chǫ, and his songs are often inspired by his father’s stories of life on the land, as well as his own experience of navigating two worlds.

Thanks to older brothers and their passion for music, the sounds of iconic artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the soundtrack of Diga’s childhood. Yet, Diga’s first artistic passions fell firmly in visual arts and cartooning. It wasn’t until Diga found a discarded copy of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs that he developed fascination with music, which led him down the journey he has been on since. 

A multi-instrumentalist, Diga finds musical inspiration from an eclectic range of artists, including Kashtin, Tłı̨chǫ Drummers, Enigma, Caribou, Bob Moses, and Indigenous Siberian folk-pop band Otyken. Diga studied audio recording in Ottawa partly in response to the expense of traveling south to record, and now produces and writes out in his home studio. “The North is a very small town,” he says, “you have to wear a lot of hats.” And so he is a producer, engineer, songwriter, musician, and film composer.