Asa Thomas Metcalfe
Special to ICT
Dead Pioneers is not a parody of punk rock or parody packaged in punk. They’re not about filling some quota of minority representation, and they don’t care to be. Dead Pioneers is about being themselves and telling it how it is, a true honest representation of the Native American experience. It just happens to feature some humor.
Vocalist Gregg Deal, a Pyramid Lake Paiute tribal citizen, is a Colorado-based multimedia artist with exhibits featured in several of Colorado’s most respected galleries. He’s a performance artist, painter, printer, sculptor and now a musician.
Much like Jello Biafra’s lyrics in early Dead Kennedys, the words in Dead Pioneers’ 12-track, first full release are both thought provoking and, at times, uproariously hilarious.
The self-titled album was preceded by a single titled “Bad Indian,” which graced the Spotify playlists over a year ago and feels like a musical underscore to a Native American standup comic’s five-minute set, but Deal says he’s never fancied himself a comedian.
“When I started getting bigger public speaking gigs, I started paying attention to the cadence of comedians, and the way that they talk and the way they sort of deliver because it’s more interesting, especially in the storytelling end of things,” Deal said. “So there’s an aspect of it to that, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself a comedian.”
A heavy bass rumbles along with a 4/4 rhythm and spacious psychedelic guitar riffs while Deal rattles through a litany of brilliant jokes explaining the experience of Native Americans living in the “so-called United States.” The comedy is unapologetic. It takes aim at all, but it mostly addresses neoliberal types who attempt inclusion with tone-deaf and racially insensitive questions.
Deal doesn’t retell them for the sake of being vicious, he just wants these stories to add a depth of perception.
“I don’t think that guy woke up and was just like, yeah, like Native American people are not as good as my superior race,” Deal said. “But but his privilege points to this place where he’s listening to me talking particularly, and he says, ‘Holy shit. You speak really good for a Native American,’ which is systemically racist, right? He’s not burning crosses on lawns, but he’s not very mindful of his place and what he’s doing when he’s talking to you. Those stories are all true, you know, and I think that it speaks to a shared experience that other Native people have.”
The song is, in all ways, hilarious. It sets up jokes and delivers punchlines. It functions as comedy should, but it also posits many deep concepts of racism and social ignorance.
In one narrative verse, a woman asks what Deal’s “Indian name” is, to which he replies “Gregg.” But when she pushes him to reveal his “real Indian name,” he jokes that it could be “Grey Skull” and points out that by missing this He-Man reference she avoids acknowledging that while he is an Indian, he is “also having an American experience, too.”
The two-minute song is not short of humor or punk sentiment. But the strongest moment is the closing line in which Deal compounds the political nature and message of the song by double layering the already double meaning of the song by referencing Civil War Gen. Philip Sheridan’s controversial quote: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” In his song, Deal croons: “You know the one, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. Well, I’m a bad Indian.”
Dead Pioneers didn’t even start as a band per say. It was a much smaller piece of live spoken-work projects that fit in with the larger scale of Deal’s other meaningful works, but somehow as it took more shape it started becoming its own entity.
“Immediately, I was like, especially because my wife was like, ‘Dude, what are you doing?’” Deal said. “‘You’re in your 40s you have no business doing this.’ But I approached it as another artistic medium, and it’s an exciting, artistic medium, but maybe people like it and maybe people don’t and that’s okay. I approach my own artwork in the same way. I don’t want to make something that I hope everybody likes. I want to make something that I like, that I want to make, so that it stays true to what I’m doing.
“I think the response to what we’ve been doing has been really good,” Deal said. He is in a bit of awe given the otherall reception because the general concept of Dead Pioneers is to emulate a lot of different bands who were never all that famous in their own right. The list of their greatest inspirations is a real who’s-who of obscure plays.
“If you look at the entire sort of history of punk, and stuff that people really love, like people who love The Minutemen, and people who love 7 Seconds. But these are not the bands that are at the forefront.”
Maybe it’s a simple equation. The basic chords of punk fandom are struck but in tandem with poignant elements of the greater conservation happening around the Dead Pioneers’ music. Whereas Jello and the Dead Kennedys were poking fun at the American political system during a time of political nihilism and referencing a war that had already concluded, Dead Pioneers is joining a growing chorus of young Americans finally reconciling with the effects of colonialism and a genocide of displacement, which is far from over.
“This is a really interesting part about Indian Country as a whole. The connection that Native people feel to punk rock and metal is just inherently there, and it always has been,” Deal said. “I think the statements of disenfranchisement and frustration with power structures that exist in the ethos of punk rock speak to a shared feeling of frustration that are already there in Native communities,” Deal says.
Dead Pioneers is not so much a radical idea or a new counter-culture, so much as they are a sobering voice in the cacophony of other voices. The social expectation of Native Americans is changing. There is a new wave of reverence coming from the comedians and artists on the Native scenes.
“I don’t know if I’m really into politics. I mean, it just, it is what it is,” Deal said. “But it’s not uncommon for Native people to know a lot about their history, and a lot about the politics that affect us because it becomes sort of a survival tool to have that.”
Deal lived in Washington, D.C., for 17 years and being a part of a Native American art scene he found himself also a big part of the Native American socio-political scene.
“There is a sort of political disenfranchisement and it’s hard. Like, there’s a cultural aspect of knowing and understanding all that stuff for Native people. If you’re the only Native in the room then suddenly you have to be an expert on everything. And so we generally end up being an expert on everything because we know our stuff.
“It was really hard to ignore what was going on there.” Deal said. “I was one of several faces at the forefront of the sports mascot debate. And specifically with the Washington football team.”
But Dead Pioneers doesn’t really have a greater mission in mind. The only real purpose is to add new perspectives to the greater echelon.
“Unless you’re top-tier, the US doesn’t really support artistic endeavors,” Deal said.
“But like, it’s also interesting, too. I’ve gotten more interest from labels overseas than I have from labels in my own homelands. But the music machine in the United States is also just a strange beast as it pertains to music that would otherwise be off the beaten track. So yeah, it’s weird.”
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