Redbone: Public Racial Identity and the Emergence of a Native American Rock Band

• In Event: My Music: Anti-Colonial Feminist Punk Rock

Abstract

The relationship between Chicanx studies and Native American and Indigenous studies has long been troubled. Though the genesis of both entailed mutual recognition and solidarity in the Third World Student Movement, the fields soon diverged along cultural nationalist lines into explorations of supposedly separate citizen-subjects with distinct experiences and goals. The conflicting nationalist projects of these fields is perhaps best encapsulated in debates over early Chicanx studies’ claims of indigeneity, which scholars such as Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and Andrea Smith have critiqued as essentializing and appropriative. What both fields have failed to examine, however, are the experiences of people who are both Native and Chicanx and whose experiences do not fit neatly into either field. Specifically, I look at Pat and Lolly Vegas, two brothers who comprised the core of the Native American rock band Redbone. Redbone produced a number of successful albums in the 1970s with singles “Come and Get Your Love” and “The Witch Queen of New Orleans” charting on Billboard’s Top 40. Through an examination of Pat’s memoir Come and Get Your Love (2017) and the band’s albums, songs, and performances, I interrogate how Pat and Lolly Vegas’s emergence into the public sphere entailed a concealment. In presenting themselves as Native American in the public sphere through their attire, album covers, and the subject matter of their songs, Pat and Lolly Vegas concealed the fact that they were Mexican as well as Native (Shoshone) and that they drew on both sides of their heritage for musical and personal inspiration. I argue that Pat and Lolly Vegas’s choice to emphasize their Native heritage over their Mexican upon their emergence into the public sphere reveals the normative, homogenizing mandates of identity, which are exacerbated by cultural nationalisms, as well as the commodification of Native American identity. In conclusion, this paper complicates normative assumptions about Chicanx and Native identities as well as debates surrounding Chicanx indigeneity by pointing to one of a great number of instances in which Native and Chicanx identities are intimately intertwined.

Author

• Jedediah H Kuhn, University of Toronto