Joe Rainey is a Pow Wow singer. On Niineta, he 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.

Rainey grew up a Red Lake Ojibwe in Minneapolis, a city with one of the largest and
proudest Native American populations in the country. The Red Lake Reservation sits five hours to the North, a sovereign state unto itself, but Rainey grew up down in what Northerners call “The Cities,” in his mom’s house on historic Milwaukee Avenue on Minneapolis’ South Side. He was raised less than a mile away from Franklin Avenue, the post-Reorganization Act urban nexus of local Native American life, 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.”

Rainey became interested in Pow Wow singing as a child—at the age of five, he started
recording Pow Wow singing groups with his GE tape recorder, and his mom enrolled him in a dancing and singing practice with the Little Earth Juniors soon thereafter. As a pre-teen he began hanging out around The Boyz (a legendary Minneapolis drum group) at a house some of them stayed at in the Little Earth projects. “They knew me as a Little Joey,” he remembers. “As in, ‘Hey I tried to get Little Joey to sit down and sing, but he’s too shy.” By the time he 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.

Eventually, his voice grew strong enough to sing in Midnite Express, a new drum group
featuring some of The Boyz themselves. 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. Now with an upgraded workhorse Sony tape recorder, he was a student of the game, a maven, a bootlegger
extraordinaire.