Join us Saturday, November 22nd at 2:00 p.m. at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in the Atkins Auditorium.
Powwow People (2025) is a documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering. Rather than entering as outside observers, the filmmakers organized the powwow itself, inviting dancers, singers, vendors, and community members to participate in the making of this film. Structured around the arc of a single day, the film follows four central figures, drawing the viewers into the textures, movement, and collective presence of the powwow. The documentary is both a reflection of a beloved and complicated community and a gesture toward the continuities of Native life. The short Sunflower Siege Engine will also be screened.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape–designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media.
Joanna Hearne is the Jeanne Hoffman Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where her work spans Native American and global Indigenous media studies, archival recoveries of Indigenous presence in cinema history, and contemporary digital media, digital storytelling, and animation. Her books argue for the centrality of Indigenous images and image-making to American film history. She is the author of Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (SUNY Press, 2012) and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), and the co-editor of the collections ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and By Their Work: Indigenous Women's Digital Media in North America (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
