Joe Rainey, taiqaa//ambe omaa

media release: On Saturday, November 5, 2022 at 7pm, Arts + Literature Laboratory presents renowned Pow Wow singer Joe Rainey in support of his acclaimed recent album Niineta.

Tickets are $15 ($10 student/ALL member) in advance online and $20 at the door for everyone. Doors open at 6:30pm.

That same afternoon, from 2-3:30pm, Joe Rainey will present a public workshop and Q&A. Registration details on the workshop will be posted soon.

On his latest album, Niineta, Joe Rainey demonstrates his command of the Pow Wow style, descending from Indigenous singing that’s been heard across the waters of what is now called Minnesota for centuries. Depending on the song or the pattern, his voice can celebrate or console, welcome or intimidate, wake you up with a start or lull your babies to sleep. Each note conveys a clear message, no matter the inflection: We’re still here. We were here before you were, and we never left.  

On Niineta, Rainey collaborates with the producer Andrew Broder, who brought his multi-instrumentalist, turntablist sensibility to the project. Each song started with Broder’s beats, the two of them experimenting with various sounds and tempos, before bringing in other 37d03d collaborators to orchestrate and recontextualize the ancient Pow Wow sound in strange, new in-between places. 

"Niineta is at once rooted in tradition and deeply idiosyncratic, fusing pow wow melodies with the timbres and rhythms of the 21st-century city: techno, industrial, hip-hop, dub, noise." --Andy Cush, Pitchfork

Joe Rainey grew up a Red Lake Ojibwe in Minneapolis, a city with one of the largest and proudest Native American populations in the country. Rainey became interested in Pow Wow singing as a child—at the age of five, he started recording Pow Wow singing groups with his tape recorder. He was raised less than a mile away from Franklin Avenue, a community centered in the Little Earth housing projects and the Minneapolis American Indian Center. The neighborhood still serves as a home for both the housed and the un-housed, and the don’t-even-wanna-be-housed Native. It is the birthplace of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the pioneering grassroots civil rights organization founded to combat the colonizing forces of police brutality. Rainey came of age in the heart of this community, but always felt like he was living in a liminal space—not that he was uncomfortable with that. “Growing up, knowing that you weren’t from the Rez, but you were repping them, was kind of weird,” he says. “But I liked that.”

By the time Rainey was a teenager, however, he had found enough courage to help start The Boyz Juniors, his first drum group, before going on to sing with Big Cedar, Wolf Spirit, Raining Thunder, and Iron Boy. They were professionals, city Indians travelling all over the north country, repping their reservations and their neighborhoods on every side of every conceivable border—competing for cash and cred, carousing, providing the beat to the grass dances, always striving to capture that “Pow Wow feeling” of togetherness. Rainey was always just as much of a fan as he was a participant—when he wasn’t at his own drum, he was recording other drums, then studying the tapes when he got home, admiring and cataloging the different singing styles, whether it was Northern Cree, Cozad or Eyabay.

Rainey got his album title, Niineta, from his drum brother Michael Migizi Sullivan, who suggested a short version of the Ojibwe term meaning, “just me.” But he’s using the term only in the sense that he’s taking sole responsibility for its content. Rainey is protective of Pow Wow culture—which was outlawed by the United States government for a generation, defiantly maintained in secret by Native elders he deeply respects—while trying to figure out exactly where he fits into it and how he can explore it on his own terms.