Your new EP, Pow Wow Punk Rock IIII is the final instalment of your Pow Wow Punk Rock EP series, which you started in 2020. How did the idea for this series come about? What went into your decision to wrap it up after four?

I had the idea a long time ago. I was in a punk-ska band when I was 19, or something like that, and we had a song that was called “Revolution” that had this four-to-the-floor beat. The song was written by my older brother, who was in that band, and the lyrics were talking about how, as ndn people, our time is coming to be able to start taking all of our stuff back. Because of the lyrics and all that stuff, I was like, “Man, it would be really cool to have a pow wow drum behind the drum kit, just to emphasize the Indigenous message of the song.” We took all the time recording it and everything, but it didn’t end up in the final mix. That’s where it sparked. I was like, “Man, this is dope! There’s gotta be something like this where pow wow music is being mixed with punk rock.”

Over the years, I’d been thinking about it and didn’t have the technology to do it myself. I was really depending on getting a band together, and I could never convince anyone to do it. No one understood what I was trying to say, no one got it. So over the years, I learned how to record on my own. I learned how to play all the instruments and all that stuff. Around 2018 is when I started trying to put it together. I would do it on laptops and the laptops would always crash. I recorded the very first Pow Wow Punk Rock EP three times, in full. [laughs] I would record it and then the laptop would crash and erase everything. I’d re-gather myself, re-record everything, and it would crash again and delete it all. It was like divine intervention or something. Eventually, my wife gave me a computer and was like, “I think you can do it with this.” Then I was finally able to get it out! [laughs]

As far as the series, it was always meant to be four. Four is a sacred number for us as Indigenous people; there’s four directions, there’s four seasons, there’s always four. It’s the final edition of the EP series. I don’t know if that means we have albums now or where it goes from here, but the Pow Wow Punk Rock EPs are done.

The EP cover features four people, including the three women who were on the covers of the first three EPs. What’s the story behind the photos?

They are women in my life who have given me gifts or provided something that has completely changed my life. They’re women who I have more respect for than anyone else in the world. Where I come from, on my Blackfeet side, we have a matriarch, and on my Cheyenne side, we have a patriarch. Though I have a Cheyenne dad, I have a Blackfeet mother, so the matriarchal energy is strong in my family. On my Blackfeet side and on my Cheyenne side, but on my Blackfeet side specifically, the women are strong. They are strong, strong women. I always tell people my dad taught me to respect women, and my mom taught me why.

I wanted to celebrate the women in my family. The first EP is my mom. She gave me the gift of life; she gave me everything. She’s the reason why I speak, the reason why I sing. The second EP is my cousin Deleana OtherBull and she’s from my Cheyenne side. As Cheyenne people, she gave me something that changed my life, changed the trajectory of my life, and continues to stay with me and keep me safe. Then the third EP is my wife. She obviously gave me the computer that I was able to record the first EP on. [laughs] But she’s given me everything. She gave me life in a different way. It’s these three different ways of life: my mom, my cousin, and my wife. They’ve all given me a life in a way. The final EP is my cousin SA, who’s on my Blackfeet side. She gave me life in the music world. She’s been a huge support system and she’s helped me in a lot of different ways once this project came out. She was running with me and a lot of times was telling me where to go. It’s another way of how women in my life have given me life. She’s one of those people. I wanted to celebrate all sides of my life. They’re all four directions of my life.

You also have some friends and family members on the opening track. What does it mean to you to have them involved?

It meant a lot. It felt really nice to reach out to these people and have them just give me the big thumbs up and be like, “Of course, I’ll be on it!” I don’t know what happens from here, so I wanted to celebrate as many of my friends as I could and celebrate as many people that we’ve met along the way as we could. I wanted to bring in as many friends that we’ve made throughout this career and this music.

David Rodriguez from The Casualties and Starving Wolves sings on that song. I met David through the music. Sober Junkie has become a really good friend of mine and I met him through the music as well. SA, even though she’s my cousin, we didn’t know we were related. It was the music that brought me to SA. Then there’s Jesse DesRosier, he’s a Blackfeet guy from my rez. He worked for Cuts Wood and he’s a fluent speaker of Blackfeet. Again, it’s because of the music that I was able to speak with him and become friends with him, even though we’re technically related. [laughs] My cousin Cinnamon Killsfirst also speaks on the song. They’re people who walk with me and I walk with them, so I wanted to bring them in on the song too.

The prompt that I gave them was: If you could look through a window to two or three generations down and say something to them, what would you tell them? As ndn people right now, we don’t have that. A lot of our messages and things like that have been passed down generation by generation through oral history, but the difference between us and all the generations before is that now there’s so much noise. We’ve had boarding schools disconnect us. We’ve had Christians, Catholics, Americans, Spanish, French, Germans, Russians, all these different governments have come in and tried to sever us from our people, from our messages, and from our oral history by changing our language, changing our government, making our language illegal, and making our traditions illegal. Because of that, my generation is trying to pick up the pieces of the messages that were lost.

This EP will be on vinyl and vinyl can be played forever. [laughs] A piece of vinyl will last a lot longer, and the technology to play vinyl will outlast tapes and CDs and mp3s and things like that. This is literally a record of a message from us to two generations, three generations down. What everyone sent me back was their message to the future.

The way the messages were mixed, they go in a swirl. If you listen to it with headphones, it starts small and goes big. The idea behind that was, when we pray and things like that, we do it with medicine and when you watch the smoke, it comes up and goes out. There’s the part where it’s just me, where I’m singing, “I’ll give all I have for you / I’ll never give up on you,” and then there’s the stack of voices. It’s supposed to be me singing to the past generation and to the future. Then when the whole stack of voices comes in, it’s the past singing back to me. It’s like this smoke, you hear all these messages coming out and now they’re here and they’re singing at you. That’s how it’s supposed to sound. It’s a very thought-out 20 seconds. [laughs]

How would you describe your songwriting process?

It depends on the song and it depends on the EP. I’m really proud of this EP in general. I’m proud of them all, but this specific one came out exactly how I wanted it to come out. It sounds exactly how I wanted it to sound. Each song has its own way of writing. The first song, “Haahp’e’hahe”, which is the one we were just talking about, took a long time. It took a while to figure out what to do with everything and how to focus my message.

I wrote every piece of the music for “Dancing on the Enemy” when I was like 16. It’s unchanged. [laughs] I just never used it and I was like, “I’m going to use this song because I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. I’m going to take this thing that I’ve never used and we’re going to use it now.” I don’t know what I was thinking when I was 16. The words and lyrics are from now. There’s a lot of doubt on our band. There’s a lot of people trying to shit talk us who aren’t from our community and people trying to take opportunities from us, things like that. As a Blackfeet and Northern Cheyenne person, we’re both war-born cultures; that’s what they call us, so there’s the idea of continuing to dance on your enemies. You don’t let them stop you. You bury those motherfuckers and you dance on them and you just keep going. It’s kinda just saying, “Whatever, I’m not stopping.” It took the strongest military in the world, the US military, and they couldn’t even stop us, so what makes you think you’re going to stop us? I’m Northern Cheyenne. My blood was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. They couldn’t even stop us. You’re not gonna stop me.

I was also thinking a lot about Palestine and the kids in Gaza. All those kids being decimated and starved to death and thinking about how that’s also happened to my people and we survived. I don’t know a ton about the Palestinian culture, but I do know that dancing and singing, like most cultures, are a big part of it. I was thinking about that and you can’t let these people stop you from dancing. I’m hoping that somebody over there hears that there is a future. Right now, it’s rough for Palestinians. I’ve never had to live through that genocide, but I am the product of genocide. There is a time after, there is a life after. But the thing is, you can’t let them stop you from dancing, you cannot let them stop you from singing. That’s what I’m trying to talk about in that song like, “Keep dancing on these motherfuckers. Don’t let them make you stop. Keep going, keep dancing.”

Each song had its own process of where it started; some of them started with a line, some of them started with a single lyric, some of them started with me playing on my guitar and going, “Man, this sounds dope! Let me write something to this.” They all have their own start and finish. I don’t have an exact process of, “This is how I sit down and write my music,” everything’s just a little bit different. [laughs]

You’ve said “Braids in the Pit” was inspired by a show that you played where the majority of the crowd was made up of Indigenous people.

Yeah! We were playing in Albuquerque at an Indigenous festival called Merciless Savages. It was all ndn bands, all ndn rappers, every Indigenous artist you could think of: country, punk rock, metal, hip-hop. They were all there and we were there. So, of course, the crowd was majority Indigenous. There were also Mexicans there, who are also Indigenous, but they have their own culture, some white people sprinkled out there, a few Black people sprinkled out there, but mostly ndn people. When we were playing our music, we had a pretty sizable, pretty good crowd there. Usually the pit is in the front next to the stage, but, for whatever reason, at this show the pit was way at the back to the left. I’m at the mic, singing, playing guitar, and I look and I see them going off. They were getting twisted up in there! I just saw braids flipping around, beadwork and chains just whipping around. I was like, “That is so badass!” Later on, I was talking to the band like, “It was so dope seeing all those braids in the pit,” and it was like a light went on like, “Oh, that’s a good line! I need to take that somewhere!”

It’s also my love letter to the crunk era. I love Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz, just the whole crunk era in general. I was too young to be involved in any of that, plus I’m from Portland. I’m not from Atlanta; I’m from the exact opposite. [laughs] If I ever had the opportunity to go back in time, that’s where I would go; I would go to a club in Atlanta during the crunk era. That was my shit, man! It’s a pow wow punk song, but I’m hoping that somewhere in the world, a crunk artist hears this and goes, “Holy shit! I didn’t know these ndns up on the West Coast were bumping this shit too!” [laughs] It’s my love letter to my culture as a pow wow punk rock artist, a love letter to ndn people and to punk, and it’s also a love letter to crunk music and the crunk era. We interpolate a Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz song.

Which one?

“What U Gon’ Do”. Not to get too nerdy into this, but for the guitar lines in the chorus, I used both of the synth lines and made them into the guitar lines. I just turned that synth line into a guitar line. Super fucking nerdy. [laughs]

You have some featured artists on the EP. You have Hans Gruber and the Die Hards, Wyzaker, Kunu, and Mista Chief. How did those collaborations come about?

Rosey from Hans Gruber has been such a huge supporter of us from the jump, when it was just me recording music on my own. I think she has one of the first Pow Wow Punk Rock T-shirts that I ever made. I made like 25 and we used that to bankroll some more shirts and keep building. She’s been supportive from the very, very beginning. 1876’s first show was with Hans Gruber. It was because of them that we played our first show. Again, because the series is coming to an end, I wanted to find a way to fold them in because they deserve the recognition of being part of our history and our lore as a band, especially Rosey. They just happen to play horns and I just happened to have a song that needed horns, so I asked them and they were like, “Of course, we would love to do this!”

Wyzaker, Kunu, and Mista Chief are part of this collective called Burial Ground Society. It’s an Indigenous artist collective. About a year ago, they noticed the splash that we’re making and they asked if I would want to be a part of that artist collective, so I said yeah. That’s how I met Wyzaker, but Kunu and Mista Chief are actually my cousins on my Cheyenne side. So not only are we related, but we’re in this artist collective together. Kunu is a rapper and a filmographer, Mista Chief does roots reggae kinda stuff, and Wyzaker is a rapper. He’s a pretty good rapper and he’s been doing it for a long time. He’s just in his grind.

All of them are doing their thing and them bringing me into Burial Ground Society is why I wanted them on this, but also Wyzaker has been a huge supporter of us since I met him. Everything we do, even if it’s as little as sharing something, he will share it. If it’s as big as inviting me to an event to help me get more eyes on what we’re doing, he does it. He’s a huge, huge supporter. He’s from Eugene and if we’re in Eugene, he’s there. He’s even in the “Braids in the Pit” video! I put a callout to everybody like, “If you wanna be in a video, meet us here at this time,” and he showed up. He was driving back from his rez and he was like, “I’m there, dude!” [laughs] He’s just that kind of dude. I was like, “How do I pay this guy back?” The best way I could think of to honour him and show him the respect that he deserves is by having him come in on our song. Kunu and Mista Chief, like I said, are my cousins, but they’ve also been supportive of us.

The song is “CTYNDN II” and all four of us are city ndns. Mista Chief and Kunu, they’re Cheyenne, and it meant a lot to me to have more Cheyennes, my own family, and other city ndns on this song about being city ndns. I thought it was a cool way to introduce them to our fanbase because some of our people might not know them, but they are good artists who deserve the recognition and who deserve support. That’s why I wanted to bring them in.

Lifting each other up.

Yeah, exactly! That’s what it is, in any way possible. For a lot of people, it’s monetarily, and unfortunately, we’re an independent, Indigenous band, which is a really fancy way of saying we’re fucking broke, no money. [laughs] I can’t support people with money in the way that I wish I could, but the way that I can support them is this way. I will bring you in, I’ll be on your music, I’ll write for you, I’ll produce. Anything I can do with music, I will because I don’t have the money to support you with money. If I can do it this way, I 100% will, and I do.

You’ll be touring the US with Subhumans starting later this month. What are you looking forward to the most about these shows?

To be honest, I’m excited just to go out in general. I’m really excited to go out with Subhumans! I’m excited to be exposed to their crowd. On a personal level, the thing that excites me the most about this tour is we’re gonna be out at the beginning of Native American Heritage Month, which is November here in the States. We’re gonna be out on the road playing pow wow punk rock music at the beginning of Native American Heritage Month and we’re going down the West Coast. I’m really excited about that. The elbow to the ribs kind of thing is, we’re going to be out with a British band during Native American Heritage month. [laughs] So we’re just a bunch of ndns with some British guys like, “Hey man, we’re talking about the history you tried to erase!” [laughs] That’s just a joke; I don’t feel that way about the Subhumans at all. I don’t blame them for anything, but it is a fun irony.

On the first day of Native American Heritage Month, we will be on the road. I’m really proud of that. We’re gonna be in Garden Grove on November 1, so LA kind of. It’s supposed to be a bigger room, so that’ll be cool on the first day of Native American Heritage Month. I really wanna get that point out there and tell all the LA ndns you gotta be there! You gotta make this an event. This is a celebration, you gotta be here for this. How many times in history has a pow wow punk rock band been in your city on the very first day of Native American Heritage Month? When has that ever happened in history? Never, so you gotta be there! You gotta make this happen. [laughs]

What do the Subhumans mean to you as a band?

Any band that is willing to take us out in general, I have high respect for because we’re kind of boundary-pushing in every sense of the word. When you think of punk rock, you think of mohawks and battle vests and all that stuff, then here a bunch of braided up ndns come with long hair. [laughs] When you think of punk rock, you think of a certain look, a certain aesthetic, and you think of a certain sound. Here we are doing our shit. In my opinion, the most going against the grain thing you can do is doing what’s true to you. That’s what punk rock is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be about conformity and doing what everyone is telling you to do and following the “rules” of punk rock. It’s an oxymoron: the rules of punk rock.

For a band to take us out, like Starving Wolves, Koffin Kats, or Subhumans, it’s like they’re taking a risk on us. I really think they are fanning the flame of true punk rock when they take a band like us out because we are the opposite of a lot of what you picture in your head as being punk rock. You’re not really gonna see that in us, but you will hear it. Our live shows go off! We are punk rock, we’re just doing it our way. Ultimately, I have the highest respect for them for being willing to take us out and taking a chance on us. I hope we make them proud. I hope we make them feel like they made the right decision. I hope they like us! [laughs] As a band, they’re trailblazers, and so are we. It feels good to be out and have trailblazers like that take a chance on us.

I think you guys are doing more to embody the spirit of punk than a lot of bands out there because you’re doing it in your own way.

A lot of the time, we’re the things that people say they want in punk rock: they want an independent band, they want self-made, they want people who write their own shit. We don’t owe anybody anything. We are not owned by a single person. Everything has been built on our own. We’re not signed, so we’ve got no label backing. If you see something, like any kind of advertisement, we figured that out on our own. The music has been recorded from the jump by us, by me. I wrote and recorded everything on my own. That’s DIY. That’s what punk rock is supposed to be: DIY, independent. Because when you’re independent, you’re not owned by anybody, and you can do and say what the fuck you want to do and say because there’s no loss. The only loss is if people don’t agree.

You have all these punk bands who immediately get signed, immediately have label backing, immediately get a big booking agent conglomerate, and they’re immediately owned which is like, “What the fuck are we doing here?” You have all these bands who are playing these festivals, who fucking suck, and then all these punks who are being filtered into that. They’re like a river running to these festivals or running to these bands who have a commercial objective. That’s not the punk rock ethos. Then you have bands like us who fucking do everything on their own, completely DIY. Everything that the punk rock ethos says you’re supposed to be is what we are because we’re ndn. We’re already made that way. [laughs] The reason why we do it this way is because this is our culture. The ethos of punk rock is something that we already exude as ndn people. I am thankful for the people who do support us.

You were on stage with NOFX during their final Portland show. What was that experience like?

It was crazy! [laughs] It was one of those moments where you reap what you sow. It’s like that basketball analogy everyone always uses: you miss every shot you don’t take. If you take a shot, maybe you’ll get it, maybe you won’t, but at least you tried. That’s kind of one of those moments. We were invited to the show and we were given all-access passes. While we were there, we met some other people who are friends of ours who had backstage passes, so we went backstage. While we were backstage, I met Sam King and Ceschi from Codefendants and they’re both fans of our band already. They weren’t fanning out or anything, but they were like, “Hey, your band’s dope! Stoked to meet you.” I’m hanging out with them, talking with them and then I met some other people, some ndn people. We were backstage, but we couldn’t be on stage and they were like, “Fuck that, just walk on stage with us when we go do our thing.” I was like, “Ok!” So we then we go up on stage and we’re side stage. We got every pass you could get along the way just by being like, “Hey, I know you!” [laughs]

My brother and I used to cover “Kill All The White Man” and along with my oldest brother, we’ve been listening to that song forever. We would pull up to pow wows blasting that shit. It was a full circle moment for us when we saw that song was on their setlist. We were like, “No fucking way! We’ve been playing this song at pow wows since we were kids. We’ve been listening to this thing forever. We’ve been playing this as a band. This is full circle!” Sam King walks by, so I talk to him like, “Hey dude, NOFX is playing ‘Kill All The White Man’, what are the chances you think you can get us onstage when they play that?” He was like, “Yeah, dude. I got you.” They start playing the song and Sam’s eyes just dart over to me. He’s got these super blue eyes, so from across the stage I see these big, blue eyes staring at me. [laughs] He’s like, “Fuck, let’s go!” He runs by us and my whole band just jumps out on stage. He goes up to Fat Mike and is like, “These guys are going to sing the song,” and he was like, “Ok.” So we sang it with him. It was just chance, it wasn’t like we were invited. [laughs] We just went!

That’s the DIY spirit!

Yeah, man! We were polite and that got us up there. It was dope. It felt really good. My oldest brother, like I said, he’s the one who introduced my other brother, who’s in 1876, and me to the band and he was up there singing it with us. For me, if that was the height of where we ended as a band, all of this was worth it just to be able to get both my brothers on stage and my best friend Mark, who was our drummer at the time and is like a brother, singing this song we’ve been listening to and singing since we were kids. We were up there as a family. All four brothers were on stage, singing this song with this band we’ve been listening to since we were kids. If that’s where 1876 ended, that’s perfect. It was all worth it.

Which song are you most excited to play on your upcoming tour?

I’m excited to sing them all, really. I think off the new EP, I’m excited to sing “Haahp’e’hahe”. It’s exciting for me on a personal level because it’s multi-generational. You’re here, we’re here, everything was given up for us to be here and we will continue to give everything for the next people to be here. That’s gonna be a fun one to sing during Native American Heritage Month. It’s gonna mean a lot to me to be able to sing that wherever we go.

“Dancing on the Enemy” is also gonna be a fun one to sing because off the new EP, that has been the song that took charge over every other song. It’s not the one I expected, but it’s the one that people seem to like the most. It’ll be exciting to play that song because I know people will want to hear it. Then “Braids in the Pit”, of course, because it’s Native American Heritage Month and I want to see those pits go off! [laughs]

Do you have a proudest moment on Pow Wow Punk Rock IIII?

I’m just proud of the thing overall. The 49er at the end, I’m really, really proud of. It came out so dope. 49ers have been recorded and sung forever, but the way that I did it, there’s no other one like it. I’m really proud of that song. The cool could-have-been story behind that 49er is that I almost got Patrick Stump on that song. I met him in Seattle at our show. Him and I geeked out about vocal stacking and 7-piece harmonies, all this shit that I never get to talk to anybody in my band about because they’re like, “Yeah, whatever, dude.” I finally found someone! [laughs] We just immediately hit it off and we were talking about all this stuff, so I sent him that 49er. I was like, “Dude, what do you think of this?” He was like, “This is badass! This is such a sick song.” Of course, I’ve heard 49ers my whole life, but he hasn’t, so this is a whole new lane of music for him. I was like, “Hey man, how would you feel about singing on this?” and he was like, “I don’t even know where I’d begin.”

I was like, “If you hear any harmonies, just sing a harmony. Just send it back and I’ll throw it in there. Then it will be 1876 ‘49er? I Barely Knew Her’ featuring Patrick Stump. This will make history! This is a historical song because no non-Indigenous person has ever sung on a recorded 49er. Also, the flip of that is mainstream artists never come to us to be on our music; they ask us to be on theirs, they feature us on theirs. So you will be the first mainstream artist ever to come to ndns and lend your voice to us. This will open up a whole new fanbase for you, a whole bunch of ndns are gonna be like, ‘Holy shit, I had no idea this guy fucked with us like that!’” I didn’t hear anything back from him, and I was like, “Damn it! I just gotta put this thing out.” [laughs] It was so close! Maybe next time. [laughs] There’s a lot of proud moments on this. I’m proud of the whole thing.