IndigiPalooza: Resistance 250

The second annual IndigiPalooza Festival is a vibrant, two-day celebration of Indigenous pride and power.
Shortly after the inaugural IndigiPalooza MT (IPFEST for short) in 2025, the organizers began discussing how another event might unfold. They didn’t want to do a simple repeat of the first event with different presenters, they wanted to have an entirely different theme. They chose RESISTANCE 250+ because 2026 is being heralded as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. They asked themselves what this means to Native people, whose stolen land (combined with the forced slave labor of Black people) is the source of the foundational wealth of settler colonial nation; the Declaration of Independence goes so far as to identify the original human inhabitants as “Merciless Indian Savages.” So they decided to devote IPFEST to the ways that Native people have resisted the genocide of entire communities for more than 250 years to not just survive, but thrive in the wake of all of this calamity.
They also wanted to go beyond the big, headline-grabbing events. Things like the occupation of Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and Standing Rock. Those acts of resistance are important but they wanted to focus on the small and significant ways Native people resist in their day-to-day lives, both personally and in community. Ways Native organizations have stepped in to address problems created, and then ignored, by settlers. How Native people have begun to address the decimation of language and culture, and rebuild traditional relationships with older than human relatives. Much of this activity has been happening underground and now more and more of it is coming to the surface. This is where they wanted to focus this effort toward education, beginning with the people directly engaged in it.