t’s unlikely that the average U.S. citizen could name a single North American indigenous film or actor, musician or album, book or author (excluding, maybe, Sherman Alexie). But the Canadian-bred hip-hop trio, A Tribe Called Red’s electric powwow (that’s right electric powwow) is putting indigenous beat-makers on the map.

Hailing from Ottawa, the three men known as Bear Witness, DJ NDN, and DJ Shub — aka A Tribe Called Red — originally set out solely to throw a good party, compiling digital dance rhythms and putting together sets at local clubs. But as Bear explains in an interview with PolicyMic, the band sold out their first show and quickly realized they were doing something big — something people had been craving for a long time.

“People in our community owned it so quickly and said ‘this is ours, for us,’ we really started to realize what we had done,” he says. “We had inadvertently created something within the hip-hop environment that all cultures can appreciate, but it’s ours. It reflects who [indigenous people] are and we can own it in a way — we’ve never had that before. We’ve never had something within pop-music or pop-culture that represented us, by us.”