Gregg Deal, 51, from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, is making noise with singles being dropped from his new album Wagon Burner with the Dead Pioneers band, due out in June.
“Morality over Mercy,” the lyrics read on an old tv screen with a fire behind it in a video on YouTube for the No Kings song. “Punishment over Health. Punish the Poor. Prop Up Wealth. America’s Best Export is Just Lies. A pig in lipstick is the American Prize. You Cover Your Face But We Can See American Bootlickers Bend a Knee…”
The well traveled Deal is a multi talented artist who also paints, makes movies and does performance art. Two years ago, he completed a beautiful mural of Washo weaver Dat So La Lee at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City.
The father of five visits family in northern Nevada every year or so, in between tours, such as one which recently took him through Europe.
His mom was born here, and he has “cousins, aunties and uncles,” in the area, inheriting “stories about the lake and stories that are associated with it … recognizing the language as it lives. It feels familiar. It feels like home,” he said during a recent phone interview with Our Town Reno.
“I’m struck by the fact that our people have been there for thousands and thousands of years and you feel that when you go back,” he said.
The Park City, Utah, native spent time in his twenties and thirties living in Washington D.C., where he also did activism related to mascot debates, oil pipelines and environmentalism.
“Native people in the United States are inherently political. We’re not a racial group, we’re a political one confined in the so-called founding documents of the country,” he said, explaining politics come through all his visual work, performances, lyrics, spoken word and writing.
The Instagram bio for the Dead Pioneers has “Indigenous fronted, unapologetically disruptive.”
“Lyrically, I tend to go to a place acknowledging Indigenous stewardship over the earth,” he said when asked if he has followed the controversies of the Thacker Pass lithium mine and northern Nevada data centers on sacred land.
Explaining the punk band’s name itself he says “there’s a lot of pioneer heritage … in the West, as part of that narrative of westward expansion. And so to me it’s meant to be irreverent and a little bit tongue in cheek. As Native people are relegated to sort of a relic and as everybody wants cowboys and Indians as we see illustrations of skulls with headdress and things of that nature, I question whether or not we can turn that around and turn it back onto the colonial narratives and also make light of it at the same time.”
After we explained we found out about him based on local northern Nevada fandom, he concluded “I’m super stoked about that. I’m humbled by that. I’m just doing my best.”
The new album, the third by the band, is due June 26th via Hassle Records.
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