Sihasin is a Diné (Navajo) word that translates to “hope.” With bass, drums and soaring vocals, Jeneda and Clayson Benally take a traditional Navajo foundation and weave it together with folk, rock, activism and a lot of punk. It’s a sound both dissonant and lyrical, with impeccable craftsmanship. “It’s like energy that propels you into movement,” says Jeneda.
The sister-and-brother duo from northern Arizona will perform Aug. 10 at Sundays at Six in Alamosa’s Cole Park.
Since its founding in 2012, Sihasin has recorded albums, won awards, performed at the Gathering of Nations and has traveled the world as a part of American Music Abroad, a cultural diplomacy program sponsored by the U.S. State Department that shares American music internationally. Sihasin’s single “We the People” premiered digitally on July 4, 2021, in each American embassy.
TV viewers might remember hearing their cover of “Winter Wonderland,” which was used in Hyundai’s “Naughty or Nice” ad campaign in 2017.
Throughout their travels, Sihasin never strays far from its musical roots.
The Benally siblings grew up in Black Mesa, Arizona, during a land dispute between the Navajo Nation and Hopi, and the Peabody coal mining company, which resulted in the forced relocation of thousands of people. The activism they saw and participated in at the time later became an inspiration for their music.
Or, as Clayson says, “Finding a way to just turn up our sound system or the music to 10 and put distortion behind it was a natural progression.”
It would be so easy – and fun – to hang out with the very engaging Benallys all day, but we only had time for five questions. Here’s our interview with Sihasin, edited slightly for clarity and length.
Alamosa Citizen: How do you go about mixing the punk sound and the punk tradition with your Native American traditions? How do you blend that together in your lives?
Jeneda Benally: I think that for me personally, it’s just authentically who I am. I grew up listening to the Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains. And I really can also consider Midnight Oil to be punk, just because they were breaking down so many stereotypes. And for me, that’s really what punk is. It’s that raw energy, that truthful energy. But it’s not, that’s the thing, it’s not stagnant. It’s like energy that propels you into movement. And for me that’s punk. It’s like constantly moving and creating and expressing and living authentically as we are, as being Diné, as being traditional people. I didn’t really see that there was much of a difference between our songs. When we sing them, our traditional songs for ceremonies and such, they tell our history, they’re for healing. They’re for that expression of bringing yourself and your world back to be in beauty and balance. And for me, I know a lot of people see punk as being kind of chaos and anarchy, but for me, I don’t. I see punk as creating that positive change that we want to see in our communities. And so for me it’s that natural confluence of cultures that make me who I authentically am.
Clayson Benally: Yeah. I can add a little bit, if that’s all right. Where we grew up on the Navajo reservation in our community, that was impacted by relocation and displacement going back into the 1970s, being born into what was a cultural resistance and trying to just live our lives on the landscape that our ancestors had from time immemorial, seeing our elders struggle to just exist. As a child, as a youth watching that, I think the only music that I could identify with that could express that kind of emotion and relate with something that was true and honest, that was punk. But growing up in a land dispute and a struggle in Big Mountain with Peabody coal extracting resources and draining the water table, that was such a powerful place for us as youth to start writing songs and to tell the world what was happening in our community because we didn’t see it talked about in mainstream media or reflected. And our elders would be going to the United Nations or to Washington, D.C., to different parts of the world to talk about this injustice. So for me, finding a way to just turn up our sound system or the music to 10 and put distortion behind it was a natural progression.
AC: So I was reading a little bit about your bio and I saw that you were part of the American Music Abroad program. Tell me a little bit about that and what you did.
JB: So as ambassadors for American Music Abroad, we had the incredible opportunity to tour in different countries throughout the world and really utilize our music as a form of diplomacy. And we went into different countries such as China. We toured in five cities in China and also took the opportunity to do workshops and also different presentations as well. We also were in Armenia and Peru and had these incredible opportunities just to go into small communities and to be able to also work with other artists and collaborate.
CB: And Mexico, as well.
JB: And Mexico!
CB: With American music abroad, representing and talking about issues that we’re faced with as Native Americans, but using that as a platform as well to bring healing to other communities. It was such a powerful tool. Currently for 2025, we were asked to be a part of it, I’m sorry, it’s complicated. We were supposed to be going, but unfortunately at this stage, the funding and all the ability to make those connections is in a transitional state.
JB: We hope that this program continues. I mean, the thing about AMA is that it has this incredible legacy of bringing musicians from the United States to all different countries. And I know it started out with a lot of the different jazz musicians, and so to be able to kind of follow in those footsteps of diplomacy through music was really, it really is a privilege.
AC: I’m going to ask you a silly question. You played all these different countries and I’m sure you tour widely in this country. What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever played?
JB: The weirdest, or wonderful …
CB: Everybody always references Timbuktu as being the most far-out, remote place you can go. We actually not only got to play in Timbuktu, but further and throughout the Sahara Desert during the Festival of the Desert back in 2002, 2003.
JB: That was really fun. We’ve played stages for tens of thousands of people to small communities in Peru for Shipibo women who are refugees from the Amazon rainforest, who had to be evacuated from their traditional homelands from their villages because the mining companies targeted women and utilized rape as a weapon against their tribe. So we’ve had shows from the most heartbreaking places to ice stages too. Yeah. We played on ice stages in Norway. Complete stages made of ice.
AC: My next question is a party question my music friends have with each other. What is the first album you ever bought with your very own money?
JB: Oh no. OK, our manager is leaving the room because she knows about this story. So our mom [Berta Benally] is a folk musician and she really didn’t like for us to listen to anything more than folk. She didn’t want anything in her vicinity, in her sonic vicinity other than folk. And so I really wanted to buy Bon Jovi, a Bon Jovi cassette. We were visiting one of her friends who’s this incredible, yeah, incredible musician who’s played on so many different albums and toured throughout the world with so many amazing musicians and in his own name done all that recording and touring as well, not just on other people’s albums. So he was asking me about what kind of music I was into and I was like, well, I really want to get this Bon Jovi album, and it was my first time in LA as a teenager. And so he’s like, you know what? We’re going to go get you that album, especially because your mom doesn’t want you to have that album. He drove me to a record store and I bought that cassette and I listened to it all the way heading back from LA to Arizona. So that’s the very first album I bought.
CB: He, of course, had reminded our mother that, Hey, you don’t want to be your parents. Make sure that you support your kids. Just the reminder of the power of music. Then for myself, I think the first album I bought … I’m trying to remember, it might’ve been Butthole Surfers. That’s an interesting album. And Primus.
JB: So we used to exchange mix tapes. We would just record music from the radio or get mixed tapes from folks and that’s how we learned about just the vast genres that exist in music before Spotify and algorithms and stuff.
AC: And so my last question is just a simple one. It’s just, What do you hope people take home with them after they see you perform?
JB: I really hope that people feel inspired in some way or moved to create positive change in their community. That somehow, in some way, if we are so, if there’s in any way in the universe that people feel empowered to just create that positive change in their community, that really builds bridges of respect. That’s what I hope. And that they have fun. Of course, I hope that they leave with smiles. I hope that people leave with smiles on their faces and goodness in their hearts.
CB: I also want to add that for us, Mount Blanca is such a significant place for us as Navajo and just so honored to be within our four sacred mountains and to the East, this is a place of dawn and awakening and new beginnings and just so happy to be in your space and your community and this mountain is a homecoming for us. Very honored to be invited.
