June is here, and so is the heat, both outside and on the powwow trail. Powwow season is officially heating up, and we've got a big list of upcoming powwows for you down below.
Quick heads up: tomorrow you'll get our twice-a-month powwow calendar newsletter, packed with everything coming up over the next three months. Keep an eye on your inbox for that one.
And here's the fun one, I put together a Native pop culture trivia quiz. TV shows, movies, actors, actresses, think you know your stuff when it comes to Native representation on screen?
Get a perfect score, and you're entered into a drawing.
Thanks,
Paul G PowWows.com
PS - I started a brand new free weekly newsletter called This Week Around Indian Country. Every Thursday, I hand-pick 10 news stories from across Indian Country and drop them straight in your inbox. Politics, culture, gaming, events, the stories that matter. It's free, it's weekly, and if you're not already on it, I'll drop a link below. First issue already went out and the response was great.
You've seen them on the big screen and binge-watched their shows. But how well do you really know Native American actors, movies, and TV?
From the groundbreaking indie films that started it all to the Emmy-winning series lighting up streaming right now, Native talent has been shaping Hollywood for decades β and the stories just keep getting better.
There's a version of American history most of us were taught. Pilgrims, Columbus, Lewis and Clark, the Wild West. Somewhere in the margins, Native Americans appear, mostly as backdrop.
That version leaves out a lot.
It leaves out a civilization that was, at its peak, larger than London. It leaves out one of the most important legal minds in 19th-century America β a man who invented something no single person had ever done alone before him. It leaves out a military force so dominant it stopped the Spanish Empire cold for 150 years. It leaves out a network of nations whose system of government helped inspire the one that now governs 330 million people.
On June 18, 1934, Congress did something it had almost never done before: it admitted that federal Indian policy had been a failure, and it changed direction.
For nearly 50 years, the Dawes Act of 1887 had been breaking up tribal lands, parceling them out as individual "allotments," and selling off whatever was left as "surplus." By the 1930s, tribes had lost roughly two-thirds of the land base they'd held before that policy began. Tribal governments had been pushed aside. Traditional ways of organizing communities were actively discouraged.
The Indian Reorganization Act changed that.
For the first time, tribes were given a real path to write their own constitutions, form their own governments, and manage their own affairs. Land sales to outside buyers stopped. Some lands that had been declared "surplus" began making their way back into tribal hands.
It wasn't perfect. The constitutions were modeled on a federal template, and not every tribe chose to adopt the new system. But it marked a turning point β the first time in decades that Washington's policy moved toward strengthening tribal governments instead of dismantling them.
And that shift didn't stop in 1934. It's still happening.
This spring, more than 1,600 tribal leaders and federal partners gathered for the 2026 Tribal Self-Governance Conference, where tribes shared how they're now designing, funding, and managing their own infrastructure, schools, and health programs β work that decades ago would have been entirely out of their hands. Tribal nations today are running their own school systems, building their own clinics, and managing their own forests and water β not as an exception, but as the standard.
What started as a single act of Congress reversing course in 1934 has grown into something much bigger: tribes leading their own future, on their own terms.
Want more of these types of stories?
π Subscribe to This Week in Native History and make sure the full story is always in your inbox.
If you've ever missed a pow wow because you just didn't know about it in time, this is for you.
The Powwows.com Pow Wow Calendar eBook gives you every pow wow for the next 12 months, organized by state and month, in a searchable PDF you can pull up on your phone anywhere.
New edition every month. Always current. June's book is now available.
$5.00 / month
$3.75 / month
Pow Wow Calendar eBook
View Pow Wow listings by month and state for the next 12 months.
Each month we will send a new edition! The ebook... Read more
Some things are better talked about than just read.
The Circle is where the conversation continues β a place to ask questions, share what you know, post photos from the trail, and connect with people who get it. No ads, no algorithm deciding what you see. Just real people who care about the same things you do.
This week's conversation starter:
What's one travel "splurge" you think is always worth the money?
Come jump into the conversation, see what everybody else is saying, and add your pick too. I always love seeing where these discussions go.
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