PowWow

Pow-wow.ca

Find an upcoming pow wow. Support the next gathering.

A pow wow is a community gathering of dancing, drumming, food, family, and cultural celebration. This is where participating communities publish event dates, locations, registration details, schedule information, and approved results. The platform is designed for community ownership, practical volunteer workflows, and the reality of a weekend that must continue in sun, rain, and unreliable venue Wi-Fi.

See upcoming pow wows For organisers
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.
116 community pages
0 published events
OCAP® data principles named up front

Browse the season

Pow wows coming up

Community directory

No events have been published for the coming season yet. When a community publishes an event, it appears here at the same time it appears on that community's own page, so the information only needs to be maintained once.

Browse the communities ->

Public listings

Upcoming Ontario pow wows

Checked August 4, 2026

These examples are drawn from public calendars while communities are being onboarded to this platform. Please confirm dates, venue details, registration requirements, and schedule changes with the host before travelling.

Nation by nation

Find a community

116 communities have a page here. Open a community page to see its programme, registration information, public updates, and results. A community with no published event yet still has a page, ready for its first listing.

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For first-time visitors

What happens at a pow wow

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

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 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 with guidance

Community guidance belongs in the product itself.

PowWow is being developed with advice from community knowledge keepers, whose guidance helps shape how the platform approaches community control, cultural information, and day-of-event operations.

Robin Beauclair in regalia, wearing a floral beaded yoke and shoulder panels, on the grounds at a pow wow.

Robin Beauclair

Cultural Oshkaabewis, Nokiiwin Tribal Council

Robin Beauclair is deeply connected to Anishinaabe culture and community. Her family roots include Fort William First Nation and Pays Plat First Nation, and Robin carries teachings and connections through the Midewin tradition. These cultural connections guide her work and her commitment to preserving and sharing Indigenous knowledge with future generations.

Robin currently serves as a Cultural Oshkaabewis with Nokiiwin Tribal Council, where she brings cultural teachings, traditional knowledge, and land-based approaches to community programming and organizational work. Robin supports the sharing of Anishinaabe teachings, ceremonies, language, and cultural practices while helping to create spaces where people can reconnect with culture, community, and one another.

First Nations data is not raw material for software.

Ownership, Control, Access and Possession frame how community information should be handled: the community writes the words, controls who can manage them, and decides what is public. The platform names the principles up front because they are a commitment it can be held to, not a badge.

First Nations Information Governance Centre OCAP® training

For organisers

What the software does

Built around how a pow wow actually runs: outdoors, often once a year, led by volunteers, and dependent on a day that cannot simply be repeated.

Event and competition management designed for how a pow wow actually runs: multiple sessions rather than one deadline, judging panels set on the day, and prize rules that each community defines for itself.

Demo event schedule showing several sessions across a pow wow weekend.

A weekend made of sessions

Grand Entry, afternoon and evening competitions, intertribal time and payouts sit on the schedule separately, because a pow wow is not one deadline.

Phone registration form with a category chosen automatically from date of birth.

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.

Judge scoring screen with categories, criteria and a sent sync state.

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.

The payout queue as the treasurer sees it: still owed, paid out, and a Pay button beside each name.

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.

Prize rule list showing several custom payout structures for a demo event.

Prize rules the community wrote

Flat payouts, placements, pooled amounts and per-session rules can all live beside each other without forcing the weekend into a preset.

Venue hub screen showing no internet, local address, queued work and sync status.

The venue hub keeps working offline

When the internet drops, the local hub keeps check-in, registration and judging moving, then syncs the queued work when the connection returns.

Bring a gathering online

Bringing your pow wow here

Every community in the directory has its own public page, web address, staff accounts, event data, and permission boundaries. Information from one community is not visible to another. If your community runs a pow wow and wants to manage registration, schedules, judging, results, and payouts here, please contact us.

Contact us