About Us - History of NAAoG

Not noticed by the majority of Germans, Native Americans had get-togethers and organized powwows in Germany. In the beginning, most of those took place on US Military installations. They established the “American Indian Intertribal Society” in 1976, which was later, renamed “Native American Intertribal Society of Germany”, due to an increasing awareness of political correctness.

Over the years, more and more Germans have taken part in their activities. The get-togethers, powwows and other cultural events were open to the German public and took also place outside of US Military installations.

In 1994, Native Americans holding leadership positions within the Native American Intertribal Society of Germany had orders to go back to the United States. In order to maintain a meeting point and a first contact center over here in Germany, the Native American Association of Germany e.V. was founded. It is registered at the District Court (Amtsgericht) Kaiserslautern, Germany (Registration-Number VR Kai 2237) and recognized as a non-profit organization by the Finance Department (Finanzamt) of Kaiserslautern ("e.V. - eingetragener Verein" means registered association).

The NAAoG is politically and denominationally neutral.

The text above explains how everything developed until the Native American Association of Germany e.V. (NAAoG) was founded in 1994. In the context of the new discussion going on in Germany, one newspaper wrote that we are not active anymore. It is a fact that we hosted our last public event back in 2013, but an immense amount of very time consuming educational work has been done since. 

So far, we did not publish information about our activities between 1994 and 2006. Especially from 1997 until 2005 the association's motto could be described as "It's powwow time". The biggest one with approximately 3,000 spectators took place at the Garden Fair in Kaiserslautern in the year 2000. Besides powwows we organized a lot of get-togethers, workshops, and seminars. We had a group of dancers and singers presenting powwow dances at cultural events and in the context of the National Native American Heritage Month. We even had a small convoy of cars going to the US Military installations in Belgium. In November 2007, a group of Native Americans from the United States and Canada went on tour and had a really good time together with the ones who were stationed here.

These are only some examples for our activities. There is much more that was done in all of these years, like e.g. educational work, sensitivity reading, giving interviews etc. There are different reasons why we finally had to make a decision that caused the end of our powwow era. The negative impact of disrespectful behavior, a lack of a deeper understanding, ignorance, and cultural appropriation played a decisive role in this.