Find a pow wow — dates, programme, registration and results
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.
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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.
Friday, August 14, 2026 — Sunday, August 16, 2026
Hosted by Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation (sample data) · Sample grounds, Sample City
Three days of dance, food and family. Sample data — dates, times and amounts are illustrative.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.