PowWow

Find a pow wow — dates, programme, registration and results

Dancers entering the arena in procession for the Grand Entry, led by an eagle staff and flags.
The arbour and the dance circle seen from the stands, with families seated around it.
A drum group seated around a large drum, singing.
Three dancers on the grass mid-dance, seen from behind, shawls and fringe in motion.
The grounds around the arena on a summer afternoon — vendor tents, families, children.

Swipe or scroll sideways to see more. Illustrations — not photographs of any particular gathering.

A pow wow is a gathering — dancing, drumming, food and family — that a community holds for its own people and for whoever comes. This is where the communities here publish theirs: when it is, where it is, how to enter, and who placed.

Running a pow wow yourself? See what the software does →

Pow wows coming up

Everything published by a community on this platform, soonest first. Each one links to the community's own page, where the programme, the registration and the results live.

On now Saturday, August 1, 2026 — Sunday, August 2, 2026

Showbiz

Hosted by Cat Lake First Nation · Lahore

On now Sunday, August 2, 2026 — Wednesday, August 5, 2026

6hop

Hosted by Cat Lake First Nation

On now Sunday, August 2, 2026

Fun Event

Hosted by Cat Lake First Nation

Friday, August 7, 2026 — Saturday, August 8, 2026

Monster

Hosted by Cat Lake First Nation

Find a community

116 communities have a page here. Open one for its programme, its registration and its results. A community with nothing published yet still has a page — it is waiting for its first event.

All 116 communities

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

W

What happens at a pow wow

A pow wow is a gathering where First Nations and Native American communities come together to dance, to sing and to honour their cultures. Some run a single afternoon and some run a week. Some are competitions with prize money; others are traditional pow wows, held for the gathering itself rather than for a placing.

The word comes from the Narragansett powwaw, “spiritual leader”. Public gatherings in something close to the present form spread from the Great Plains in the late 1800s and early 1900s — through decades in which governments worked to stop them, and communities went on holding them anyway.

A pow wow opens with the Grand Entry: the Eagle Staff first, then the flags, then the dancers, with a host drum singing them in. Veterans commonly carry the staff and the flags. An invocation, a Flag Song and a Veterans' Song follow before the dancing begins.

The dancing then runs by category — Men's Traditional, Grass and Fancy; Women's Traditional, Jingle Dress and Fancy Shawl — usually repeated down through teen, junior and tiny tot age groups, with intertribals in between that anyone present may join.

The head staff hold the day together: an MC who is the voice of the whole gathering, an arena director, head dancers who lead every dance onto the floor, and host drums whose songs the dancing is built on.

If you are going

A short summary, drawn from Wikipedia's article on the pow wow. Every community runs its own gathering its own way, and its page here is the authority on that one. Pow wow on Wikipedia

What the software does

Built around how a pow wow actually runs: outdoors, once a year, by volunteers, on a day that cannot be run again.

Event and competition management built for how a pow wow actually runs — sessions rather than a single deadline, judges picked on the day, and prize rules a community writes for itself.

Registration on the community's own terms

A window per session rather than one deadline for the weekend, with the categories, the questions and the fees the community wrote for itself. A dancer registers from a phone and keeps a link to their own entry.

A desk that works at the gate

Register someone at the table, check arrivals in by code or by name, and see who is actually here — on venue wifi, or on none.

Judging by the panel that turned up

Judges get a code at the drum, not an account weeks beforehand. A panel can change between sessions, scores go in on the judge's own phone, and names can be kept off the sheet where the community wants them off it.

Results, and then the prize money

Placings worked out from the sheets as they come in, held back until someone approves them, published to the community's page — and carried through to who is owed what.

Updates that reach the people already registered

An announcement goes on the event page and out to whoever asked to hear about it: a delayed start, a change of arena, a lost child found.

Everything prints

Nothing important exists only on a screen. Programmes, judging sheets, check-in lists and confirmation slips all print, because a dead battery is not a reason for a competition to stop.

The community's own words

Colours, logo, the words for a dancer and a category, the languages the page answers in — settings, not code. Bringing a community on is a form, not a release.

Bringing your pow wow here

Every community in that directory has its own page, its own address and its own staff accounts, and nothing about one is visible to another. If your community runs a pow wow and wants to run it here, get in touch.

Talk to us