We Were Punk First

A band that started as a piece about listening

Dead Pioneers did not begin as a band. It began as an artwork — The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy, a piece by the Colorado painter, muralist and performance artist Gregg Deal, of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, about his own relationship with music across a lifetime and what it did to him at each turn. The band was assembled to make the sound for that piece. Then the sound outgrew the piece.

Which means the origin of this band is itself a rack: one person, working out which records had carried him and why. Deal was in his late forties when the self-titled debut arrived in 2023. He is fifty-one now, with three albums out — the debut, PO$T AMERICAN, and Wagon Burner, released 26 June 2026 — and one very good sentence about why any of it exists.

That is the whole of this page's motive, said better than we could say it. It is also, precisely, why the pieces on this site keep insisting that a thing you were told was a deficit is a variation: somebody had to be the first person in the room to say it out loud, and the reason they had to is that nobody had said it to them.

Most of what Deal does on these records is spoken word over a band. That is worth knowing before you press play, because it changes what you are listening for. The songs are arguments with jokes in them, and they will not wait for you.

The band's claim, and the title of this page, is a priority claim. We Were Punk First holds that punk is not a form that Native people joined in the 1970s. Punk is rebellion; rebellion here is five hundred years old; the word arrived very late to a thing already fully under way. It is a claim about stance rather than about discography — and the discography turns out to have its own answer, which is the next section.

A record with no words, banned for what it said

In 1958 a guitarist from Dunn, North Carolina, released a two-and-a-half-minute instrumental called Rumble. It has no lyrics. It has no title words you could object to beyond the one. Radio stations banned it anyway, on the grounds that it would incite juvenile gang violence.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the cleanest thing on this page. A signal was transmitted that contained no propositions at all. Every listener who was frightened by it supplied the fright themselves, out of their own head, and then attributed it to the record. The meaning was not in the message. The meaning was in the receiver, and the receiver blamed the sender.

Fred Lincoln Wray — Link Wray — was the son of a white father and a Shawnee mother, and he described a childhood town where the police and the shopkeepers were also the Klan. He punched holes in his amplifier's speaker cone to get the sound he wanted, and the power chord he played through it became so ubiquitous that people stopped hearing it as a choice. Pete Townshend said that without Wray and Rumble he would never have picked up a guitar. Jimmy Page and Iggy Pop said versions of the same thing. Everything loud that came afterwards came partly through him.

One more thing about Wray, held open rather than resolved. Carroll notes that census records show the family recorded as “White,” and also that Wray identified as Shawnee and was accepted as Shawnee by other Native people in his lifetime. Both of those are in the book, on the same page, and we are not going to pick one. They are what the record says.

The drumbeat you think is Indian

You already have a sound in your head for this. A tom-tom, four beats to the bar, a heavy stamp on the first and three light ones after it. BOOM-boom-boom-boom. A minor pentatonic melody over an open fifth. You have heard it in a hundred Westerns and a thousand cartoons, and you have probably drummed it on a table.

No Native musical tradition produced it. It is a European concert-hall convention that hardened into a film convention, and by the 1920s it was a purchasable commodity: silent-film accompanists worked from cue anthologies indexed by mood and situation, of which Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924) is the canonical example — a rapid-reference collection of pieces sorted into fifty-two moods and situations, so an organist could find the right stock cue while the reel was running. The “Indian” sound was one of the entries. You looked it up.

So the thing millions of people believe is the sound of Native America is, in its actual provenance, sheet music sold to a man at an organ who had ninety seconds to find the page.

Carroll's own account is that the Western caricature was built to sound threatening, and that Native music does something close to the reverse for him — that it is calming, and that punk and metal, by way of volume and anger, do the same job. That is a claim about regulation, made in plain words by somebody describing his own nervous system, and it is the reason a page about loud music sits on this particular site at all.

Then listen to what happens when a real drum meets a label. XIT — “Crossing of Indian Tribes,” out of Albuquerque — signed to Motown, put Taos Pueblo drums in place of a standard kit, sang partly in Navajo, Lakota and Puebloan, and were kept off American radio while charting across Europe. And then listen to 1876, from Portland, covering the Black Lodge Singers' children's song Mighty Mouse as a punk song, with powwow drums and powwow vocables, entirely unbothered.

The landscape is a filter, not a silence

Ask why the far-north bands sound the way they do and you will get the word isolation. Ask why Navajo rez metal sits in that particular seam between thrash and black metal and you will get the desert. Both answers are gestures at something real, and the something real is measurable.

Air is a low-pass filter, and it is not a subtle one. A sound wave loses energy to the air it travels through, partly to viscosity and heat conduction and mostly, in ordinary conditions, to molecular relaxation in oxygen and nitrogen. The loss climbs steeply with frequency — roughly with the square of it for the classical part. Over a kilometre, a low note arrives having lost a decibel or two. A high one can lose tens. This is why distant thunder rumbles and near thunder cracks: same event, different amount of air.

Fresh snow is one of the most absorptive surfaces in the natural world. It is a porous solid — a foam of ice and trapped air — and sound entering it is scattered and damped rather than reflected. Measured absorption coefficients for new snow run very high across the mid and upper frequencies. A snowfield does not echo. It swallows.

And then the opposite effect, in the same place. Sound travels faster in warmer air, so a temperature gradient bends it. Over snow and ice, especially on a still night, the air near the ground is colder than the air above it — an inversion — so the sound speed increases with height, and wavefronts curve back down toward the surface instead of escaping upward. Range extends dramatically. Over hot open ground in daylight the gradient runs the other way and sound bends up and away, leaving an acoustic shadow a surprisingly short distance from the source.

So a landscape does not simply have more or less sound in it. A landscape decides which parts of a sound survive, and how far. The far north takes the treble out and hands the low end a long way. The daylight desert takes the whole thing and throws it at the sky. Neither place is quiet. Both are selective.

And what comes out of those places, made by people who grew up listening in them, is exactly that shape: long low tones and slow decay from the north, and something dry, fast and close-range from the desert. We are not claiming the acoustics caused the music. We are pointing at a rhyme, and marking it as one.

That line arrived on its own and we are not going to pretend we planned it. Down to the molecular level is the shape of the sentence this whole site is built on, said by somebody who had never heard of us, about something else entirely. In the north the molecules in question are ice and trapped air. In the sentence we usually write, they are carbon and calcium and iron. It is the same grammar: down to names how far a thing reaches, not why it is deserved.

Singing to two hundred people

There is a decision that recurs across this music and has no equivalent in most of the rest of popular culture: bands recording in languages with a few thousand speakers, releasing the songs untranslated, and declining to explain.

Northern Haze, from Igloolik, made a metal album in Inuktitut in 1985 for Inuit listeners in Inuit towns, played it in school auditoriums and legion halls because there were no clubs, and put out nothing to help an outsider follow it. Hamac Caziim, who are Comcaac from Sonora, record traditional songs as metal at the urging of their own elders, because the young people would take the language that way. Warumpi Band's Jailanguru Pakarnu was the first rock song released in an Aboriginal language. Alien Weaponry write in te reo Māori about specific battles their own ancestors died in.

None of that is a marketing position. The audience is the audience, and if it is small then it is small. Carroll's own summary of the whole phenomenon is that this music is Indigenous people adapting the dominant culture on their own terms — taking a form that arrived with the colonisers, keeping the volume, and putting the language back in.

Which produces one of the more useful reversals on this site. We spend a lot of pages arguing that a thing should be made legible — that a person should not have to translate themselves to be counted. Here is a body of work that simply declines to be translated, and is not diminished by it, and does not owe anyone the subtitles.

How a scene checks itself

There is a category of act in this world that has to be named because the music itself cannot filter it out: white supremacists using Indigenous names, imagery and languages while making records that hate Indigenous people.

Carroll's book carries an appendix of them — dozens of project names belonging, by his count, to fewer than twenty individuals, most of them one person alone in a room, most of them banned from playing anywhere, several running an openly Nazi project alongside the “Native” one. The longer history is the same shape: the founder of the modern Klan claimed Cherokee ancestry, and a Klan organiser named Asa Carter reinvented himself as the Cherokee author “Forrest Carter,” sold The Education of Little Tree and The Outlaw Josey Wales, and was believed, at scale, by Hollywood.

How the scene actually checks: you ask. Communities are small, families are known, and somebody knows somebody. It is not forensic and it does not need to be. The failure mode Carroll describes is not that verification is hard — it is that people who know very little about Native communities are reluctant to admit how little they know, so they accept whatever fits the picture they already have.

That failure mode is the whole reason this site keeps a public changelog.

Still here, and tired

Carroll's conclusion, after three hundred and four Native bands, fifteen Aboriginal bands and thirty-two Pacific Islander bands, is four words long: this music says we are still here.

The exhaustion in it is not incidental and it is not a personal failing. Dead Pioneers have a spoken-word piece whose whole architecture is a list of structural facts, ending on being tired — not defeated, not despairing, tired, which is what a rigged system produces in the people it is rigged against, and which is a description of the system rather than of them. Anyone who has spent years explaining their own existence to institutions recognises the register immediately.

And this is where we have to be careful, because it would be very easy and completely wrong to walk away from this page having quietly converted somebody else's history into a metaphor for ours.

Deal himself has described what happens with Bad Indian — a song about being asked to live up to somebody else's picture of you. He has said that people connect to it through their own experience of not measuring up and not belonging, that he accepts this as a real byproduct of the work, and that he does not accept any duty to educate anybody. Both halves of that matter, and the second half is the one that usually gets dropped.

So: the structural rhyme is real, it is narrow, and it belongs to the reader rather than to us. Being handed a portrait made by other people and then graded on how well you match it is the mechanism in “but you don't look autistic,” and it is the mechanism in the tom-tom and the headdress and the mascot. Recognising the shape is allowed. Claiming the experience is not. Colonisation is not a figure of speech.

What this site says, it says here too and no louder: the universe does not pathologise its own variation, a filter selects rather than ranks, and down to measures how far the loving reaches, not what earns it.