Start with four young Native-American musicians, add a dash of B.B. King's blues, Carlos Santana's guitar leads, and Sinead O'Connor's lyrics, and voila, you end up with Indigenous, a band that's putting the Nakota Nation on the rock airplay charts. Saturday, Indigenous will play one of their nearly 200 gigs this year at the Native American Film Festival in San Francisco, where "Smoke Signals" director Chris Eyre will be honored and the band's first video -- which Eyre directed -- will have its premiere.

With their album "Things We Do," Indigenous became the first Native-American band to break onto the national music scene in decades. Raised on a Yankton Sioux reservation in Marty, S.D., lead singer-guitarist Mato Nanji, 24, his sister Wanbdi, 20, brother Pte, 22, and cousin Horse, 20, crisscrossed the Midwest for years playing blues clubs, bars, and reservations. They put out three D.I.Y. albums before being signed to Pachyderm Records, the start-up Minneapolis label run by Jim Nickels, owner of Pachyderm Studios where Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and others have recorded. (Indigenous has also performed at one of Bill Clinton's inaugural balls and shared the stage with Johnny Lang and Keb Mo). Wanbdi tells EW Online that signing a record deal has its advantages: "People who wouldn't look at us before say, 'Oh, you're on a label, okay, maybe we'll give you a listen.'"