For four days in October, the small mountain town of Red Lodge will host an Indigenous arts and culture festival built around a simple idea: that neighbors should know each other's stories. The Neighboring Nations Indigenous Arts and Culture Festival runs October 9 through 12, 2026, timed to land on Indigenous Peoples' Day, and its organizers have designed it less as a spectator event than as a long weekend of shared meals, shared art, and shared conversation.
The festival is the work of Indigenous Impact Co., a Native-owned management consulting firm that describes its mission as catalyzing Native-led solutions through strategy, storytelling, and capacity-building. The company's founder, Jael Kampfe, grew up in Red Lodge as part of an extensive fourth-generation ranching family of Scottish and German descent. She now lives in nearby Bearcreek, on the traditional homelands of the Oceti Sakowin, Cheyenne, and Apsáalooke peoples, with her husband, Gerald Sherman, whom she describes as Blue Star Man.
Kampfe's path to founding the festival runs through decades of work in Native economic development. She attended Yale University, where she developed the writing and listening skills she would later put to use helping Lakota traditional chief and sun dance leader Albert White Hat Sr. write and publish "Reading and Writing the Lakota Language," the first Lakota language curriculum written by a fluent speaker. Together with other national leaders, they co-founded Four Times Foundation, where Kampfe served as founding executive director. The foundation made equity investments in reservation-based Native entrepreneurs while strengthening the ecosystem around them, and it reported a business success rate that surpassed the national average despite serving some of the poorest counties in the United States. Kampfe was later hired to adapt that model statewide in South Dakota, co-creating the Dakota Rising fellowship program at Dakota Resources. The Montana Indian Equity Fund, she notes, was influenced by Four Times Foundation's success. She also became the first woman to manage and later lease the Lazy EL Ranch, a 12,000-acre cattle operation and guest business.
That background shows in how the festival is structured. Rather than a single ticketed showcase, Neighboring Nations unfolds across four days, with most of the programming open to the public. It begins a day early, on Thursday, October 8, with the raising and "Lighting of the Teepees" in partnership with the Pretty Shield Foundation. The foundation uses lighted lodges as symbols of hope, healing, and the relationships that carry people forward; festival-goers are invited to help raise the lodges and then gather as they are illuminated. A community feed follows, with buffalo stew and frybread served as a way to visit and spend time together before the weekend gets underway. The evening closes with a fireside chat featuring Dr. Kelly Sherman-Conroy, an Oglala Lakota theologian described as the first Native female theologian in the ELCA Christian tradition, speaking on storytelling, relationship, and responsibility — on the stories we inherit, the stories we tell about one another, and how listening differently can change the way we understand our obligations to each other and to the places we call home.
The Pretty Shield Foundation's teepee work has deep roots in the region. At a 2022 event called "Welcome to Indian Country" on the 406 Events Lawn in east Billings, the foundation erected teepees in the traditional Apsáalooke, or Crow, style and hosted a Lighting of the Teepees, with volunteers explaining the purpose of each part of the lodge as they raised it. Several teepees were lit in various colors along Fourth Avenue North, a busy road in east Billings that sees an estimated 12,000 cars a day, in the week leading up to that event. The Billings Symphony partnered on the program, which paired Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest with a five-piece contemporary Indigenous music ensemble for an evening of song, spoken word, and satire honoring elders and ancestors. The same impulse — putting Native art and ceremony in plain public view rather than behind a ticket window — animates the Red Lodge festival.
Friday, October 9, brings the official opening: an Indigenous fashion show, dancers, and a welcome, featuring the work of Brocade and Chokecherry Creek. Choke Cherry Creek is the label of Angela Howe-Parrish, an Indigenous-owned business creating contemporary Apsáalooke designs, with collections that carry names like Strength in Roots, Legacy, and Lateral Kindness. Its stated aim is to elevate and inspire all generations through fashion, design, and culture. The label has shown at the Reservation Economic Summit Indigenous Fashion Show and Networking Reception at the Omnia Night Club at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, so the Red Lodge runway represents a homecoming of sorts for work that has traveled well beyond Montana.
The weekend also includes a special screening of award-winning short films, cooking classes, and other performances. Organizers note that several festival experiences — including the film screenings, the fashion show, cooking classes, and select performances — have limited seating, so visitors planning around those specific events should look into reservations. The broader festival, however, is designed to be easy to drop into.
That openness is the point. Red Lodge sits at the foot of the Beartooth Scenic Byway, a route that draws travelers through some of the most dramatic country in the Rocky Mountains, and the town itself is small enough that a four-day cultural festival visibly changes its rhythm. The event's framing — Native art, Native stories, Native identities, all under the banner of neighboring nations — suggests an invitation rather than a performance. The name itself carries the argument: that the peoples who have lived on this land and the people who live on it now are, in the end, neighbors, and that the work of being good relatives is ongoing.
For anyone in the region looking for a way to spend Indigenous Peoples' Day weekend, the festival offers an unusually full slate: a lodge raising and a bowl of buffalo stew on Thursday, a fashion show and dancers on Friday, films and food and music through the weekend, and a closing that lands on the holiday itself. Most of it is free to walk into. The teepees, lit against the October dark, are likely to be the image people carry home.