The best joke I’ve heard so far this year was told by a Native American standing 20 feet beneath the pavements of Camden Town. Gregg Deal, singer with the Denver-based punk rock act Dead Pioneers, was introducing his bandmates at the sold-out Underworld club when he explained that while two-thirds of the group are indigenous, three members are white.
“They’re our DEI hires,” he said.
That night, the quintet’s performance at the kind of dive where ticketholders receive a tetanus shot at the door was a devoutly political affair. Up near the bar, a bookseller hawked anti-capitalist literature; on stage, Dead Pioneers performed songs with titles such as Working Class Warfare and Nazi Teeth, addressing international adventurism, the importance of joining a union, and (naturally) the USA.
It was the joke, though, that hit the bullseye. “In the United States, 40% of people believe that native people don’t exist,” Deal tells me, citing a survey by Reclaiming Native Truth. “To them, we’re extinct. It’s kind of funny, but that number is probably about the same as people who support Trump.”
For Deal, the battle for native rights is both ancient and ongoing. In 1492, upon landing in what is now the Dominican Republic, Columbus noted in his journal that the island’s indigenous inhabitants would make “good servants.” Half a millennium later, at a congressional hearing in 1993, Donald Trump griped that Native American casino owners “don’t look like Indians to me… and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.”
With a spirit of resistance that owes a debt to Public Enemy, Dead Pioneers combine the muscle of MC5 with the poesy of Gil Scott Heron. Touring the world in a splitter van, in just five years they’ve caught the ear of rock’s higher orders. Last spring, supporting Pearl Jam, they played to 50,000 people over four gigs in Georgia and Florida.
“I don’t know if Dead Pioneers would have worked 10 years ago,” Deal says. “But Black Lives Matter made a huge contribution to opening doors so marginalised voices can be heard.”
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Born in Park City, Utah, to a car mechanic dad and a bus-driving mum, the 50-year-old father of five made rent as a spoken-word poet and graphic artist before forming his band. A member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe, while living in Washington DC he was one of maybe half a dozen indigenous voices who successfully lobbied for the city’s NFL team to change its name from the Redskins to the Commanders. Today, teams like the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Blackhawks remain on his watchlist.
On the Dead Pioneers’ two studio albums, misrepresentation of native lives elsewhere in US culture is treated with equal gusto. Even John Wayne gets a mouthful of his own medicine.
“Best cowboy that never existed/White narrative gets it twisted/I want to punch you, close-fisted/tear down your silver screen of lies,” Deal sings on the song Mythical Cowboys.
“One of the big tools of visibility is the stereotype, and the stereotype lives strong in the United States,” he says. “Things dismissed as silly are massive catalysts for understanding indigenous existence. From a western lens, these are not truths but romantic nationalistic ideas that actively silence indigenous existence as a whole.”
As a member of a marginalised group, Deal grew up knowing the USA doesn’t always play fair. “I was born disappointed,” he says. “The first racial slur I ever heard pointed at me was when I was six. I didn’t know what it meant, but I understood the inflection. You understand the vitriol even that young.”
The irony of being regarded as an outsider by white Americans fuels his energy. On stage in Camden Town, during My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal, a lifetime of resistance was distilled into a single line: “A stolen home on stolen land [is] a foundation built on sand.”
As the concert ended, Dead Pioneers skipped the dressing-room luxuries in favour of mingling with the audience. Behind them, a short message on an inverted American flag bore silent testament to the band’s heritage:
“Never surrender,” it read. “Resistance since 1492.”
No Kings by Dead Pioneers is out now. Their new album Wagon Burner is released in June.
Ian Winwood is the bestselling author of Bodies: Life and Death in Music
