(Dena’ina) had never heard powwow singing before attending an Indigenous music conference in Toronto in 2008.

She was born north of Anchorage, Alaska, where powwows just started appearing in the last 25 years. At the conference, she was drawn to the singing voice of (Mescalero Apache, Irish, Chicano, German). The pair discovered they had a lot in common, eventually marrying in 2009.

“It’s a beautiful thing, how I’ve learned about powwows through participating with John-Carlos over the years,” Bissett Perea said. “We have invitational dance forms in Alaska. But as more of a newcomer who doesn’t know all the things about powwows, it’s been good for me to be able to ask questions to John-Carlos.”

The pair recently joined the faculty at the ��������: Bissett Perea is an associate professor of American Indian Studies and an adjunct associate professor of music history and Comparative History of Ideas; Perea is associate professor and interim head of ethnomusicology, adjunct associate professor of American Indian Studies and Comparative History of Ideas. This quarter, they are co-teaching a new iteration of “Powwow Cultures in Native North America.”

While a powwow course existed in the past, this is the first time it’s an interdisciplinary offering between American Indian Studies and the School of Music. The course will cover historic and contemporary powwow practices through a variety of activities, including participation in the annual  and interactions with powwow musicians, dancers and organizers.

“The class changes from instructor to instructor,” Perea said. “Everybody’s going to have their own take on it. We’re looking forward to entering that discussion, especially considering we are still new to town. We want to use this not just to talk about how we’ve experienced powwow music and events, but also to take the opportunity to be able to learn more about how these events have functioned in the Seattle area.”

The class will cover musical elements and style as well as history and context. Both instructors are trained in music — Perea in ethnomusicology and Bissett Perea in music history — and are jazz musicians. Being affiliated with the School of Music at the UW is a milestone, Bissett Perea said, because “for a long time, Native music wasn’t seen as music.”

“It’s important to us that we demonstrate Native ways of doing research and music history and ethnomusicology,” Bissett Perea said. “It’s a different approach, with different kinds of attention paid to politics of citation and presence. It’s intellectual work, but it’s also physical. It’s emotional and it’s spiritual. It will be a tall order, but hopefully by introducing students to powwow — this beautiful structure that is always changing and always reinventing itself — they’ll want to ask more questions and take more classes and continue the conversation.”

Whether the students come from Native American, Indigenous or other cultural backgrounds, Perea said, they’re taking the course because of a shared interest in music and dance. His goal is to foster an appreciation for powwow music, especially in those students who have yet to experience it. He once wrote a book chapter on the different ways people have called powwow noise. In his time as a powwow singer, he’s been yelled at and even had the cops called on him while teaching.

“That speaks to a lot of fear in how people get socialized, not just around powwow music but a lot of Native music,” Perea said. “It’s not noise. Hang out with me for 10 weeks, and by the end of it, you’ll be surprised. I can show you that it’s as organized as anything else you’re listening to. But whose organization are we stressing out about? What is it that our ear needs to know? I want students to walk away not just knowing what a powwow is, but also having been changed through learning how they might relate to it.”

When Perea attended the annual UW Powwow last year for the first time, he saw things he’d never witnessed before. That, he said, is part of the greatness of powwows: Something new can quickly become tradition. That’s why the class doesn’t have a textbook, and why it won’t look the same from year to year.

“John-Carlos and I share an endless curiosity,” Bissett Perea said. “We’re always learning. That’s one of things that keeps us in this profession.”

Washington is rich with urban and rural Native communities, Bissett Perea said, and there are specific histories surrounding migration, urbanization, tribal law and federal policies that have impacted Native peoples. Giving attention to how powwow arrived in cities like Seattle is important, especially to Native students who might not know their history.

“A lot of these students are figuring out the specificities of who they are, who their peoples are and where they’re from,” Bissett Perea said. “It’s an invitation to dig deeper, to have permission to celebrate being Native. For non-Native students, it’s an invitation be in better relations with the original stewards of these lands.”

Ahead of the course, the pair built a calendar of upcoming powwows in the area, which students will be able add to. They’ve listed events within a 100-mile radius, finding more than a half dozen in April and May alone. They also plan to encourage students to participate, volunteer or attend the UW Powwow.

“I say to my students, ‘I’m going to tell you this one way, but then you’re going to go to the powwow this weekend and somebody’s going to describe it a different way,’” Perea said. “That’s the point. It’s all the meanings together. It’s holding multiple, sometimes conflicting thoughts at the same time. That’s what it means to do this thing.”

For more information, contact Jessica Bissett Perea at jbperea@uw.edu or John-Carlos Perea at jcperea@uw.edu.

When he isn’t lecturing at the �������� or pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of California, Davis, (Quinault) co-hosts a global Indigenous radio show with Kevin Sur (Kānaka Maoli) on KEXP.

Every Monday between 3 and 5 a.m., he welcomes listeners to , playing cross-continental Indigenous music from a variety of genres. After sunrise, Johnston can be found in the UW’s Department of American Indian Studies, teaching classes like “United States/Indian Relations” and “Contemporary Indigenous Environmental Issues.

For someone who fell in love with music as a child – learning how to play Metallica riffs and listening to everything from virtuosic guitar to jazz – studying and amplifying Indigenous sound represents a full-circle moment.

“I’m interested in what Native music does, meeting Indigenous people where they’re at and conveying the authentic love for sound and music that comes through in their songs,” said Johnston, whose doctoral work in Native American studies at UC Davis focuses on Indigenous sounds and music. “It’s not just like ‘traditional music’ that we play on the show. It’s hip-hop and metal and jazz. There’s just as much of a sort of semantic potency to that as there is in the songs that our ancestors made.”

Johnston was raised in Taholah, Washington, on the mouth of the Quinault River. He graduated in 2015 from the UW, the only school he ever wanted to attend, with a degree in American Indian studies. He saw the department as a way to cultivate a home away from home.

“It was kind of hard reckoning with the idea that all land is Indigenous land, and the UW sits on the dispossessed land of the Coast Salish peoples,” Johnston said. “But I always give thanks to and gratitude toward the people that animate the Native presence in Seattle, including the American Indian Studies Department. The Quinault and other Coast Salish peoples have interacted for thousands of years, so the lands and waters we’re on here are familiar to my ancestors.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree, Johnston worked as an outreach coordinator for the Department of the Interior’s as well as a Native youth suicide prevention coordinator for the Seattle Indian Health Board. Needing a change, he then decided to pursue a graduate degree at UC Davis.

Originally, Johnston planned to focus his graduate studies on environmental law and policy before enrolling in law school. That all changed when Johnston met (Dena’ina), an interdisciplinary music scholar who then worked at UC Davis and is now associate professor of American Indian Studies at the UW. Bissett Perea’s Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered work changed Johnston’s perspective and pushed him to focus his work on Indigenous sound and music.

“Bissett Perea’s work as a musicologist awoke this thing in me, which was this musicality that I’ve had my entire life,” Johnston said. “I’ve always, always loved music, and I’ve always thought deeply about it, too. She showed me those ideas and that way of thinking was possible through an Indigeneity-centered lens.”

On Bissett Perea’s suggestion, Johnston applied for a lecturer position at the UW. Ten days after he was offered the job, another opportunity arose. A friend alerted Johnston that KEXP was hiring a global Indigenous radio DJ. Johnston had never DJed before, but the station was seeking applicants with both scholarly and musical backgrounds. Johnston checked both boxes and, as a bonus, he brought basic knowledge of audio production.

“KEXP has a global audience,” Johnston said. “That’s one of the most humbling things ,is for them to trust me to take the reins and show our thousands and thousands of listeners these Native artists that I love. It’s an absolute joy. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in my life.”

When he hosts, Johnston offers his perspective on what it means to be an Indigenous musician. Indigenous musicians have been invisible contributors to the musical canon of every genre, Johnston said, and representing their genuine, authentic love for both Indigeneity and music ties in with the name of the show: Sounds of Survivance.

‘Survivance,’ a term coined by American Indian studies scholar , represents a combination of survival and resistance. It’s about the continuance of Indigenous stories, and the renunciation of narratives centered around tragedy and victimhood.

“That’s sort of the ethic of the show,” Johnston said. “It’s demonstrating: One, we’ve always been here. Two, we’ve always been making songs. Three, these songs are really beautiful. Let me show them to you.”

Johnston aims to play a part amplifying an Indigenous legacy of sound and artistry that’s been intentionally obscured.

“It’s refusing to let ourselves be erased,” Johnston said. “We mobilize using the same processes that our ancestors did. They gave us this gift of being able to create song, and so we decided to use it. It’s self-determining. It’s personal and collective sovereignty over the ways that we want to sound.”

For more information, contact Johnston at tmaj@uw.edu.