Country clubbers, workers, lovers, rivals, gods, ghosts, Hollywood retirees, Native Americans, Hispanics, whites, the fleeting and the eternal, the deep and the dead, the people behind the gates, all mix up in this chronicle of a dying American joy. Using modern-day characters to illuminate an infamous 1908 manhunt for Willie Boy, a Native American who outran a mounted posse on foot across 500 miles of desert in the Coachella Valley, Pow Wow presents individuals that have, in many ways, utilized the desert to survive and run free.