The Story of Powwow Times

Often times people ask how Powwow Times got started and what is the story behind Powwow Times.

In this post I want to share with you how we got started and what our company has been up to.

My name is Patrick Mitsuing and I grew up going to Powwows. My brother Nathan Mitsuing is a deadly grass dancer and always has been. Here is a older video of him dancing.

We would travel everywhere to go Powwow and I looked up to my brother and wanted to be a dancer just like him.

I eventually did become a fancy dancer. I love to dance Powwow and every time I went out to dance, I would feel free and exhilarating. Here is a video of me dancing.

When I graduated high school, I took an interest in business. I started to learn online marketing.

Through that learning, I learned video editing, blogging, vlogging, social media, etc.

Originally I started creating content about home business advice and leadership advice. I started to make money online through affiliate marketing, which is selling other people’s products using the internet.

It was very cool to see that you can make money online by creating content. That was my dream to just be able to have a home office, be with my kids, and be able to take care of my family from home.

The only problem was, everytime it was Powwow Season (April – October) for me, I would stop online marketing and just go Powwow.

That is how much I loved Powwow.

Then after Powwow season, I would go back to online marketing (November – March) and I would never get enough traction because I would constantly stop to do Powwow.

The Idea of Powwow Times Was Born

In 2015, my home community Powwow in Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation was coming up.

I wanted to use my skill as a online marketer to promote our Powwow.

I didn’t want to use my own personal name so I decided to create a stand alone Facebook Page.

I was thinking – LA Times, New York Times…..

Hey how about Powwow Times.

So I went to Facebook and created the page – Powwow Times.

Then I started making the video to promote the upcoming Powwow. I can’t find it online anymore, but I do remember it was kind of cheesy. I love watching UFC and I modelled how they create their promo videos with Bruce Buffer voice in the back ground and Joe Rogan hyping up the event.

I posted the video on the new Facebook Page and to my surprise it went viral.

There were likes, shares, comments, and people who started to like and follow our page.

It was truly amazing.

The Idea to Grow Powwow Times

Watching the video go viral and people start to follow our page, It gave me a huge idea.

I was already learning so much about online marketing and knew what to do from creating content in the make money from home space, that I thought maybe I can just focus on our culture and do that full time.

I had a $200 flip camera, they don’t even sell them anymore and decided I was going to document Powwows and start promoting our culture.

I also had a great reason why I wanted to share our culture.

I felt a lot of places I went to, there was a negative perception of Indigenous People. I wanted to share the beautiful side of our culture and as well as help families reconnect back with their culture and heritage.

So I went hard on recording as much as I could.

For years Powwow Times made nothing as a company. All we did every single day was record, edit, and publish.

When I got to about 5,000+ videos published, we started to make a small YouTube income. Not enough to pay a full time uploader, but enough to pay for gas to keep going to Powwows.

The Mentors Started to Come In

One of our mentors was my adopted dad, Derek Rope. He kept telling us to incorporate our business as it would lead to access to funding to grow what we started.

At this time we started to work with communities, we started to dance shows, we started curating events on a smaller scale.

In 2020, we incorporated our Powwow Times business as a Non-Profit.

Incorporating our business helped the growth of our business tremendously. We started to grow quickly, but not in the online world. We started creating more partnerships and really get our name out in the world of business.

Our First Big Break – The Making of Powwow Times

I was scrolling through Facebook one day and saw a call out for proposals from our local museum.

At this point we were going to a lot of schools teaching kids about Powwow and the stories behind the dances.

I wrote up a proposal to create Powwow Regalia from artists around Powwow Country and get the stories behind the dances recorded. This way people can come to the exhibit and learn all about Powwow. A place for people to come, instead of us going to different places.

It took a year to hear anything back from the Museum, but they eventually called and we set up a few meetings to talk about this project.

It finally got the greenlight and we got to work reaching out to all the artists we needed to make this happen, and curated our first project that was about $100,000 to get done.

The exhibit went very well and since it was created it won three museum awards which is totally amazing.

To Celebrate the Awards We Started Winning and Our Museum Exhibit

We decided as a group from the Museum that we would like to do a small Powwow demonstration and a lunch to celebrate our exhibit.

But at this time….I was starting to think bigger.

I proposed that we do a full Powwow Instead.

Everyone kind of thought I was nuts but they decided to make it happen with us.

So we started to meet up often and figure out how to run a powwow from start to finish.

Even though I’ve been going to Powwows all my life, I really didn’t know how to run a Powwow. So I had to get some advice.

Getting Some Advice From Others Who Done it Before Me

One day at a Powwow I saw the great Lisa Meeches watching the Powwow. I approached her with some tobacco and asked her …. How do I run my own Powwow?

She was so open with her information and I learned SO much just from one interaction with her.

Honestly that was worth more than going to event planning school for a few years, just in one one hour conversation.

I felt confident moving forward.

The next was learning how to write a Sponsorship Package. I learned this from my pops, Derek Rope.

Then I got advice from all the people who we now hire as our headstaff.

All this info, I was able to take back to our team and we got to work.

The First Annual Powwow Times Powwow

In October 22-24th, 2022, we hosted our first Powwow.

This was suppose to be our celebration for our Exhibit. A small little get together, turned into a full on Powwow event.

This was an amazing accomplishment for us to host and we all learned so much as a team.

We thought about everything and how this Powwow will not only accommodate the dancer mindset but the spectator mindset as well.

We also done the first annual Powwow during the pandemic which was very tough.

There was so many restrictions we had to battle and a lot of people still had a lot of fear travelling to a Powwow, but we went ahead doing it in the safest way possible.

Success is Something You Attract…..Not Chase

Through this whole journey, I’ve been doing personal development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xWthDqkQfA&t

One of my mentors said, Success is something you attract by the person you become. Powwow Times was starting to become a great entity that was attracting partnerships.

One of those partnerships was with Indigenous Tourism Alberta where we won a Marketing Award for our first annual Powwow.

Indigenous Tourism Alberta connected us with the Calgary Stampede – The Greatest Show on Earth.

Calgary Stampede started to chat with us about hosting a large scale Powwow in the Saddledome during the Calgary Stampede.

We gave them our ideas and proposed a great team to deliver this event to the world.

We just love Powwow So much and our whole company is about Powwow, so we decided that we can make it happen.

The Calgary Stampede Powwow

After we announced we were going to the Calgary Stampede Pow Wow, it was mixed with positive and negative reaction.

The negative was how we might be doing it for the money or we were greedy. The other was going into a different area and maybe stepping on other people’s toes by going into another territory and doing an event.

We never meant to offend anyone but we realised from doing all our events that you cannot please everyone.

We just wanted to give our input as Powwow people and how to run a Powwow in a way that is innovative.

The Calgary Stampede only gave us three hours per day for our powwow so it had to be different.

It meant for a fast paced Powwow that had to move quick and a format that would accommodate a three hour schedule.

I truly believe that The Calgary Stampede Powwow could be one of the biggest and most successful Powwows if they continue to make it happen each year.

I honestly thought that Calgary Stampede was one of the funnest and coolest Powwows of the year.

We did get a lot of support from the area during the event and after as well. But there was a lot of nasty stuff said about my wife and I online.

100% of anything that was made, went back into youth programming and towards our 2nd Annual Powwow.

We learned a lot about how to approach going into a new territory and how to be sensitive to the people in the area. We would love to be part of the 2nd Annual Calgary Stampede Powwow, but also want to do it in the right way.

Partnerships Start Rolling In – Making of Powwow Times

We then got contacted by Westerner Park to help them with their Westerner Days.

Right after Calgary Stampede Powwow, we had a deal with Westerner Days to create a Powwow Show. This was an awesome opportunity because Westerner Park was where we rented the venue off of to do our Powwow.

Then more communities started to reach out for us to do more events with them as well.

It was amazing the growth we started to have.

The Second Annual Powwow Times Powwow – Bigger and More Badass

Now that we officially had two Powwows under our belt.

It was time for our 2nd Annual Powwow that was held on October 14th-16th, 2022.

We didn’t have much time to plan as we were busy with Calgary Stampede Powwow and partners with other communities and organizations.

We held the Powwow in the largest arena we had in our area, the Peavey Mart Centrium Arena.

We partnered with Shaw Spotlight to have our Powwow broadcasted Nationwide on satellite television, local television, and online on our YouTube Channel.

It was an amazing hit.

We reached a lot more people and our Powwow grew 80% from our previous year in terms of dancers and 30% in terms of attendance.

The Powwow was a loss in terms of costs for the Powwow and Revenue we had. The problem is going into a Powwow blind of costs. When writing grants you want to get as much information as possible about Venue costs and many times you won’t know the costs until the Powwow is done.

The venue was actually $25,000 more than we budgeted out for. Sound was $5,000 more than we budgeted and Carpet was $3,000 more than we budgeted.

Luckily we have some funds still coming in from other projects to offset the costs. We got every single person paid from our dancers, singers, headstaff, etc.

We just slower to pay off our venue which can set up some negative relationships. We were very transparent about the situation we were at with the venue and so far they seem understanding and confident we will pay them off.

Heading to the New Year and Plans for Future

Now that we know the costs to run our Powwow in the new venue, we will be better at planning and preparing for it.

We can write the full cost into grants we apply for and know what we need for sponsorships.

We want to ramp up our social media content. We were very steady in the past where we posted new content every single day.

We are getting some grants and creating revenue to hire a full time content person for our company. We also want to have a few full time writers on writing great content on this blog daily.

We are planning more huge Youth Day events as well. We have a gala that we have planned for Sept.30th and that will be each year moving forward.

We want the Youth Day, The Gala, and The Powwow to all compliment each other and if any revenue is made at the events, it will be used to support the next event.

We plan to get into more film, record some documentaries, short series on Youtube, and gather more stories from our People.

We want to reach 1 billion people with our content and so far on YouTube I think we at 19 Million. Something like that.

The future is open to us…and we hope you stay with us for the Journey.

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