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On April 11 Denver’s Dead Pioneers will release their new album, PO$T AMERICAN, via Hassle Records. Fronted by renowned visual and performance artist Gregg Deal, a North American Indigenous vocalist, the band unapologetically confronts social, political, and cultural issues—a focus central to their identity. Today the band offers another taste of PO$T AMERICAN via new single "Mythical Cowboys.” Deal shares:
In 1990, when I was a sophomore in high school, Dances with Wolves came out. Like many, in the initial viewing of what would later win an Oscar for best film, I was enamoured and confused.
Seeing something Indigenously familiar when you’re young can sometimes be confusing and overwhelming, to be sure, but something was amiss. Without the language to articulate what it I would later come to a place of understanding the Hollywood trope of white saviorism.
My mother’s adopted father, a white man, would express his love for John Wayne, a common hero for his generation. As someone who has always been treated as a Native person, good, bad or indifferent, his glare has always left me uncomfortable.
The narrative of the cowboy and Indian is a myth. A storyline used to sell books, films, photos, and paintings, but a storyline with the nefarious purpose of supplanting the existence of Native people as the enemy of Colonial Settlerism, a structure backed by religious belief of divinity and righteous purpose. Please note: if your righteous purpose includes the death of others, it’s not righteous. The existence of this narrative undermines Indigenous rights, existence and assertion to the authority of our own homelands.
Costner embodies the white obsession with westward expansion, casting aside the truth for romanticism. If we were honest, westerns would look more like a horror movie than the romantic dribble that arrives on the silver screen. This need to romanticize western exceptionalism through a narrative of romantic nationalism is the obsession of the so-called righteous religious nationalism perpetuated through people like Kevin Costner and John Wayne. These narratives play into the religious right and far right, inform the fantasy of exceptionalism through violence, and the perpetuation of these ideas backed by millions of dollars. This continues the cycle of violence in the real world, being dismissive of human life under the flag of benevolent colonialism and civilization, which requires the demonization of black and brown people. This isn’t civilization, this is brutalization. The most brutal structures imposed on planet earth, and Kevin can’t wait to sell you the movie tickets for it.
The myth of the American cowboy has long been a cinematic fantasy—one built on systemic distortions and racist tropes that obscure the real histories of Indigenous people. The video for today’s single confronts this legacy head-on, dismantling the Western genre’s romanticized portrayals of conquest and erasure. TJ Blake, an Atlanta-based Thai/American multimedia artist and musician, brings this vision to life by animating and expanding upon frontman Gregg Deal’s powerful visual series, The Others. Originally created in 2019 as paintings, The Others reimagines mid-century comic book imagery through an Indigenous lens, replacing dialogue with lyrics from punk anthems that mirror the struggle of Native resistance. It embodies the message of Gregg’s work, and by extension the voice of Dead Pioneers. Blake’s animation weaves the “Mythical Cowboy” lyrics into The Others narrative, further intensifying its impact—directly referencing MDC’s “John Wayne Was a Nazi” and the 1998 Native-directed film Smoke Signals.
