Miccosukee Indian Arts & Crafts Festival

Joe Tohonnie Jr. and the White Mountain Apache Crown Dancers
Hailing from the White Mountains of Arizona, the Apache Crown Dancers present a tradition of healing drawn directly from the highest elevations of their land. Led by singer and two-time Grammy nominee Joe Tohonnie Jr., the dancers summon the mountain spirits to protect them from enemies so they may live in harmony.

Native Pride Dancers
Composed of members of various Tribal nations, Native Pride Dancers’ mission is to educate, inspire, and motivate through the beauty and power of Native American music and dance. The group’s founder and artistic director, Larry Yazzie, is a world-champion fancy dancer and member of the Meskwaki Nation.

Frank Waln
Frank Waln is a Sicangu Lakota music artist, public speaker, and educator from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Audio Arts & Acoustics from Columbia College Chicago, where he received the Mayor’s Award for Civic Engagement.

He has gained recognition on platforms like MTV, CNN, NPR, and ESPN and has won several awards, including Native American Music Awards and “Best Music Video” at the Das Indianer International Film Festival. His work has been showcased at renowned venues like the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Kennedy Center. As a curator, he designed a music exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago and organized Chicago’s first all-Indigenous music showcase in 2022.

Waln’s writing has appeared in journals like the School Library Journal, and he contributed to “American Like Me”, a New York Times best-seller. Over the past decade, he has lectured at colleges worldwide, including Stanford and Harvard. His recent focus is on his family’s history with boarding schools, highlighted during his artist residency at Harvard University in 2023-2024, where he curated campus programming and created music honoring his great-grandmother’s resilience.

Currently, he is a professor at Western Michigan University, teaching music production and Native American studies. His self-published music is available on all streaming platforms.

Tatanka Means is an award-winning actor and stand-up comedian from Chinle, Arizona, representing the Navajo, Oglala Lakota, Yankton Dakota, and Omaha Nations. His latest film is the Oscar-nominated “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese. He is currently filming Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga,” with Part One recently released and Part Two coming this fall. Tatanka will also appear in “Wind River: Rising,” “Outer Range,” “Opus,” “Canyon of the Dead,” and the Netflix series “Ransom Canyon.”

In addition to acting, he performs stand-up comedy across Indian Country, inspiring audiences of all ages. Recently featured in the PBS special “Roots of Comedy,” Tatanka is one of the busiest Native comedians today. He was named “Entertainer of the Year” by the National Indian Gaming Association and is proud to be an alcohol- and drug-free performer.