Native Business Magazine - May 2019

NAVAJO NATION PRESIDENT

JONATHAN NEZ NAVAJO NATION VICE PRESIDENT MYRON LIZER EMPOWER ENTREPRENEURSHIP. Busin e v ti

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THEIR STRATEGY? BUY NAVAJO, BUY LOCAL.

GEORGE RIVERA: CASTING CULTURAL ICONS IN BRONZE

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IN THIS ISSUE MAY 2019 • Volume01 Number 6

on the cover

Jonathan Nez & Myron Lizer Navajo Nation President and Vice President See Page 6.

BY ANDREW RICCI Cover Photo Courtesy: The Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President

T’ÁÁ HWÓ’ AJÍT’ÉEGO (To Be Able To Do For Yourself)

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PHOTO COURTESY THE NAVAJO NATION OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

See page 6.

BY ANDREW RICCI

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Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs Our "Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs" issue illustrates the sheer number of Native entrepreneurs and Native-owned small businesses thriving across Indian Country.

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NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

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21

27

Energy

Art & Tourism

Consulting

Geoff Hager Allen G. Cadreau

Ed DesRosier George Rivera

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24

Vanessa Roanhorse Lillie Keener Stephine Poston

Agriculture / Hemp

Manufacturing & Construction

Kaben & Shelby Smallwood

Cathryn Palmer JC Seneca Aaron Thomas Carlos Muñoz

Art & Tourism

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Steven Paul Judd Peter Boome

Insurance

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Matt Silverstein Robert Weaver

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Consulting

Graphic Design & Media Travis Komahcheet Don Thornton Sterlin Harjo & Jeremy Charles

Michell Hicks Jamie Fullmer MAY 2 0 1 9

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FOUNDERS/PUBLISHERS

Gary (Cherokee) and Carmen (Makah/Chippewa-Cree/Yakama) Davis

EDITORIAL

Executive Editor Carmen Davis - carmen@nativebusinessmag.com Senior Editor Kristin Butler - kristin@nativebusinessmag.com

CREATIVE

Art Director Kym Tyler (Diné) Creative Consultant Vestalight Sevenly

WRITERS

Contributing Writers Andrew Ricci • Suzette Brewer (Cherokee) • Lynn Armitage (Oneida Nation) Renae Ditmer (Chippewa) • Clifton Cottrell (Cherokee) Debra Utacia Krol (Xolon Salinan Tribe) • Josh Robertson • Mark Fogarty Mary Belle Zook (Citizen Potawatomi Nation)

ADVERTISING & EVENTS

Event Director Yvonne Schaaf (Salt River Pima/Mojave/Quechan) - yvonne@nativebusinessmag.com Advertising Director Janee' Doxtator-Andrews (Oneida) - advertising@nativebusinessmag.com

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NATIVE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

PHOTOS BY WHITNEY PATTERSON PHOTOGRAPHY

There is a defining spirit and momentum of self-reliance rising across Indian Country.

Yet too often these inspiring conversations are relegated to Tribal sustainability and exclude Native entrepreneurship, which is foundational in building strong Tribal economies and keeping dollars circulating within our Native communities.

Native entrepreneurs have not been showcased enough. And in the spirit of that, our “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue stands to raise the profile of some of these powerful change agents who have taken the initiative to fulfill their dreams, while providing important products and services, and oftentimes offering meaningful employment to Tribal and community members. Many of these Native entrepreneurs launched their businesses with little to no startup capital. Their perseverance, innovation and resilience turned mere ideas into reality.

May the Native entrepreneurs profiled in this issue of Native Business serve as role models for up-and-coming generations across Indian Country to recognize their power and capacity to build thriving businesses to achieve self sovereignty that in turn benefits and uplifts their community directly and makes a positive impact on Indian Country as a whole.

Two covers distinguish our May 2019 “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue, honoring leadership of the two largest Tribes in the United States: the Navajo Nation and the Cherokee Nation.

The cover story displayed on this side of the magazine details the incredible influence and vision of Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer, who are committed to supporting Native entrepreneurs and Native-owned businesses. President Nez and Vice President Lizer shared with Native Business one particularly creative way that they are promoting reservation entrepreneurship — through “Buy Navajo, Buy Local,” a movement that encourages Navajo people to commit to purchasing goods on reservation rather than sending money to border towns. “‘Buy Navajo, Buy Local’ is self-resiliency at its best,” Vice President Lizer said. “It’s self-government. We challenge our people to recognize that they control their destiny, and when they change their purchasing decisions daily, it could lead to economic viability.”

We organized the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” by sector to demonstrate the

diversity of industries where Native people are making substantial contributions. This half of the magazine shines a light on entrepreneurs who started businesses in the Energy, Manufacturing & Constructing, Agriculture / Hemp, Art & Tourism, Insurance, Consulting, and Graphic Design & Media sectors.

In the Energy field, we spotlight Geoff Hager, the Osage founder of Big Elk Energy Systems, who leads his business with this mentality: “If you want someone to invest in you, you have to go all-in yourself.”

In the Manufacturing & Construction category, Cat Palmer, Kiowa, shares her considerable career change from nail technician to decorative concrete artisan as the founder of TCB Construction.

Kaben and Shelby Smallwood, the Choctaw brothers behind Symbiotic Aquaponic, helm our Agriculture / Hemp category. The pair launched a company that designs and builds customized backyard and commercial aquaponic farming systems for any individual, Tribe or organization.

In the Art & Tourism category, Native Business features George Rivera, the former Governor of the Pueblo of Pojoaque who has carved out a successful career as an artist sculpting cultural icons. He's currently creating 13 bronze sculptures, slightly larger than life size, for Pechanga Resort and Casino.

In our Insurance sector, we spotlight Robert Weaver, the Quapaw founder of RWI Benefits, who is committed to getting Tribes better health care at a better price.

Among the many great consultants across Indian Country, we recognize Stephine Poston, who, amongst many other accomplishments, served as the lead event planner for the historic honoring of the first Native Congresswomen, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, in Washington D.C. in January 2019.

And in our Graphic Design & Media category, we share the great story of how two Native entrepreneurs, Jeremy Charles (Cherokee) and Sterlin Harjo (Creek), merged their cinemative

and video production aspirations to form Firethief Productions.

The release of our premiere “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue — and sixth print edition of Native Business Magazine — coincides with Native Business’ inaugural Native Business Summit, which we are hosting May 13-15 at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It would be remiss not to highlight these firsts that reflect the purpose of Native Business: to spotlight, uplift and inspire Tribally and Native-owned businesses.

We rise together, and the heart of everything that we do at Native Business is to empower the self-sovereignty, self-sustainability and prosperity of Indian Country. Native entrepreneurs play a significant role in driving Native economies.

As the Nez-Lizer Administration reinforces through its “Buy Navajo, Buy Local” initiative, the growth of Native-owned companies will equate to community growth. If we hire our own people, and purchase goods and services from our own people, we will see Native communities evolve and become more and more powerful economic forces, which will catalyze business opportunities and inspire entrepreneurship among future generations throughout Indian Country. If there is one take away for you from this issue, it is: We are the change we’ve been waiting for.

Onward, GARY DAVIS Publisher

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JONATHAN NEZ, MYRON LIZER

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THE FUTURE OF THE NAVAJO NATION

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By Andrew Ricci

ast year marked the 150th year since the signing of the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, which, along with the Long Walk of the Navajo four years prior to the treaty’s signing, was a turning point and landmark event in Nava-

jo Nation history.

PHOTO COURTESY THE NAVAJO NATION OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

“The United States government brought us all together and began to take us on this forced walk to a reservation 400 miles from our homeland,” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez told Native Business Magazine. “We lost a lot of people who couldn’t keep up on this forced march, including our elderly, mothers who were expecting, the sick and the young.”

“It marked a really dark time in Navajo history,” Nez continued. “We as a Navajo people were placed in captivity on that reserve.”

With the signing of the treaty, the Navajo people were allowed to return to their homeland. When they got back, however, Nez says that the Navajo people found complete devastation as a result of the United States’ scorched Earth campaign designed to subjugate indigenous people, pushing them to their knees using starvation and fear.

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COVER STORY

“When we came back here to our homeland, all the homes were burned, the farms were burned, and the crops were devastated,” Nez said. “So that was a time of rebuilding our Nation.”

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public administration from Northern Arizona University, Nez was working on a doctoral degree when he found himself elected to his first public position.

“I was elected into office as the vice president of the chapter, which is kind of like the vice mayor of a community,” Nez said. “A couple of years after that, the next thing you know, they elected me to the Tribal Council just like my grandfather. I was at a very young age — in my early 30s after finishing school.”

Nez served three terms as Navajo Nation Council Delegate, representing the chapters of Shonto, Oljato, Tsah Bi Kin and Navajo Mountain. He also served two terms on the Navajo County Board of Supervisors for District 1.

When Russell Begaye, who served as Navajo Nation President from 2015 until earlier this year, asked Nez to serve as his running mate, Nez prayed about it before agreeing to join the ticket.

“Being a very young age, I think I was looked at as the bridge between the younger and older generation,” he said.

Nez said that holding the position of Vice President for four years gave him new insights about the executive side of government, as well as opportunities to engage with the wider community.

“You know, 27,000 square miles is a big nation,” Nez said. “Not everybody has the same issues. The community I come from has different issues than folks here on the other side of the Nation, so I got an idea of the priorities that were out there.”

At the end of his term as Vice President,

Nez says that he was encouraged to take the next step up, and on November 6, 2018, the Navajo Nation selected Nez and Lizer as their leaders for the next four years.

Myron Lizer says there were a lot of steps along his path to the Navajo Nation’s Vice Presidency. Like Nez, his early life took place in a rural community — Fort Defiance, Arizona, a 6.08-square-mile unincorporated community registering a population of 3,624 in the 2010 Census.

“I stumbled out of the block, so to speak,” Lizer said. “In my first try at college, I flunked out. But I was raised in a Christian home, and I aspired for something better than myself, and I think that’s what kept me alive — always looking for a better way of doing things.”

Eighteen years after leaving college without a degree, Lizer gave it another try as a nontraditional student — this time graduating from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business Administration.

That was in 2006, when Lizer was 40 years old with three children, two cars and two houses.

Prior to his elected office, Lizer collected a resume rich with business experience.

He spent 28 years in retail management working for four Fortune 500 companies.

He has been an entrepreneur and an accountant. He was part of the team that promoted partnering with the Nation of Israel in 2012 to advance business and eco-

PHOTOS COURTESY THE NAVAJO NATION OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

For President Nez, this rebuilding is a crucial — and often ignored — part of his Nation’s history. When most schools teach Navajo or Native American history, he says that they end with the Long Walk and the signing of the treaty. But how the Navajo have rebuilt into the Nation they are today is the real story that needs to be told, he says.

“I truly believe that we are missing the biggest part of the Navajo story, which is the history of the resilience and overcoming as a people,” Nez said. “We walked all the way back — 400-plus miles — from Fort Sumner back to our homeland.”

“Fast-forward 151 years, and people look up to the Navajo Nation,” he said. “The story that we’re trying to retell this year is to remind ourselves that our ancestors never gave up during that time period.”

At 43 years old, Nez is the youngest person to be elected President of the Navajo Nation, and along with his running mate, Myron Lizer, they govern a physical territory larger than 10 U.S. states. At 27,413 square miles, it’s roughly 3,300 square miles bigger than the state of West Virginia.

Nez grew up in the rural community of Shonto, where he spoke Navajo as his first language. Growing up, many people would tell him stories about his grandfather, H.T. Donald, who was a former Navajo Nation Council Delegate for Shonto Chapter.

“My grandfather was on the Tribal Council, and he passed away when I was a year old, but my mom says that my grandfather held me as a baby,” Nez said. “When I grew up later on, I heard stories of how my grandfather helped a lot of people.

Every time I would say my grandfather’s name, people would say ‘you know, he really helped me.’”

“I thought, ‘man, what a great way to leave this Earth, you know, to be known as helping others,’” he continued. “So really, that started my pursuit to try to help folks and maybe go into politics — not just because of my family name, but to work hard at it.”

After getting a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in

COVER STORY

nomic relationships. And he’s helped foster a sense of business acumen in his community, leading financial literacy courses and helping other Native Americans write business plans to qualify for business start-up loans, grants, and investments.

“My family has been on our Navajo Nation for over 48 years in some shape or form,” Lizer said. “We got good at starting businesses and expanding businesses, and now we’re looking for the next generation to take over, which will be the third generation.”

“You’ve got to be adept at good business skills and have good business acumen by spending less than you make,” Lizer continued. “That way, you put it away for a rainy day and when opportunity comes, you’re able to invest in it. That’s how we’ve led our lives up to this point, and I hope to teach that to the next generation and the next generation.”

been passed down.”

Part of this involves focusing on promoting economics in a way that members of the Nation understand.

Nez and Lizer see a lot of potential to improve the lives of the Navajo Nation’s members if they can get them to understand the power of their collective dollars, which is why the administration has prioritized a “Buy Navajo, Buy Local” initiative.

“If you’re able to take care of yourself, then you’re able to have hope for yourself,” Nez said. “I think it starts with the money that we may have in our wallet, and to utilize that money in our community, on our Nation, to help jumpstart the larger economy here. If we can reteach that and start with this initiative, which would be ongoing throughout the year, it will give our Navajo people an understanding of how powerful our dollar is here on our Nation.

“We’re able to push a lot of the social ills off our Nation if we can just reframe or change the way we think,” Nez said. “We want to grow our own businesses and our own entrepreneurs, and the more we can

PHOTO COURTESY

In addition to ending a dark period for the Tribe and allowing them to return to

their homeland, the Treaty of Bosque Redondo was also critical because it formally recognized the Navajo Nation’s inherent sovereignty.

“As you may have noticed, we don’t call ourselves the Navajo reservation anymore,” Nez said. “We call ourselves the Navajo Nation, because that treaty recognized the nation-to-nation relationship for over 150 years.”

“Before that signing, we were a Nation,” Nez continued. “We were a people who took care of each other.”

One of the priorities of the Nez-Lizer Administration is reinforcing that inherent sovereignty and the possibilities that it provides.

“We’re really letting our people know how strong our ancestors were and how that resilient teaching has been passed down from generation to generation,” Nez said. “And at the same time, letting our people know that we have the ability to solve most or maybe even all of our problems here on the Navajo Nation if we just work together and utilize our teachings, our culture and our traditions that have

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Lizer says that after 150 years, the Nation is in the first year of a new awakening, marked by initiatives like “Buy Navajo, Buy Local.”

“We want to be ahead of the game economically, educationally, definitely lifestyle, and recognizing the need for renewable energy development,” Lizer said. “We want to lead the country in this, not only Indian Country but our national United States of America.”

“We need to change our thinking,” Lizer continued. “‘Buy Navajo, Buy Local’ is self-resiliency at its best. It’s self-government. We challenge our people to recognize that they control their destiny, and when they change their purchasing decisions daily, it could lead to economic viability. It’ll be small, but it’ll still be saving dollars from eroding off the Nation and staying locally.”

Lizer describes this as the first step, and it’s one that is fundamental to his and Nez’s long-term strategy for the Nation. Even though the initiative by itself may not be a panacea, he says that it will enhance the Nation’s tax base and generate more for future development. And in making progress toward both of these goals, they lay the groundwork for further activity.

“We need to look and turn over every stone of opportunity,” Lizer said. “You know, as well as I know, that there’s billions of dollars out there, and I’ve always

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said that money is kind of like electricity: it flows through the path of least resistance. For those that have it, they want to keep it or they want to invest in new opportunities, and we’ve definitely got a lot of opportunities on the Navajo Nation and much more in Indian Country.”

In April, Nez and his Vice President marked

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PHOTO COURTESY THE NAVAJO NATION OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

keep our dollar here on the Nation, the better off we will be in the future.”

Lizer added: “Since the treaty, we’ve been conditioned in a lot of ways. But if we’re to overcome that, we need a better discipline, or we will continue to struggle.”

their 100th day in office. Since the first day, Nez said they hit the ground running.

There’s a Navajo teaching, Nez said, called T’áá hwó’ ajít’éego, that guides the work of his Administration.

“One of the things that we’ve been telling folks is that we have the power to change our future for the better,” Nez said.

“Folks will call that sovereignty out there in Tribal Nations, but we call it T’áá hwó’ ajít’éego — to be able to do for yourself.

And when you do for yourself, you make improvements in yourself and your family, then you give back to your community.

Once you give back to your community, just imagine how much better off your Nation or your people will be.”

“One-hundred-and-fifty-plus years ago, that was how the Navajo people lived — T’áá hwó’ ajít’éego,” Nez continued. “I think it’s time to go full circle in bringing that back to the forefront of our way of life. And once we recognize that here, once all 350,000-plus members recognize that, I guarantee you we will be stronger and healthier for the next 150 years and continue to be leaders in Indian Country.”

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he “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue serves to uplift Native business founders and leaders who are demonstrating innovation, professionalism and self-determination. Their pursuit of self-sovereignty benefits their communities with valuable goods and services, and oftentimes critical employment. Leading by example, they empower and inspire other Native entrepreneurs to start businesses and fulfill their dreams.

Native Business Magazine’s recognition of 50 Native entrepreneurs also stands to reinforce the notion that predominantly investing in businesses outside of Native communities is hindering Indian Country’s overall economic progress. When money circulates within Native communities between Tribal enterprises, private Native-owned businesses, the employees of those businesses and Tribal citizens, it drives an economy where everyone gains — Tribal governments and enterprises, Native families and individual Native entrepreneurs.

Indian Country is growing in number and strength every day, and thus the potential for an increase in entrepreneurship across business sectors is limitless. Considering our Native people have survived hundreds of years of active cultural, social, political and economic oppression, we inherently possess the qualities necessary for entrepreneurship, including the determination and resilience to persist in spite of barriers, such as limited access to capital, resources and infrastructure. We know how to adapt to challenges and persevere, and we embrace a positive mindset that fosters business development — including the patience and fortitude to cultivate sustainable businesses that will benefit future generations of Native people to come.

As Native people, we descend from ancestors who lead entrepre-

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Native-owned private businesses help to create functioning economies and essential jobs in Indian Country.

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a sustainable Native economy is nothing more than a concept or idea.

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WITHOUT NATIVE ENTREPRENEURS TO SOURCE OPPORTUNITY,

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neurial lives and built economies like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan.

We need look no further than our past to recognize our inherent worth, competence and wherewithal to not only survive but to prosper.

Our recurring list of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” illustrates the sheer number of Native entrepreneurs and Native-owned small businesses thriving across Indian Country.

Native Business delivers a mix of snapshots and lengthier profiles of these 50 Native entrepreneurs, in no particular hierarchy, documenting and memorializing their innovation and self-determination. Organized by category, our list demonstrates the diversity of industries where Natives are making substantial contributions.

This half of the magazine shines a light on entrepreneurs who started businesses in the Energy, Manufacturing & Constructing, Agriculture / Hemp, Art & Tourism, Insurance, Consulting, and Graphic Design & Media sectors.

The visionaries featured in our premiere list of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” play a vital role in ending the cycle or loop of dependence on federal and Tribal governments, or any external source, to realize success. These Native entrepreneurs are accomplishing their business goals and dreams through resourcefulness and ingenuity. It’s this mentality and inspired action that will improve the standard of living across Indian Country and change the future of our people.

JUSTIN BENNETT

CAYUGA ONGWEOWEH

By Mark Fogarty

PHOTO COURTESY JUSTIN BENNETT

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ative-owned Ongweoweh Corp. derived its name from the Haudenosaunee word meaning “original or real people,” according to President Justin Bennett, and it’s a signal to potential customers that they will be doing business with real people.

“The business relationship will be with real human beings,” is how Bennett puts the company philosophy.

The firm got its start in 1978 by Frank C. Bonamie, a Cayuga Tribal member in the construction trade who saw an opportunity in pallets, the wooden racks that goods get loaded on for transport. From a modest beginning in a barn in Spencer, New York (“it was just him and his son,” Bennett said), the firm has grown to one with 260 employees (80 in its headquarters in Ithaca, New York) and revenues of nearly a quarter billion dollars last year. It has locations in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Bonamie had many contacts with the federal government, other Tribes and private firms in his construction business, but

ker that provides pallet management to its customers, which include some Fortune 500 firms.

In addition to traditional wood, it works with pallets made of plastic, composites or corrugated pallets.

It also has specialized in technology (called NativeTrax) that can track pallets from different suppliers. This is environmentally friendly because instead of being discarded, these pallets can be kept and repaired by vendors who get a rebate. Then Ongweoweh resells them.

Pallet shipping also involves a lot of packaging, and Ongweoweh includes this in the recycling effort, saving a lot of material from going to the landfill through a unit called 7Gen Waste Logistics that gives vendors credits on the material returned.

Ongweoweh’s growth has also come through acquisitions. In 2012 it purchased White and Co. and its software programs Best Pallet and Best Load. Best Pallet is a pallet design program. Different loads can have different requirements, said Bennett, so a design for a lighter pallet that works with what is being shipped can save a customer money.

A customer shipping brick needs a heavy-duty pallet, said Bennett, but a customer shipping sneakers can use a much cheaper, lighter pallet.

The same is true with Best Load, which his next move came about because a friend optimizes the loading of units depending knew of an opportunity in Rochester, New on the product and comes up with the opYork. The company was Kodak, and they timal way of stacking the load or moving needed pallets and wanted to work with mithe wooden boards. This can nority suppliers. result in an 8 percent to 15 Kodak remains a customer percent savings for the custo this day, Bennett said, and tomer, Bennett said.

Ongweoweh got an opportu“Ongweoweh strives to be nity to grow by finding pallet an adviser to its customers makers close to Kodak plants when it comes to secondaround the country and broary packaging,” Bennett askering pallets for them. serted. “We advise them to Revenues have grown look at the science and the from $76 million in 2006 engineering to discover new to $246 million in 2017, a ways to save.” track that could put them The firm is quick to adnear the $1 billion mark in vertise its core values and rethe next decade. “Over the Ongweoweh Corp. Founder, sponsibilities. “Ongweoweh years there’s been some rapid Frank C. Bonamie strives to abide by our basic growth,” Bennett acknowlcorporate values in addition to abiding by edged. (Bennett is a former executive directhe values of the ‘Seventh Generation’ phitor of housing at the Cayuga Nation.) losophy derived from the Iroquois Great Law The firm has small operations in New of Peace. Our core values include Integrity, York, Illinois and Georgia that manufacture Respect, Accountability and Stewardship,” new and recycled pallets, to keep it current the firm states. with industry trends. But mostly it is a broMAY 2 0 1 9

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MANUFACTURING & CONSTRUCTION

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

TCB CONSTRUCTION, LLC

By Josh Robertson

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aking the career change from nail technician to decorative concrete artisan may seem like a radical shift, but Cat Palmer of TCB Construction assures us it wasn't. Sometimes the entrepreneurial vision is about seeing the similarities others don't.

“The nail industry and the decorative concrete industry — it's the same chemical makeup, it's just a larger canvas,” she says. “Polymer, catalyst… I just got it. And I loved it.”

Palmer threw herself into decorative concrete, launching her own company in 2003. Her guiding principle is communication.

Her product is expensive, and it can take a prospective client a year to pull the trigger; Palmer romances them with honesty and information. "Build that relationship," she says. "If they choose me, great, but if they don't, I still like to give them a lot of knowledge.

And that way, when they do pick me, they feel really good about handing over the money. Sometimes I worry that I text my clients too much, but in the end, they love it."

Palmer is descended from Kiowa celebrity — her grandpas (technically grand-uncles) were Gus, Dixon and George Palmer, of the Black Leggings warrior society. The inspiration from her famous ancestors, who danced for three U.S. Presidents, is ever-present.

"It drives me," she says, "especially in construction, where I want to be that Native-owned, woman-owned business in a field that is dominated by caucasian men. To have the respect from colleagues because I've been doing it for so long. I didn't let anything stop me — I feel my ancestors' guidance, like these doors are opening up for me because of their hardship."

Palmer is in the process of opening a second office, in Florida.

She has investigated the move and feels confident that the market is there. She also feels TCB Construction now has the standing and capabilities to seek out the Tribal contracts — casinos, gas stations, housing — she hasn't yet pursued. She looks forward to calling on fellow Native contractors and working more closely with Bank2, owned by the Chickasaws. "Any time I can do business with other Native American companies," she says, "that's my first priority."

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“I

had the idea that if we were going to succeed in business, we had to put ourselves in control of our own destiny,” JC Seneca told Native Business. A member of the Seneca Nation, the serial entrepreneur started his first business in 1987 — selling 60 cartons of cigarettes from his camper. Eventually, that retail

PHOTO COURTESY NICOLE SENECA

CATHRYN PALMER KIOWA

SENECA SIX NATIONS MANUFACTURING, NATIVE PRIDE TRAVEL PLAZA & BUFFALO CIGARETTES

AARON LUMBEE THOMAS METCON

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n 1999, Aaron Thomas launched his construction business, notable for its emphasis on energy-positive buildings that produce more energy than they consume. The firm’s current delivery methods break down to 28 percent general contracting, 51 percent construction management, and 21 percent design build.

Construction areas that Metcon targets are commercial-retail-corporate; education, government, health care; hospitality-multifamily and infrastructure.

Metcon, based in Pembroke, North Carolina, capital of the

Lumbee Nation, counts five offices around the Carolinas and employs 80 people. It has been involved in more than 650 construction project completions over the years.

Metcon’s buildings help reduce expenses for business and organizations by lowering energy costs. Natural sunlight is used to contribute a significant portion of lighting, and construction materials are often recycled or salvaged.

“It’s extremely fulfilling to be constructing energy-positive buildings that are not only protecting Mother Earth, but also providing amazing building environments, while reducing the total cost of ownership for our clients,” Thomas told Native Business.

As for the future of Metcon? “We’re in growth mode,” Thomas said.

PHOTO COURTESY AARON THOMAS

PHOTO COURTESY CATHRYN PALMER

MANUFACTURING & CONSTRUCTION

JC SENECA

operation turned into a 50-acre property and truck stop called Native Pride Travel Plaza, which houses a smoke shop, gas station, high-speed Diesel pumps and a popular diner in Irving, New York.

Seneca also developed and trademarked his own brand of cigarettes: BUFFALO Cigarettes.

“I produce my own cigarettes, and I haul my own fuel,” said Seneca, who also acts as motor fuel wholesaler and transporter with his own fleet of trucks. “I’m totally self-sufficient.”

For the past 10 years, Seneca has produced BUFFALO Cigarettes at his tobacco plant, Six Nations Manufacturing — self-capitalized with the income created through his retail business. Seneca currently employs more than 100 people across his enterprises.

In 2011, he started the JC Seneca Foundation, a nonprofit committed to advancing healthy living in body, mind and spirit for the people of the Seneca Nation and surrounding communities.

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

CARLOS MUÑOZ GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY PIMMEX CONTRACTING CORPORATION

By Debra Utacia Krol

PHOTO COURTESY CARLOS MUÑOZ

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ast December, Santa Claus and his special guest visited a residential home for youth in the Gila River Indian Community.

Each youth received a brand-new pair of Nike shoes, thanks to Santa’s friend Carlos Muñoz.

The giveaway is a tradition for Muñoz (Pima/Mexican), the founder and president of PIMMEX Contracting Corporation.

“I was raised to give without expecting anything in return,” says Muñoz, the son of a roofer who learned his trade at his father’s hands.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in business management, Muñoz, a citizen of the Gila River Indian Community, continued working alongside his dad. “I started a whole new division within my dad’s company,” he says. Then, the younger Muñoz won a roofing contract, and hasn’t looked back since. “My dad put in start-up funds” to start his own firm in 2008, he says. “I would do almost all the work,” Muñoz says.

“I worked 12 to 14-hour days for the first three or four years!”

That hard work has paid off. The tiny construction firm that once could only

qualify for a $100,000 construction bond now takes on jobs requiring a bond of up to $35 million. PIMMEX holds licenses with Gila River Indian Community, the Navajo Nation and the state of Arizona. Muñoz manages a staff of 25, of which more than half are Native. “We have a pretty diverse staff,” he says, “including Native, Hispanic and African Americans.”

PIMMEX is a full-service firm, offering both general contracting and design-build services. The firm’s website notes a dozen completed projects, including single-family and multi-unit housing, commercial and government services builds. The firm also works throughout the Southwest, and thanks to Muñoz ’s foresight in securing a state contractor’s license, his projects span both on- and off-reservation builds. “Relationships have come out of our work,” says Muñoz, who grew up in Gila River’s District 5, where he’s sited PIMMEX’s headquarters.

His latest upcoming project: a remodel of the Apache Gold Casino and Hotel for the San Carlos Apache Tribe, located about 100 miles east of Phoenix.

And then, there’s Muñoz’s most recent venture: solar-powered street lighting.

Native Energy Solutions has closed the

deal on more than 800 solar street lights to the Navajo Nation alone and has delivered about 300 to his own Gila River Indian Community.

Muñoz’s success also has given him the opportunity to follow his family’s teachings to give back. In addition to the shoe giveaway, Muñoz has worked with all the Boys and Girls Clubs in the Gila River Community to deliver school supplies, and PIMMEX sponsors causes and events in the area. And, he’s proud to say he paid his dad’s investment back two years ago. He told the Gila River Indian News last year that he would like to do a jacket drive for kids, so he can increase the number of gifts he gives. “Being able to help my community has been my biggest success,” he says.

“My eventual goal is to start a foundation that will create a structural approach and a process to give back,” says Muñoz. “I’d like to run a foundation full-time.” Fortunately, Muñoz has also learned a valuable lesson along the way to enable him to spend more time as a philanthropist: “I’ve learned to pass responsibilities to my employees,” he says. “I know now that you have to utilize all your resources; never think you have to do everything.”

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OSAGE BIG ELK ENERGY SYSTEMS

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eoff Hager, Osage, launched Big Elk Energy Systems with a “go big or go home” strategy. The saying applies two-fold. Hager put everything on the line to start his business, and more literally, the company builds massive parts, the size of semi tractor-trailers, for use in the pipeline industry.

Hager sacrificed a steady paycheck as well as health and retirement benefits to get his business off the ground.

“I went two years without a paycheck and one year without medical insurance,” he said, adding that he spent a lot of time praying he and his family would not become ill.

“If you want someone to invest in you, you have to go all-in yourself,” Hager told Native Business.

His leap of faith paid off. The Osage

ALLEN G. CADREAU CHIPPEWA INDIAN ENERGY, LLC

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llen G. Cadreau and his company, Indian Energy, LLC, are dedicated to helping Tribal communities operate their own energy infrastructure. Indian Energy would rather see Tribal Nations in the energy business, as opposed to simply leasing land to power operators. “We want Tribes to own their own utilities, so they can electrify their communities and keep the dollars on the reservation,” Cadreau told Native Business.

Cadreau counts more than 45 years in the electrical industry — including advanced microgrid design and utility scale power plant development expertise. He launched Indian Energy after a southwestern Tribe asked him for technical support in creating a Tribal utility authority to generate and sell electricity.

Indian Energy, a 100 percent Native owned and a certified small disadvantaged business, provides cyber-secure energy solutions to the military and Tribal

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entrepreneur managed to raise more than $7 million to open the doors to his 144,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in 2014. Private investors put down about $2.5 million, and a bank put down another $5 million.

Last year, the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company earned several number ones in the annual Inc. Magazine rankings, including the status of fastest-growing manufacturer in the country (its revenue increased by a huge 3,152 percent over three years).

Big Elk, which currently employs an estimated 120 people, operates an internal training program for welders. Hager estimates the company will add at least 30 to 40 more jobs this year.

Hager is also responsible for M3 Energy Services, a field test operation to check on the accuracy of the parts Big Elk manufactures, like flow meters. The recent initiative helps Big Elk avoid sending the massive parts to remote locations for testing.

For Hager, a direct descendant of Osage chief Big Elk, his successful business is a testament to his resilient ancestors. Big Elk’s Osage name was Opahtunkah. “The family name stands for strength, courage and leadership, an insight into the mission of Big Elk Energy Systems,” Hager said.

PHOTO COURTESY GEOFF HAGER

GEOFF HAGER

reservations. Owners consist of founder and CEO Cadreau; his son Allen J. Cadreau, the director of engineering; cousin Henry J. Boulley Jr., who serves as chief operations officer and chief information officer; and other family members — all citizens of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

Indian Energy also created a partnership with its sister tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota. “This enables us to pursue U.S. Government set-asides and sole-source energy contracts with any governmental agency,” Cadreau said.

Microgrids, which are designed to power communities instead of entire states or regions, are an exciting part of the future of energy, and Indian Energy is helping to drive the movement. From sustainable power generation to cutting-edge storage solutions such as flywheel kinetic energy storage devices and advanced use monitoring, Cadreau sees these smaller systems as Indian Country’s solution to giving remote Tribal communities energy independence — or, in the case of some communities, building energy capacity that was previously unavailable. “This is the future,” said Cadreau.

PHOTO COURTESY ALLEN G. CADREAU

E N E R GY

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

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NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

KABEN & SHELBY SMALLWOOD

By Lynn Armitage

T

ake one noble dream to feed everyone in Indian Country, add two entrepreneurial brothers from the Choctaw Nation, throw in emulsified fish water to fuel a proprietary farming system, blend with years of hard work and perseverance, and what do you get?

Symbiotic Aquaponic, a pioneering company created by Kaben and Shelby Smallwood that designs and builds customized backyard and commercial aquaponic farming systems for any individual, Tribe, community, school or business interested in growing USDA-certified organic food in a way that reduces the water use of traditional farming by up to 99 percent.

If you are unfamiliar with aquaponic farming, you are not alone. Although the agricultural system of growing fish and plants together in recirculated water dates way back to Aztecan and Far Eastern cultures, the business side of aquaponics is a whole new frontier.

And going where not many farmers have gone before, the Smallwood brothers launched Symbiotic Aquaponic in 2012 with little more than a dream and a wealth of support from co-owners Regina Cook, Trevor Harkreader and their parents. With a $4,000 investment from the Choctaw Nation to test the waters, they built their first aquaponic system in a greenhouse at Kiowa Public Schools in Oklahoma.

“We sourced components from hardware

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stores and salvaged tractor supplies to build this proof of concept that would grow food,” recalls 34-year-old Kaben, an economist by trade sounding a little like Dr. Frankenstein.

“It was a labor of love. We worked without pay and without any guarantee of success.”

But it was a success. So much so that in 2013, the brothers earned a $40,000 Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur Award from the Hitachi Foundation, which Kaben describes as “a very defining moment.”

They immediately put that money to good work. “Shelby, an expert designer and engineer, created a new, proprietary, patent-pending aquaponic system, and we became original equipment manufacturers,” says Kaben, proudly adding that all their equipment is manufactured in the United States, except for PVC components. “Now we have a fully developed supply chain to design and engineer scalable, modular aquaponics systems to fit almost any crop, topography, geography or location.”

Business Has Snowballed Symbiotic Aquaponic has designed and built nearly 100 aquaponic farming systems in seven states ― from small, 20-square-feet beds for $1,200 to their largest commercial project to date that cost $199,000.

As the website states, clients include “hobbyists, gardeners, survivalists, environmentalists, educators, schools, nonprofit organizations, colleges, Future Farmers of America,

4-H organizations … commercial farmers and community groups.”

The farming pioneers have also partnered with several federally recognized Tribes, including the Seminole, Choctaw and Cherokee Nations of Oklahoma, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Tribes, and the Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma.

Two years ago, they landed a $199,000 rural business development grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to build a 30 foot x 96 foot commercial greenhouse and aquaponic facility with 4,500 gallons of water for the Seminole Nation to help spur economic growth for the Tribe. Construction is currently underway.

Kaben considers this partnership one of their greatest successes. “Seeing this project with the Seminole Nation come to fruition is one of the most rewarding professional experiences I have had.” It is a full-circle moment, he says. “It’s incredible to use our aquaponic technology like we intended from the start to benefit other Tribes and underserved populations in our own backyard.”

USDA-Certified Organic Those three words make Kaben’s heart sing.

“We were one of the first companies to get our aquaponic systems certified as USDA-organic after the National Organic Standards Board ruled that aquaponics and hydroponics could be deemed organic if they met minimum requirements.”

PHOTOS COURTESY SYMBIOTIC AQUAPONIC

CHOCTAW SYMBIOTIC AQUAPONIC

High Profits From CBD Last year, growing industrial hemp and cannabis became legal in Oklahoma. Unlike other states, Oklahoma did not limit the number of cultivators. True to their entrepreneurial nature, the Smallwoods saw an opportunity and pounced.

“We’ve applied the same aquaponic technology to grow USDA-certified organic herbs to grow USDA-certified organic CBD to capitalize on new market opportunities,” as Kaben describes their recent, most profitable venture into growing CBD, or cannabidiol, a compound in the cannabis plant that studies show helps treat pain, inflammation, anxiety and other ailments without getting users high. “We’re still serving our social mission because we grow the purest form of medicine that can be grown in a certified organic system.”

How profitable is CBD? “We went from growing USDA-certified organic herbs, like mint and basil, at an average $10/pound, to growing organic CBD at $300/pound. And the yields aren’t much different,” Kaben sums up the profit bonanza. “It gives us new revenue streams rather than relying solely on selling aquaponic systems.”

The brothers want others to profit from growing CBD, too, so they teach hands-on farming classes. “We’re excited about leading the way for indoor organic CBD production, as well as educating other growers on how to profit on their own.”

ponic farming. To that end, the Choctaw entrepreneurs have been teaching one-day certificate courses at nearby Oklahoma colleges for the last six years. “We get a cross-section of students ― from a 16-year-old high schooler to a 60-year-old retiree looking for a second career,” states Kaben.

What’s more, the brothers have helped develop agricultural curriculum that meets state standards for K-12 schools, community colleges, four-year universities and undergraduate research programs. “Our college research partners extend from UC-Davis on the West Coast to Redlands Community College in Oklahoma to Delaware Valley University in Pennsylvania,” says Kaben.

Their most enduring education partnership has been with Eastern Oklahoma State College, which houses two commercial aquaponic greenhouse systems where students grow an assortment of crops, such as lettuce, basil, tomatoes, decorative flowers and koi.

And through another $199,000 USDA grant, the brothers helped create the school’s Aquaponics Incubation Program that trains students to be aquaponic farmers and entrepreneurs.

The Best Is Yet to Come The Smallwood brothers are proud of what they have built in the last seven years. “We have learned a lot through our successes and failures, and we have leveraged that experience into a durable, high-quality product,” says Kaben, adding jokingly, “I tell my brother all the time that we have designed the light bulb that won’t burn out.”

But they will never forget about the people who helped them get there ― their mother, father and grandfather, on whose farm in Talihina, Oklahoma, they spent their childhood and first fell in love with the bounty of Mother Earth. Sadly, they lost both their grandparents five years ago. But Kaben says his grandfather’s business influence left an indelible mark on him.

As for the future, “We are trying to set smart goals. We are figuring out the best way to take that next step, in terms of organizational structure, raising capital and doing things to legitimize our brand on a national, and maybe international level,” shares Kaben, who recently got married.

As the very wise newlywed says, “I would like to think that the best times are ahead of us.”

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AGR IC ULTUR E / H EM P

The brothers believe they have completely disrupted the organic marketplace, thanks to the proprietary process that creates their grow media ― pH-neutral shale baked in a kiln at an extremely high temperature ― that immediately meets requirements for organic growing.

“We design and engineer systems that can achieve organic certification almost overnight, something we call ‘Express Organic.’”

Kaben says most organic farmers must wait three years for their soil quality to meet organic standards. “Express Organic” service allows clients to rapidly scale their organic growing operations and speed-up profit-making.

In addition to designing and engineering USDA-certified organic systems for clients, Shelby and Kaben operate their own systems to raise organic herbs, tilapia, leafy greens and starter gardens, which they give away free to the community.

“We want to stay true to our mission of food production and food sovereignty by giving people access to fresh food in the rural areas we serve,” says Kaben.

ART & TOU RI S M

STEVEN PAUL JUDD

PETER BOOME

KIOWA/CHOCTAW STEVEN PAUL JUDD, LLC

UPPER SKAGIT ARAQUIN DESIGNS

teven Paul Judd had no formal training as an artist or graphic designer. He learned Photoshop through online tutorials. The first thing he sold was a vintage boxing poster featuring Sitting Bull v. Custer. He shared it on Facebook, and it sold on Etsy.

“It was very grassroots. I think what I was making tapped into the zeitgeist of Indian Country,” says Judd.

Judd’s art takes a playful and satiric spin on mainstream culture, often reimagining superheroes and American icons as Native American.

But attaining success required more than innovation. Judd learned early on that he had to take risks.

“Business wise, I wanted to make stickers, and I bought $400 worth of stickers. It was a big, huge, scary decision for me at the time, because my rent was only $580. So, buying $400 worth of stickers was almost a month’s rent. I was so nervous. This was just me in my apartment seeing if I could make a living in art.”

Judd sold out of stickers in two weeks. “That’s when I started buying in bulk. I realized, if I was super rich, I wouldn’t just buy one property and flip it, I’d buy seven. Now I buy huge orders of stickers,” says the Kiowa/Choctaw award-winning contemporary visual artist and filmmaker.

Once he added t-shirts, paintings and more to his portfolio available for purchase, he incorporated as an LLC and hired an assistant. Judd also partnered with TheNTVS.com, a premium Native American streetwear clothing line, to sell his art and designs.

In addition to visual art, Judd has produced several award-winning independent films. His 2015-released short “Ronnie BoDean,” starring Wes Studi as an Indian anti-hero, screened at film festivals worldwide, including in Denver, San Francisco, Toronto, Paris and Germany.

Most recently, Judd is in development with HBO. He penned a script with writing partner Ken Kristensen, an Academy Nicholl-award-winning screenwriter, TV writer and comic book author recognized for writing episodes of the television series' Happy! and The Punisher (Netflix/Marvel). “It’s like True Detectives on the reservation in the 1970s,” Judd says. “It’s an Indian Country noir.”

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PHOTO COURTESY STEVEN PAUL JUDD

S

In 2003, Peter Boome (Upper Skagit) was about to start law school and was looking to be more resilient regarding his family’s income. He’d been an artist for his entire life, selling pieces here and there or working on commission, but had never pursued it professionally.

“My father in law’s cousin is Andy Peterson, who is a pretty well-known Skokomish artist, and he had just started his own printmaking,” Boome told Native Business Magazine. “I took a bunch of paintings to Andy and asked if he’d print them up for me, and he said ‘no, but you can come print them yourself.’ That was the kindest thing that anybody could ever do.”

After printing a few pieces at Peterson’s studio, Boome was hooked. He and his wife took their tax return and life savings and sunk it into the equipment needed to start his own printmaking business in a backyard shed.

“My wife and I had a business plan where the goal was to pay ourselves off with the proceeds from the business within two years,” Boome said. “Four months later, it was paid off.”

After graduating from law school at the height of the recession, Boome found that the law jobs he was pursuing paid less than what he was making in the art business, for a heavier workload and time commitment. So art remained the core of his business.

Over the course of his career, Boome’s artistry has come in many forms. In addition to printmaking, he’s worked on apparel, dinnerware sets, wedding photography and logo design. He also teaches business, works as a public defender in a drug deferment court, and is about to start a Tribally-focused legal mediation business.

“It’s natural for us in Indian country to be entrepreneurs,” he said. “It’s a traditional type of behavior. We’ve been led to believe that we’re not businesspeople, and that’s simply not true. We’re naturally businesspeople, but we need a little bit more support from our own communities. And we need a little more recognition.”

PHOTO COURTESY PETER BOOME

By Andrew Ricci

ED DESROSIER BLACKFEET SUN TOURS

By Lynn Armitage

PHOTOS COURTESY ED DESROSIER

I

n 2017, more than 12.5 million visitors to Montana spent nearly $3.4 billion.

That’s music to Ed DesRosier’s ears. The Blackfeet Nation Tribal member has owned Sun Tours since 1992, after a rough start getting the sightseeing business off the ground.

“We had to fight the National Park Service to be recognized as a legitimate concession company. My Tribe represented us, and we appealed all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.” In the end, it never had to go that far.

DesRosier started Sun Tours with just one Ford van and now runs a thriving, 11-vehicle bus-tour business through Glacier National Park — from the point of view of the Blackfeet Nation.

“All our guides are Tribal members who give a perspective you won’t find anywhere else,” he says with pride. “This is our indigenous homeland. We grew up hearing the stories and history of the sacred places, and we feel it is important for travelers to learn about it, authentically, from us.”

According to the 65-year-old business owner, Montana tourism has always recognized Tribal culture, lore and history.

“That romantic image has always been out there. But we also need an image of a contemporary Indian driving a bus full of people on a tour.”

Highlights of DesRosier’s interpretive bus tours include the scenic St. Mary Valley, the eastern gateway to Glacier National Park; the Two Medicine region; Goingto-the-Sun Road; buffalo herds: and the legendary Old North Trail. Tourists can

choose between full- or half-day tours, ranging from $55 to $115 for adult tickets.

Children five years old and under are free.

Tours are seasonal and run from May 15 to October 15. Sun Tours is about to start its 27th operating season.

“We are really fortunate to have this landscape that the Creator blessed us with,” says DesRosier. “To share Glacier National Park with new eyes, people who are visitors, gives us an even deeper appreciation for the place we call home.”

Like every smart entrepreneur, DesRosier is expanding his business into new markets, adding custom, high-end private tours for corporations, families, executives and celebrities. “It’s a new audience that has really grown,” he says. Notable clients have included Bonnie Raitt and the Indigo Girls. “Mark Zuckerberg came last year, but he rode on my competitor’s red bus,” laughs DesRosier.

DesRosier, recently named the 2018 Montana Tourism Ambassador by the Governor’s Conference on Tourism and Recreation, believes the future looks bright for Tribal tourism. “Our Tribe has recognized the economic force that is Native tourism. It will do nothing but grow.

And people are starting to pay attention.”

Now living in St Mary, Montana, DesRosier has lived his entire life on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. He graduated from High School in Browning, Montana in 1971, and attended college at

Flathead Valley Community College in 1972 and 1973.

Summers of his youth were spent working for the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning. The park and reservation land have been a constant study in summer and winter. Most of his youth and adult years included enjoying the mountains and valleys of Glacier National Park, hiking, snowshoeing, skiing hundreds of miles of trails, and climbing many of its highest peaks.

Sun Tours fulfills DesRosier’s mission “to educate and inspire all to a higher respect, appreciation and understanding of our Blackfeet world.”

In 2005, DesRosier was appointed to serve on the Montana Governor’s Tourism Advisory Council and, again, for a second term, he served as Chairman until 2013.

As a Blackfeet Tribal Board Member, DesRosier has served on the Blackfeet Tribe’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department. “I belong to tourism organizations locally, the East Glacier and Blackfeet Country, Chamber of Commerce, and on the national level, the American Indian and Alaskan Native Tourism Association,” DesRosier says.

Throughout his professional career and personal work, he has traveled extensively throughout Montana and the northwest United States, networking with many Tribes and organizations, and sharing his tourism business experience and passion.

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GEORGE RIVERA PUEBLO OF POJOAQUE GEORGE RIVERA STUDIO

By Andrew Ricci

G

eorge Rivera, an artist and former Governor of the Pueblo of Pojoaque, says that one of his strengths is creating cultural icons. Whether he’s composing a sculpture or a building, he wants to make sure that the design not only reflects the culture, but stands as an icon to exemplify it.

In some ways, his focus on creating works that embody the Pojoaque culture has defined much of his career. After attending the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and the California College of Arts and Crafts, he studied and worked at the Lacoste School of Art in the South of France.

“While I was there, I had this kind of vision of what I was going to do for my Tribe in the future,” Rivera said. “It was to do an Arts and Cultural Center, and so I came back from Europe and I started working on the project, but the Tribe had no financial resources to apply to getting anything like this done.”

To bring the project to fruition, Rivera

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started seeking grants and collaborating with other artists on putting together a regional cultural center. At the same time, his uncle, Jacob Viarrial, was serving as the Tribe’s Governor and asked Rivera to serve as Lieutenant Governor. From there, the two started developing businesses for the Tribe to increase its financial standing.

“We started out small,” Rivera said. “We had a supermarket and some land leases, and then we got into gaming, little by little. That really made us learn the business and learn the politics. It wasn’t just a matter of opening a business, it was changing laws and making sure that our own gaming industry was regulated and functioning well.”

Eventually, their efforts paid off in 2008 when the Tribe opened Buffalo Thunder, the largest resort in the state of New Mexico. Because they brought in Hilton as a partner, the hotel giant helped them create an experience that had something for everyone.

“They helped us develop a resort with a casino in it, so you could either have the hotel and casino experience, or you could

have the resort experience,” Rivera said.

“It was really about trying to diversify, to ensure that it wasn’t just about bringing gamers in, it was about bringing in resort people too.”

When Rivera first started in his leadership role with the Tribe, he says there were approximately 50 employees across their business ventures. After the Tribe opened Buffalo Thunder and began leveraging their gaming revenues toward other economic development initiatives, that number skyrocketed to 1,600.

“We went from a lot of dirt, weeds and small brush to a world-class destination resort,” Rivera said. “It had the same effect on the Tribal members. We went from a poverty-stricken community with a lot of addiction and social problems to a place where people had a lot of hope, and became progressive and educated.”

“The discussion that I used to hear kids talk about was when they were going to drop out of high school or what year they dropped out,” Rivera continued. “And that discussion changed to ‘which college are you going to?’”

PHOTOS COURTESY GEORGE RIVERA

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NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

Rivera has been sketching and drawing since he was a teenager, and when he returned home from France, his uncle and other businesspeople figured that they could use the ideas he had for creating a cultural center and bringing back traditional art forms to start putting art around local buildings.

“They thought, ‘wow, that’s a great idea, because it makes a statement about who we are,’” Rivera said. “We won’t just have a blank building that says ‘I’m a building,’ we’ll have one that says ‘I’m a Native American Building.’ So we automatically had a theme.”

“We didn’t have to create a different theme, we just had to stay focused on what our cultural identity is,” he continued. “And that was our theme for many of our projects — especially Buffalo Thunder.”

In 1990, the dream that Rivera first conceptualized in the south of France came to fruition, when the first programs started at the Poeh Cultural Center. A few years later, they started construction on the buildings, which were completed over the years, designed to resemble a very traditional pueblo-looking building. Today, the Poeh Museum curates two collections: a permanent collection holding more than 600 objects spanning a millennium of Pueblo culture and an archive containing approximately 10,000 photographs.

to be doing it because it fits both my artistic role as a sculptor, but also all the stuff that I fought for, to help my Tribe get gaming and help the other Tribes in New Mexico get gaming and protect their sovereignty.”

“This sculpture says so much about all of that,” he said. “It’s like taking all our history and honoring it, and by them having me sculpt it and cast it in bronze, it’s really hope for the future.”

Another important piece he’s currently working on honors two ultramarathon runners, Catua and Omtua, who participated in the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. The runners would travel between villages throughout the entire day, communicating messages through a knotted cord. Because the revolt’s coordinators never told the runners what the message was, they were ultimately captured, tortured, and killed on the plaza in Santa Fe. Still another, yet to be cast in bronze, honors Billy Mills, recognized as one of the most famous Native American ath-

letes whose gold medal win in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics is considered one of the greatest Olympic upsets of all time.

For Rivera, this theme of having his work tell a story and reflect the culture is paramount. He’s not just making a statue, he’s making a cultural icon. So when he’s starting a new project, he says that the first step is getting the story out of the subject or client. Then the detail work follows from that story, and it all comes together in bronze or whatever medium is chosen.

“I like to work out their ideas into a composition and then have the final product be something that they’re really proud of, whether it’s a single sculpture or a building,” Rivera said.

“The projects that I’ve completed, I think what I’ve done is made something that us now and future generations can be proud of, something that is part of the culture,” he said.

Rivera spent 22 years holding elected office — 12 years as Lieutenant Governor and, after his uncle passed away, 10 years as Governor himself. Today, he is focusing on his art full time.

Many of the projects he’s worked on fit into that theme of creating cultural icons.

One piece, which he’s creating for the Pechanga Resort and Casino, he says is “going to be one of the most important pieces in Indian Country and in the state of California.”

For the piece, Rivera is creating 13 bronze sculptures, slightly bigger than life size, depicting the Peon game, which is a stick game or gambling game. One of the reasons that it’s so important, he says, is that it’s one of the games used in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court Case that enabled gaming on Indian reservations.

“This game has never been put out there the way I’m putting it out there for Pechanga,” Rivera said. “And I’m honored MAY 2 0 1 9

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NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

CHOCTAW FIRSTNATION HEALTH

M

att Silverstein, Choctaw, points out that health care costs have risen six times faster than wages for decades, and that health care is usually a Tribe’s second-biggest expense after payroll. In the future, health care could become a Tribe’s greatest expenditure, Silverstein estimates, “unless Tribes take control and use benefits in an efficient way,” he told Native Business.

As chief executive of FirstNation Health in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Silverstein helps Tribes access significant savings by negotiating on behalf of Tribes and helping them take advantage of huge health insurance breaks.

FirstNation Health does business with Tribes in 30 states and has claims processing units in California and Michigan.

The board of directors for FirstNation Health is 100 percent Native American.

Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell is a board member and chief strategist for the firm. The company recently made a

ROBERT WEAVER QUAPAW RWI BENEFITS

By Josh Robertson

E

ntrepreneurship can be a solitary pursuit — but not for health care consultant Robert Weaver, a member of the Quapaw Nation. "You see a need that's unmet," he says. "You work to find solutions yourself, you see if other people have solutions, and you try to get a group of people together, and then you really actually begin to chip away at the problem."

People and populations are the key.

Weaver has mastered the complexities of the health insurance system, and serves as the catalyst to get Tribes better care at a better price. "It's the Law of Large Numbers," he observes. "There are millions of us. We should have access to not just second or third-rate care, we should have the best."

Through his company RWI Benefits, Weaver has consulted over 40 Tribes, analyzing health care arrangements and designing improvements. "They have the people who can do the work,"

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he says. "They just don't have the subject-matter expertise. So typically — I call it triage. I triage the worst parts first. I fix the things that are bleeding out." Within three months, he says, he's reconfiguring the Tribal plan, and his work is usually done in about a year.

Weaver has the entrepreneur's obsession with details, because that's really where the money, or in this case, the savings, resides. "I love getting IHS [Indian Health Service] and the Tribe working together well," he says. "I find a lot of the insurance producers aren't trained on how to work with IHS. So consequently, they're leaving a lot of money on the table, because they aren't using the laws [to realize] the savings that Tribes can get."

Weaver made headlines in February 2018 as President Trump's nominee to lead the Indian Health Service. His nomination fell apart as he faced criticism in Washington and from Indian country — but he has no regrets, and would do the whole thing again for the insights and contacts gained. "I have thick skin, so it doesn't bother me," he says. "I'm just thinking about that baby that's gonna die if we don't fix something."

high-profile hire in Dave Archambault, the Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe during the Dakota Access Pipeline standoff.

Silverstein has been immersed in the financial and insurance industry for nearly two decades. He has been recognized as a top national producer by some of the largest established financial and insurance organizations in the country such as Allstate Financial and LPL Financial, the largest independent broker/dealer in America.

An activist for Indian Country, Silverstein has called Tulsa home his entire life.

In 2014, he became the first Choctaw and the youngest person in Oklahoma history to win the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate.

On February 1, 2019, FirstNation Health and MedWatch, the Medical Management team owned by Harvard Medical School affiliate Harvard Pilgrim, announced a Joint Tribal Program with aggressive cost control services — including a line by line clinical audit of every medical claim to verify for accuracy and appropriateness, along with powerful health education and wellness programs that are proactive with Tribal communities.

PHOTO COURTESY MATT SILVERSTEIN

MATT SILVERSTEIN

PHOTO COURTESY ROBERT WEAVER

IN SUR A N C E

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

N at i ve A m e r i c a n I n s u r a n c e G r o u p, I n c .

3 9 5 0 S t at e Ro a d H i g h wa y 4 7 S W A l b u q u e r q u e , N e w M ex i c o 8 7 1 0 5 O f f i c e : ( 5 0 5 ) 8 6 9 - 9 7 2 9 • Fa x : ( 5 0 5 ) 8 6 9 - 9 7 5 5 www.naiginsur ance.com

EASTERN BAND OF CHEROKEE CHIEF STRATEGY GROUP INC.

By Debra Utacia Krol

M

ichell A. Hicks, the former principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) in North Carolina, has embarked on his latest venture. Chief Strategy Group, Inc., continues his journey with his wife Marsha and an all-Native team on hand.

The three-term principal chief of the EBCI, Hicks continues to use his business skills to support other Tribal economic development.

The firm works with Tribes across the U.S. on projects ranging from community assessments, project management and strategic planning to working with a Tribe to address its opioid epidemic. “We’re reaching out in many different areas within Tribes to support them in meeting their needs,” Hicks says.

Chief Strategy Group also has expertise in business relationship building; developing and executing financial plans; expanding business opportunities; infrastructure planning and development; and grant planning and implementation, according

to its website.

“I’m very proud of the fact that our entire team of 12 associates is Native,” Hicks says.

“We have seven different Tribes represented within the pool of associates.”

Hicks recently embarked on a new initiative. Gen 7 Healthcare positions Tribes to leverage their sovereignty to manage health care services. “We created a business model for the Eastern Band to own its health care,” Hicks says. “We relied on the Indian Health Service (IHS) for our needs, but IHS has limitation.”

The new initiative allows the Tribe to take ownership by contracting out services and managing its own billing. “We’re using the revenue base to grow health care as bigger companies pull out of rural areas,” he says.

“The feds won’t fix this situation, but we can.”

Hicks plans to eventually serve off-reservation communities in Western North Carolina. “Think about the level of health care that we can begin to provide to our people,” Hicks says. “It could be absolutely amazing.”

Whether the task is small or encompasses an entire Native community, Hicks says he’s up to the challenge.

“We just want to be part of solutions for Tribes.”

JAMIE FULLMER YAVAPAI-APACHE

BLUE STONE STRATEGY GROUP

By Suzette Brewer

J

amie Fullmer was nine-years-old when his maternal grandfather, David Smith Sr., an Apache elder from Camp Verde, Arizona, took the bus all the way to Salt Lake City to visit his oldest daughter and his two grandchildren.

“He passed away shortly after he came to visit our family, but he made a point to come and see us and let us know that we were accepted,” says Fullmer, current Chairman/CEO of Blue Stone Strategy Group. “He looked into my eyes and said, ‘Grandson I want you to know that you are Apache and you belong to the Yavapai-Apache Tribe. One day, you will come there and help your people.’”

His grandfather’s words, says Fullmer, was the moment that set the course of his life’s calling.

“I was compelled by the vision of helping not only my Tribe,” says Full-

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PHOTO COURTESY MICHELL HICKS

MICHELL HICKS

mer, “but helping all Tribal communities, as well.”

Fulfilling his own vision and his grandfather’s prediction, Fullmer went on to become a two-term Chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation.

After his terms concluded, Fullmer took the lessons he learned as a Tribal leader and founded Blue Stone Strategy Group in 2007 to provide support in Tribal governance and economic development for Tribes across the United States. Today, Blue Stone has grown to a staff of 22 team members, including Tribal advisors, strategists and subject matter experts covering everything from housing, business development and infrastructure to government reorganization, Tribal leadership development and commercial land use planning. The company has worked with almost 200 Tribes across the country completing over 400 projects in the last 12 years.

“I am proud of the work that we do to support Tribes as they strive to build their futures for their people,” says Fullmer, “as well as the commitment they exercise in protecting their heritage and Tribal sovereignty.”

PHOTO COURTESY JAMIE FULLMER

CO N SULTIN G

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

PHOTO COURTESY VANESSA ROANHORSE

NAVAJO ROANHORSE CONSULTING, LLC

V

anessa Roanhorse, Diné, is often described as a powerhouse, a visionary and a disruptor of the status quo. She’s also a fierce advocate for Native women entrepreneurs and business leaders.

On any given day, you may find Roanhorse, founder and CEO of Roanhorse Consulting, LLC, discussing ways to raise the voice of minority businesses and localize economic development with her client, the City of Albuquerque, where she also calls home. You may

STEPHINE POSTON SANDIA PUEBLO POSTON & ASSOCIATES, LLC

PHOTO COURTESY STEPHINE POSTON

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erving as the lead event planner for the historic honoring for the first Native Congresswomen, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, is a hallmark achievement of Stephine Poston’s storied career.

“My company, Poston & Associates, LLC, was committed to hosting more than a reception, so to speak, but creating an experience for Indian Country,” Poston told Native Business of the January 3, 2019 event. More than 1,000 people registered to attend the celebrity-studded celebration (actor Mark Ruffalo among them).

Poston, a member of the Pueblo of Sandia, founded Poston & Associates, LLC (P&A) in 2002, following 11 years serving as a public relations analyst for the Pueblo of Sandia,

and prior to that, an eight year career with the federal government. P&A handles media relations, event and meeting planning, marketing and branding, strategic planning and facilitation, film and video production, and fundraising development.

Headquartered on the Pueblo of Sandia, just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, P&A's current and recent clients include: the Native American Bar Association, the Native American Budget & Policy Institute, the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, the Southwest Tribal Housing Association, Americans for Indian Opportunity, Native Women Lead, Acoma Tribal Housing Authority, Jicarilla Apache Housing Authority, Island Mountain Development Group, Zuni Pueblo Housing Authority and Navajo Agricultural Products Industry.

Poston also co-founded Native Women Lead, a nonprofit that recently hosted its second Native Women’s Business Summit to cultivate a safe and inclusive space to foster, start, grow and build Native women-owned businesses and leaders.

PHOTO COURTESY LILLIE KEENER

VANESSA ROANHORSE

find her in Palo Alto, California, discussing the future of credit unions, fintech and people at the Institute for the Future. You may find her uplifting the messaging of client Nusenda Credit Union about topics such as data protection, rewriting the traditional lending model, and reimagining risk management.

Or you may find her among a cohort of venerable women entrepreneurs, planning the next Native Women’s Business Summit.

After 15 years of working in the nonprofit sector in Chicago, Roanhorse returned to Albuquerque and launched her consulting business, Roanhorse Consulting, LLC, in 2016.

The company encourages economic empowerment from within Native America, and is committed to growing more indigenous and underrepresented founders. “Together we will launch, grow and create solutions for our local challenges,” her website states.

“Together” is a key word for Roanhorse. A co-creator and collaborator at heart, Roanhorse approaches consulting “unheralded” communities, businesses, organizations and individuals in an empathic and less formulaic way. Her unique style helps clients achieve self-determination “through forging communities of practice, creating equity through entrepreneurship, and encouraging economic empowerment from within,” she says.

LILLIE KEENER CHEROKEE BLUE STAR INTEGRATIVE STUDIO

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fter a brief stint as a sole-proprietorship in 2012 under the leadership of founder and principal architect Scott Moore y Medina, Blue Star Integrative Studio, a full-service planning and architecture firm, was incorporated in 2013. Lillie Keener was already an employee at Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Blue Star when the company restructured in 2016, and she was presented with an opportunity for ownership. “Of course I jumped on it,” she told Native Business. “Blue Star is perfectly aligned with my values.”

One of few B Corporations in Oklahoma, Blue Star’s certification demonstrates that the company values employee well-being and positive community impact. “The big names in B Corporations are Patagonia and Ben and Jerry’s,” Keener shared.

As an advocate for sustainably-sourced materials and responsible construction practices, Keener is proud to lead Blue Star. “Some houses that we developed for the Osage Nation were energy-plus rated, so that is lowering the utility bills for the homeowners,” shared Keener, 25, who earned her Bachelor of Science degree in sustainable design at the University of Oklahoma.

Blue Star serves both the private and public sectors, with a focus on rural, Tribal and underserved communities. As a citizen of the Tsa-la-gi (Cherokee) Nation, Keener can relate to the firm’s clients and their unique housing and development needs characteristic of smaller communities.

“We’ve seen a lot of repeat business by word of mouth,” said Keener, adding that their portfolio is diverse, ranging from health care and community centers to master planning. “We have a holistic understanding of different projects and how to approach cultural aspects in a respectful way.”

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CO N SULTIN G

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

TRAVIS KOMAHCHEET COMANCHE INTERTRIBAL VISIONS UNLIMITED

By Renae Ditmer

W

hile now on the brink of success, Travis Komahcheet’s entrepreneurial path is laden with the remains of the “bad medicine” he and his wife have endured.

Raised in a non-Native environment he describes as “dysfunctionally poor,” Komahcheet taught himself to draw on the back of tithing envelopes his mother gave him to keep him quiet in church.

“My way of making friends was drawing pictures for them. It was my first feeling of knowing that I had something to share,” reminisced the Comanche co-owner of Intertribal Visions Unlimited, a cutting-edge multimedia design company based in Cache, Oklahoma.

Advancing past notebook paper and other media, he realized his need for advanced technical skills. His host of professional friends helped, but without income from the carpentry he abandoned due to heatstroke, he instead enrolled in college. For one semester.

Then he applied for a job as a graphic artist that required a degree. He got it anyway, and “spent three years working in a ferocious, highly professional, fast-paced environment” training-ground.

During his three years there, the Komahcheets — Travis and his wife and Intertribal Visions co-owner Kristy — also toured with a

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rock band. In spite of their passion for music, “the lifestyle of touring wasn’t very spiritual,” Travis Komahcheet admits, and it brought both of them to their knees. Literally. “I made a pact with God that I would do right even though I hadn’t been living it. Spirituality was lacking in all of my life, and I wanted to correct that. The power of one wasn’t working for me,” he recounts.

So they relocated to Oklahoma 10 years ago and hit restart. Travis also wanted to get to know his father and reconnect with his Comanche roots.

But his highly romanticized version of Tribal life was quickly dashed. Komahcheet experienced the negative social impact of historical trauma on people. Worse, bad medicine — which he didn’t believe in before coming to Oklahoma — engulfed them.

His antidote? “Carrying myself so strongly that when people looked at me they would say, ‘That’s what a Native looks like.’”

When Komahcheet’s side work eventually created a schism with his employer, he broke

off on his own. Then a fortuitous meeting with Gary and Carmen Davis changed his life, setting a new bar for the quality of his work and infusing him with renewed passion.

The Komahcheets incorporated Intertribal Visions Unlimited in May 2010, and generated immediate income by hitting the powwow trail. “We were on fire. We were relentless,” Travis recalls.

Intertribal Visions offers branding, graphic design, illustration, printing, pro-sound recording, web development, video and more.

Their store of Intertribal-themed merch features hoodies, shirts, headwear, skate decks, flags decals, prints and more.

While a hit, running his own firm was “a way different scene.”

Someone unexpectedly pulled their business. Other clients didn’t pay their bills. Things fell apart. Nearly broke, Komahcheet confesses he thought of calling it quits. “Nothing was happening fast enough in spite of my prayers,” and it left him in deep depression.

A call to speak at the Comanche Nation job fair to talk about being an entrepreneur put him back on his path. The Comanche people reacted with encouragement, a Comanche Business Committee member funded the Komahcheet’s rebuilding of the abandoned print business on the Reservation, and Tribal business returned.

“The whole adventure has been exhausting, enlightening and brutal. But I want to inspire. I want the flicker to become a raging flame,” Komahcheet explains.

And it is. So much so that he hasn’t been able to share their vision. Until now. Having rebuilt since those dark days of 2017, the Komahcheets have just added multimedia capability to their long list of high-quality graphics art products.

Komahcheet’s best advice for new entrepreneurs? “Put God first, find the right team, surround yourself with people that will educate you, and embrace putting yourself outside your comfort zone.”

PHOTO COURTESY TRAVIS KOMAHCHEET

GR AP H IC D ESIGN & M ED IA

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

DON THORNTON CHEROKEE THORNTON MEDIA, INC.

By Suzette Brewer

PHOTO COURTESY DON THORNTON

D

on Thornton’s career in Native language preservation began on his grandmother’s front porch in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It was there during a visit in 1994 that he noticed voluminous lists of words in English that she was meticulously translating into Cherokee. As it turns out, she had been working on dictionaries, Bibles and other projects for a local non-Indian professor — who was passing her work off as his own.

“I asked her what she was doing with all these lists, and she told me she had been translating them for years for this guy,” says Thornton, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

“But when I checked into it, I realized that not only had she never gotten paid for the enormous amount of work she put into these projects, she had also had never received any listed credit whatsoever or even given a copy of the books that she basically wrote. He was totally taking advantage of her.”

As Thornton dug deeper, however, he learned that this was not an isolated incident.

He discovered that Tribal languages and other forms of cultural patrimony had been exploited by linguists, anthropologists and others seeking academic credit, career advancement and financial gain for decades. Moreover, these work products were usually copyrighted under someone else’s name, converting Native languages into a commodity with legal protections for their non-Indian owners. Across the country, Tribes were now confronting a tangled mess of intellectual property rights and legal jeopardy over ownership of their own languages.

“She was a master speaker and just a kind-hearted person who would have helped anyone, and that’s how most of the people in these communities are — which makes it that much more infuriating,” says Thornton.

“But it got me to thinking about how Indian people are exploited, so we wanted to create

tools for Tribes to take back their languages and the intellectual property rights that go with that.”

Shortly thereafter, he and his wife, Kara, founded Thornton Media, Inc., with a single mission: To build digital platforms for Tribes to preserve and teach their languages over which they retain sole control and ownership.

“We don’t own anything, that is the founding principle of this company,” says Thornton. “We create apps and language

learning software that the Tribes own with all proceeds going to teach the language.”

Starting with his own language, Thornton developed a program for Cherokee speakers with Nintendo’s DSi handheld game console. As technology advanced, however, Nintendo began dropping third-party developers, so Thornton Media began developing language apps for cell phones and tablets.

“We were the first Indigenous language app on both the Apple and Android operating systems,” says Thornton, who started his career as a filmmaker before switching

to software development for language preservation. “We also host apps on our servers, but over two-thirds of our Tribal clients have their own developer accounts so they can host their own software and release the apps themselves.”

Before going into a community, Thornton’s team first does several months of intense pre-production so that when they arrive, the app is pre-built and ready for community input and completion. At the start of the week, the team works with community members to record audio and take pictures, which are then sent to a graphic artist for editing and upload to the app.

“The community chooses 100 percent of the content,” says Thornton, “and we are able to provide different levels of learning, including Master-Apprentice, Total Physical Response (TPR), as well as quizzes for listening, speaking, reading and writing.”

By the end of the week, the app contains photos of community members and audio of their voices, which has become an important component of the company’s work, says Thornton, because it helps users take ownership of the app that they helped create. The team and the community then go over the entire app to check for errors and work out any technical issues, says Thornton.

“We work with a lot of amazing elders and we are keenly aware of the fact that Native languages are dying off at a rapid rate,” says Thornton.

“So we’re always very heartened to see all of the people working hard to save their languages.”

Today, Thornton Media has worked with over 250 Tribal communities throughout the United States and Canada to develop customized software that is helping to preserve ancient Indigenous languages from Alaska to Maine.

“We’d like Indigenous communities to be stronger as a result of our work — that’s our guiding principle, because language and culture are so intertwined,” says Thornton. “So it’s wonderful to see everyone from 90-yearolds to children playing with these apps for hours, studying them over and over. That’s why we love what we do.”

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NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

STERLIN HARJO & CREEK

JEREMY CHARLES CHEROKEE

FIRETHIEF PRODUCTIONS

By Josh Robertson

I

n 2014, Sterlin Harjo and Jeremy Charles ran into each other in the parking lot behind Tulsa's Circle Cinema.

Harjo, Creek, is arguably the most accomplished contemporary Native filmmaker, having directed the feature-length dramas Barking Water, Four Sheets to the Wind and Mekko. Charles, Cherokee, has been Tulsa's premiere photographer and art director for over a decade, working with clients that include the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Philbrook Museum.

They knew each other, but not well. It was a mutual-friends kind of acquaintance.

Charles asked Harjo what he was up to.

"Just trying to make some money in Oklahoma somehow," Harjo replied.

"I bet I can help out with that," Charles said. Charles was well established and well connected in Oklahoma, but was itching to change direction. "I want to do video," he told Harjo. "I'm tired of still photography.

What if we start something?"

"And it just happened," Harjo says. "We had one meeting." At that meeting, they discussed their interests and theories, finding much in common. They were both in love with storytelling — loyalty to the art of storytelling would be the guiding principle.

They knew they wanted to focus on projects in Indian Country, where budgets can be tight. They'd seen Tribally-financed

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video projects, and they saw room for improvement. "Our whole thing was — we can make this stuff look really good," Harjo says. "Particularly with the storytelling element, we can really up the game." They agreed to move forward, and to seek video projects that needed a documentary, rather than commercial, approach.

With the vision in place, Firethief Productions was born. Its offices are right next to that same movie-theater parking lot in downtown Tulsa.

Firethief immediately approached the Cherokee Nation, proposing a documentary

campaign. The Cherokees had something bigger in mind — a TV show. Harjo balked; he'd just spent three years working on a TV series called This Land, wearing too many hats and getting paid too little. Charles's concern was a little different — it sounded like a ton of work for a new shop, and he was worried that it would consume them.

The two went back and forth — was this the wrong project for them, or was it exactly what they wanted? What were they going to do — turn it down? Producing a TV series would take a lot more bodies, and would bring the "two dudes with a dream" phase to a sudden end. Ultimately, that was the appeal, and Firethief began to gather its team. "We all agreed on the tone and the approach to the storytelling," Charles recalls. "The way we envisioned it, that wasn't being compromised, so it was a golden opportunity."

The series Firethief produced for the Cherokees, Osiyo: Voices of the Cherokee People, aired its first episode in 2015 and is still going.

It's in its fifth season, and the 56 episodes that have been released to date can be seen at osiyo.tv.

Today, Firethief has 12 employees and serves multiple clients. Its latest high-profile project is a video campaign with Nike N7 featuring Taboo Nashawa, Hopi, of the Black Eyed Peas and gymnast Ashton Locklear, Lumbee. At vimeo. com/firethief you'll also find videos made with the Choctaw singer-songwriter Samantha Crain, as well as one covering a visit to Tribal lands from Jack White, delivering his Firestic sports equipment.

Harjo and Charles's vision of being a full-service production house catering to Native clients and focusing on storytelling is more or less fulfilled. The founders have some dream projects they'd like to realize — most notably Tradish, which they describe as an Anthony Bourdain-style show that travels around Indian Country experiencing traditional Native food — and thereby, Native culture. They've shot the pilot, and are trying to get a commitment from a distribution platform — Netflix, for example. It's a leap, admits Harjo, who is a film industry veteran with plenty of Hollywood connections.

"The film and TV industry is moving toward being really open to Native projects," he says. "My goal is to try to be the bridge between us and Hollywood."

PHOTO COURTESY FIRETHIEF PRODUCTIONS

Sterlin Harjo (left), Jeremy Charles (below)

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PRINCIPAL CHIEF BILL JOHN BAKER'S ENTREPRENEURIAL PAST INFORMS HIS LEADERSHIP OF THE CHEROKEE NATION ROXIE SCHESCKE SCALED A GARAGE STARTUP TO A 60-EMPLOYEE BUSINESS BOW & ARROW FOUNDERS INFUSE CULTURE INTO A BREWERY LOUIE GONG SUPPORTS THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF NATIVE ARTISTS BISON STAR NATURALS BUILDS A STOREFRONT ON TAOS PUEBLO

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IN THIS ISSUE

on the cover

PHOTOS BY AP PHOTO SUE OGROCKI

MAY 2019 • Volume01 Number 6

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Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs The “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue serves to elevate awareness of the innovation, professionalism, competence and tenacity demonstrated by Native entrepreneurs across Indian Country.

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Beauty & Wellness

Brewing

Federal Contracting

Angelo McHorse Haley Laughter Marissa Frazier Monica Simeon & Marina TurningRobe

Shyla Sheppard & Missy Begay Jake Keyes Morgan Owle-Crisp & Travis Crisp

Victoria Vasques Clara Pratte Joy Huntington Roxie Schescke

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Food

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Legal & Accounting

Falisha Steplight

Sean McCabe Gabriel Galanda

Beauty & Wellness

See page 6.

BY ANDREW RICCI

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

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BY ANDREW RICCI Cover Photo Courtesy: Cherokee Nation

FROM CREATING JOBS THROUGH A BUSINESS TO CREATING JOBS THROUGH A NATION

Chief Joe Bunch, left, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, Principal Chief John Bill Baker, center, Cherokee Nation, and Councilman Richard French, center, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, view the Treaty of New Echota at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian on Friday, April 12, 2019 in Washington, D.C.

e Busin tiv

Bill John Baker Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation See Page 6.

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Retail

Heat Laliberte Thomas Begay Karlene Hunter Lee Meisel Sean Sherman Lance Gumbs Ben Jacobs Bill McClure

Louie Gong Bethany Yellowtail Sally Snow & Will Perry Stephan Cheney Justin Notah Chrystal Antao MAY 2 0 1 9

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LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER & EXECUTIVE EDITOR

PHOTOS BY WHITNEY PATTERSON PHOTOGRAPHY

Immense passion and ingenuity are contained within the pages of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue.

In this issue of Native Business Magazine, we spotlight successful Native entrepreneurs for one reason more than any other, because it is vital that we support our own people. By investing in the goods and services of Native entrepreneurs, we demonstrate to those outside of Indian Country that we’re worthy of commerce and success. Recognizing our own worth is the first step in overcoming the debilitating effects of oppression.

United, we grow in confidence, power and influence. The content published in Native Business Magazine additionally serves to encourage the seeds of business ideas to grow and flourish.

Aspiring Native entrepreneurs and future generations across Indian Country can look to the Native entrepreneurs featured in this issue for inspiration to rise and pursue their own business dreams. Our first “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue is a testament to Native Business’ purpose — to uplift Native-owned businesses — and our faith in the self-sovereignty of Tribal people and Indian Country as a whole.

Two covers bookend this May 2019 issue, honoring leadership of the two largest Tribes in the United States: the Cherokee Nation and the Navajo Nation.

The cover story featured on this side of the magazine showcases Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker. An entrepreneur himself prior to taking on his first term as Principal Chief eight years ago (he counts 12 years on Tribal Council), he has applied his wisdom gleaned as a small business owner to leading a Tribal Nation — solving problems, generating jobs, building infrastructure and more.

Our cover feature offers a bird's eye view of the power of economic diversification attained by the Cherokee Nation, which touts more than 30 businesses that are funneling a tremendous amount of money back into the Tribe for community services and scholarships.

Principal Chief Baker, as well as Cherokee Nation Treasurer Lacey Horn, will deliver keynotes at our Native Business Summit, taking place May 13-15 at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Other confirmed presenters include Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation Chairman Mark N. Fox and Cheyenne and Arapaho Governor Reggie Wassana.)

The inaugural Native Business Summit coincides with the release of our premiere “Native

Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue — and sixth print edition of Native Business Magazine.

We organized our list of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” by sector to demonstrate the diversity of industries where Natives are making an impact. This half of the magazine shines a light on entrepreneurs who operate businesses in the Retail, Federal Contracting, Food, Breweries, Accounting & Legal, and Beauty & Wellness sectors.

Among the venerable entrepreneurs we spotlight in the Retail category is Chrystal Antao, CEO of Cherokee Data Solutions, which provides sales and support for technology and office products. Antao carries on the family business. “My mother, Pamela Bickford, started this company with the money in her pocket,” says Antao. “She started with an idea and a vision to provide for her family and her community, and she did exactly what she set out to do.”

The Federal Contracting sector of our “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” issue includes Roxie Schescke, the Lakota founder of Indian Eyes, LLC, who in 2005 bootstrapped her operation out of a two-car garage. Today she runs a 60-employee business responsible for generating between $25-27 million in annual revenue.

In the highly popular Food category, Native Business showcases Heat Laliberte, the Cree-Métis founder of One Arrow, an artisanal, naturally-smoked bacon business in Vancouver, Canada.

Among the many Native brewers, two Native women in Albuquerque are excelling in the largely male-dominated craft beer industry. Bow & Arrow Brewing Co. founders Shyla Sheppard, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, and Missy Begay, Navajo, are putting a unique Native and southwestern spin on small-batch brews.

In the Accounting & Legal sector, we underline the positive influence on Indian Country of Sean McCabe, the Navajo founder of McCabe CPA Group, and Gabriel Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of

California, who started the law firm Galanda Broadman, PLLC. In the Beauty & Wellness arena, Spokane sisters Monica Simeon and Marina TurningRobe are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Sister Sky, which integrates ancestral herbal wisdom in natural hair and skin products.

This issue marks the first of a recurring, annual list of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs.” To put things in perspective, our multimedia platform debuted online at NativeBusinessMag.com in July 2018, and our first print issue of Native Business Magazine was distributed across North America in November 2018. May 2019 represents the realization of two more significant milestones within a short timespan for Native Business. We are uniting Tribal government and business leaders, Native entrepreneurs, and representatives of corporations that seek to do business with Indian Country under one roof for dynamic networking, learning and growth opportunities at the Native Business Summit. And we’re culminating our ongoing commitment to profiling and promoting Native entrepreneurs in a single, hallmark issue. This month, we celebrate two firsts for Native Business. But these achievements simply mirror the innovation and entrepreneurial perseverance that exists across Indian Country. It’s an honor to reflect your success. Here’s to even more prosperity ahead.

Onward, CARMEN DAVIS

Publisher & Executive Editor

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5

FROM CREATING JOBS THROUGH A BUSINESS, TO…

Creating Jobs Through A NATION

BILL JOHN

BAKER

PHOTO BY AP PHOTO TULSA WORLD, JEFF LAUTENBERGER

Pri nc i p a l C h i e f

PHOTO COURTESY CHEROKEE NATION

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker and First Lady Sherry Robertson Baker (Pictured behind him) hold hands with others during a traditional dance.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker and Cherokee Nation Deputy Principal Chief S. Joe Crittenden

F

By Andrew Ricci

or four generations, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker’s family has lived in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, a city that has been the capital of the Cherokee Nation for 180 years. His lineage goes back to his great grandmother’s settling in the area after the passage of the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears.

“I’ve known nothing but growing up in Tahlequah, Oklahoma,” he told Native Business Magazine. “My grandparents and my parents were school teachers and spent a lot of time in heavily populated Cherokee areas, teaching school and spending time growing up in those communities.”

After graduating in 1972 from Tahlequah’s Northeastern State University, Baker went into the furniture business, and only expanded from there.

“I’ve got six kids and every time I had another kid, I had to go into another business just to be able to afford them,” he said. “So, even before I thought about Cherokee politics or the Council or the Chief or anything, I had pretty well raised my family and had experience in farming and ranching. I had a construction company and built homes, condos and hotels. I had insurance experience and development experience.”

And he says this business experience has helped him along his leadership path, which spans 12 years on the Tribal Council and now eight years as Principal Chief.

“As an entrepreneur or a small business owner, your main job is solving problems and having the ability to make things happen,” he said. “So I spent the first part of my life in that atmosphere where I was creating jobs, I was creating buildings, I was creating food, I was creating things and finding the wherewithal

to borrow the money to get things done. So I realized I had a lot to offer.”

As the largest of the federally recognized Tribes in the United States with more than 350,000 enrolled members, the Cherokee Nation has a long and storied history. For millennia, they were a major force in what is now the Southeastern United States. After contact, Baker says, they welcomed most visitors and were quick to adapt.

In the early 1800s, Sequoyah developed the Cherokee syllabary, which established the first way to write Cherokee. Baker says this was an important point in the Tribe’s history.

“Because Sequoyah had invented the Cherokee syllabary, we had a newspaper in English and Cherokee, and within 10 years of him inventing our written language, 90 percent of the Cherokees were literate in reading and writing at the time of removal.”

“At the time of removal, many of our leaders were better educated than those in Congress,” he continued. “And even though our lawyers won in the Supreme Court of the United States and said we could not be removed, Andrew Jackson went ahead and said, ‘Well let the Supreme Court enforce it then,’ and he sent the army and moved us out by bayonet point.”

At the time of removal, a quarter of the Tribe’s population perished. But Baker says the number one thing he’s proud of when it comes to the Tribe’s long history is that they didn’t give up.

“Our people came to the wilderness of Indian Territory and immediately went about the business of reconstituting our nation and

re-forming our government,” he said. “The first building that we built was the Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation because we believe in law, order and justice.”

Shortly after, the Cherokee Council dedicated 60 percent of their entire Treasury to build male and female seminaries, so the Cherokee people could access education despite being removed from access to universities in the east. The female seminary they built has the distinction today of being the very first institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi for any woman of any race.

PHOTO BY AP PHOTO SUE OGROCKI

Baker looks back at his Cherokee ancestors’ focus on building institutions of higher learning in their new homeland as a blue-

Oklahoma Hall of Fame member Vince Gill, left, is pictured with Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker, right, before induction ceremonies in Oklahoma City, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017. Baker is accepting a Hall of Fame medallion on behalf of Sequoyah, who created the written language of the Cherokee Nation.

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print for one of his current priorities.

“Our ancestors wanted to educate our young women to become teachers so that we could have mandatory public education in the Cherokee Nation, so they started their own university,” he said. “Today, we need doctors, so we’re starting our own medical school just like our ancestors did, so we can grow our own doctors here in the Cherokee Nation.”

“We’ve had over 1.2 million visits last year in our health care system, and we’ve invested over $100 million in the last eight years of gaming profits to improve our health care,” Baker said. “We now have a joint venture with the federal government that when we finish a building this year, the federal government will send us over $100 million per year to operate our health care system. By virtue of us building this 469,000-square-foot megaclinic, that is creating 850 new health care jobs.”

While there is a nationwide crisis caused by a shortage of doctors, it’s particularly grim in Oklahoma, where the average age of a primary care physician is 59 years old. That’s why Baker sees this medical school as filling a dire need. Through a partnership with the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, the nation’s first college of medicine, to be located at the Tribe’s health facility in Tahlequah, is expected to open next year.

“This campus will be suited for 50 students a year that will learn, live and grow right here in Indian country and not in some big city someplace,” Baker said. “And the whole message and purpose is to help populate rural Oklahoma specifically. I truly believe that through this move, we will have an oasis of doctors instead of the desert we’re experiencing right now.”

During his administration, Baker also says that he’s doubled the number of Cherokee children going to college on scholarship from 2,500 to 5,000.

“That makes it incumbent on us to create 5,000 jobs so that when these kids graduate, they can stay in their home communities, help keep those communities alive and well and growing, and keep the grandbabies clos-

PHOTO COURTESY CHEROKEE NATION

Tribal leaders at the dedication of the Cherokee National Peace Pavilion in Tahlequah.

er to Grandma and Grandpa, which is the Cherokee way,” he said.

Another of Baker’s priorities is increasing access to quality housing, which he also sees as carrying significant job creating potential.

“I just believed that there was a better way that we should be building houses, and we weren’t,” he said. “I knew that we’d create a lot of jobs for Cherokee tradesmen, the bricklayers, the cement finishers, the roofers, the plumbers, the backhoe operators, the heat and air folks that are all Cherokee citizens with their own businesses.”

“We weren’t really doing anything to boost that side of the economy, and so we found a way that we could hire Cherokees to build for Cherokees and use federal dollars that were government loans to back up these loans,” Baker said. “Now we’re putting families into homes for $350 per month, including taxes and insurance. The folks that are getting these homes are making a house payment that’s half what they were paying in rent for something not even as nice.”

Through the Housing Authority, each child that lives in one of these homes gets to take $2,800 to public school with them in the form of impact aid, which is why Baker lauds this initiative as a jobs program, a wealth building program and a public education program, all in one package.

“It’s a win-win-win,” he said.

Baker says that when he decided to run for Council almost two decades ago, he saw how all of his life experiences added up to an asset that could be valuable for an entrepreneurial Tribe.

“I had all these experiences of being a landlord, building duplexes and building a hotel, being a hotel owner, having a furniture store, and building a new furniture store,” he said.

“And also dealing with the purchasing and the retail sales and the marketing. I realized that maybe everything I’d been doing had put me in training to use those life skills that I had picked up to run a Tribe that had, when I came in, a $1 billion economic impact. And over eight years, we’ve taken it to over a $2 billion economic impact.”

“When I came in, there was a $9 million loss on all of our businesses outside of gaming,” he said. “And now, we’ve got over 30 companies and they’re putting tremendous dollars back into the bottom line that are coming back

into dividends for more scholarships.”

For almost 50 years, the Tribe has been manufacturing wiring harnesses for companies like Bell, Lockheed Martin and Boeing through Cherokee Nation Industries (CNI).

Baker says this business creates a lot of jobs, including generational jobs where grandparents, parents and children all can work for the same company.

For the last three years in a row, Baker also says the Tribe has won more than $1 billion in multi-year 8(a) contracting with the federal government. Because the Tribe has businesses in security, surveillance, manufacturing and construction with offices in places like Abu Dhabi and Baghdad, the federal government is now proactively seeking out the Nation for contracting opportunities.

“We have the expertise to run the contracts, do the accounting on the contracts and maintain the contracts,” Baker said. “The federal government likes working with us and likes the idea that any profits that are generated come back for scholarships and health care and housing and those kinds of benefits to the Tribe. They like the idea that our profits go for the greater good.”

PHOTO COURTESY CHEROKEE NATION

If you ask Baker to point to a turning point for the Tribe in recent history, he says it was the day he got elected — even though he

PHOTO BY AP PHOTO THE TULSA WORLD, ADAM WISNESKI

COVER STORY

Cherokee Chief Bill John Baker gives his mother, Isabel, a hug after being elected to his first term as Principal Chief, on June 30, 2011 in Tahlequah, Okla.

wasn’t planning on being Chief at first.

“I could not get a single soul to run for Chief,” he said. “They said that [the previous] Chief could not be beat, because he’d been in for 12 years, and that it would not be possible.”

Baker’s election was hard fought. At the end of Election Day, Baker held the lead by a margin of seven votes. By the next morning, a scrivener’s error revealed that he had lost by nine. A recount put him up by 266 votes. And after the Supreme Court mandated a new election, he ended up winning by slightly less than 2,000 votes.

So his Administration hit the ground running, perched to start implementing programs that would change the Cherokee Nation forever.

The first bill that he signed into law was one that he had presented while on the Tribal Council to invest 5 percent of the casino profits into the health system to supplement contract health for Cherokees that were falling through the cracks.

“That saved thousands of lives, and I was able to do that with the stroke of a pen,” he said.

“With the stroke of a pen, I was able to raise the minimum wage on the Cherokee Nation from the federal minimum to $9.50 an hour,” he said. “I’ve been able to give my employees a 3 percent raise every year that I’ve been here.

The year before I came, I think they got a sack of peanuts. With the stroke of a pen, I’ve been able to add maternity leave to our benefits program.”

He also says that because the Tribe has managed its money well, they’ve been able to give every full-time employee a $1,000 bonus at Christmas every year that he’s been in office.

But the thing that he’s most proud of, and Chief Baker tours construction of the new W.W. Hastings Health Center.

the thing that still has the most left to do, is his work to enhance health care for his people.

“We have improved health care, and statistically we’re better funded than probably any Native American Tribe in the country because of our personal investments,” he said.

“We’ve invested in contract health, and we’ve invested in things to make the health care of our people better. We’re working on a nursing school to come to the Cherokee Nation as well through a partnership with two or three universities, and we’re also working on a physician’s assistant school.”

“We’ve invested in the infrastructure, now we’re investing in the medical school,” Baker said. “A journey of 1000 miles starts with one step, and we have laid the groundwork, but we’re not there yet.”

One of the ways the Cherokee’s new health clinic has an eye toward the future is that, once doctors begin graduating from the forthcoming medical school, they’ll have a state-of-the-art facility to work in.

“We’re no longer in an 85-year old hospital that the county gave us when they went broke,” Baker said. “We’re no longer in a shopping center mall, calling it an Indian Clinic.

We have a clinic that any new doctor would be proud to take their parents to and say, ‘I’m a doctor now, and here’s my office; here’s where I go to work every day.’”

Because of Baker’s efforts, open-heart surgeries can now be performed in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In one of the smaller cities in the country, the Tribal health clinic is certified to offer stroke treatment. There is a helicopter in a town of 12,000 residents that can fly people from the clinic to a regional hospital in a timely fashion.

“I think that I’ll be able to look back and see that health care has been changed for the better for the next seven generations of our people,” he said.

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9

THE “NATIVE BUSINESS

ISSUE serves

ess

ENTREPRENEURS”

Na

TOP 50

u B s e i v n it

to elevate awareness of the innovation,

and tenacity demonstrated by

EN

competence

TR

Native

RS

professionalism,

U E EPREN

entrepreneurs across Indian Country.

Part of our impetus for highlighting 50 Native entrepreneurs is to underscore why Tribes and other Native entrepreneurs should invest in the goods and services of privately owned businesses in Indian Country — rather than sending money to border towns and non-Native corporations, which weakens reservation economies. These successful Native entrepreneurs are not only confident and capable, they are inspiring other Native business owners and raising the bar within their respective industries.

ple have developed and launched their business with little to no startup capital. They’ve been innovative and resilient enough to pursue their dreams, turning mere ideas into reality. They have proven their entrepreneurial competencies through their actions.

Many of the Native entrepreneurs within these pages go against the grain of what people consider common for Indian Country. As this list of high-achieving entrepreneurs indicates, Native business owners are involved in everything from making artisanal bacon to operating very successful federal contracting firms.

Our recurring list of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” illustrates the sheer number of Native entrepreneurs and Native-owned small businesses thriving across Indian Country. Native Business delivers a mix of snapshots and lengthier profiles of the 50 Native entrepreneurs, documenting and memorializing their innovation and self-determination. We organized our list of the “Native Business Top 50 Entrepreneurs” by category to demonstrate the diversity of industries where Natives are making an impact. This half of the magazine shines a light on entrepreneurs who operate businesses in the Retail, Federal Contracting, Food, Breweries, Accounting & Legal, and Beauty & Wellness sectors.

Many of these enterprising Native peo-

While recognizing 50 Native entrepre-

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neurs, in no particular numerical ranking, only scratches the surface of the wealth of Indigenous business owners across Indian Country, Native Business Magazine believes that these Native entrepreneurs merit your attention now.

When Indian Country sources opportunity to Native entrepreneurs, and we invest in ourselves, we in turn pump more money into Native economies and strengthen the economic base of our Tribal Nations. To attain generational wealth, Indian Country must start supporting and buying from these Native-owned businesses. The upside of increased Native entrepreneurship is enormous, not to mention it accelerates the creation of more Native-owned businesses, which fuels a powerful Native entrepreneurial ecosystem.

As the saying goes: A rising tide lifts all ships. United, Indian Country is an economic force. The more we help Native entrepreneurs succeed, the greater prosperity we bring to Indian Country now and for future generations to come.

FALISHA STEPLIGHT NISQUALLY ARCH SALON & SPA

By Mary Belle Zook

PHOTO COURTESY FALISHA STEPLIGHT

A

rch Salon & Spa owner and citizen of the Nisqually Indian Tribe Falisha Steplight is no stranger to stepping out of her comfort zone. After years of working with children, she launched her successful business located in Washington state in 2016 entirely on her own.

“I have never taken out a business loan,” Steplight said. “I didn’t have any credit, and I wasn’t going to get approved for anything anyway, so I had to do it with all cash.”

Early Inspiration As a child growing up on the Nisqually Indian Reservation, Steplight did not get to experiment openly with makeup.

“We were more kind of all-natural, and

we didn't wear dresses or makeup or anything like that,” she explained.

Once at school, she would often apply cosmetics in secret.

“So when my mom allowed me to wear makeup, I kind of went overboard with it,” Steplight said, then laughed. “But that's what really inspired me was the art side of it.”

Steplight felt drawn to a career off the reservation and received a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. After having children of her own, she began reevaluating her career choice.

“I wanted to go down to more core values and really do what made me happy,” she said.

Steplight strove to find her role in the

Building the Business The support of her Native American clientele and personal cultural ties inspired her to open her own eyebrow studio.

“The artistry, it's always been there (in Native American culture),” she explained.

“It's been there with beading; it has been there with drawing.

“Then the business side of things come from like bartering when you're at powwows,” Steplight added. “When you're at certain events, you're really running your own business.”

Steplight strives to boost women’s natural confidence through her salon and spa’s services. However, when thinking about branching out on her own, doubts flooded her mind. She brushed the negativity aside and focused on her dreams.

“I just wanted to do eyebrows because that’s what made me happy,” she said. “I opened up my own company called Arch.”

Since she only provides eyebrow services, which are usually one of the cheapest options at a spa or salon, Steplight worried about finances. She calculated how many clients she needed to make ends meet.

Shortly after opening, Steplight found herself needing to hire additional employees to meet demand and provide all salon and spa services in-house instead of referring customers to others.

Today Steplight owns and operates two locations and plans to expand up to five.

She strives to deliver high-quality services to clients of all backgrounds, and through her successes, provide inspiration to other Native American women entrepreneurs.

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PHOTO COURTESY FALISHA STEPLIGHT

beauty business and pave the way for other Native American women to go after their passions, even though she experienced moments of guilt.

“I felt like I was leaving for an industry that was very vain … so I didn't feel like there is very much reward in it,” Steplight said. “I just felt really bad about doing it, but it made me really happy. And so I did it anyway.”

After accepting a position in the industry, she felt like she found her calling, and she began building Native American clientele.

“Which was phenomenal to me because that kind of wasn't our culture and what we did, so to have women come in and get their makeup done, get their eyebrows done, it was such a great feeling, because then I felt like I was giving back to my community,” she said.

“It really filled that void that I thought I was going to be missing.”

B EAUTY & WELLN ESS

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

PHOTO COURTESY HALEY LAUGHTER

TAOS PUEBLO BISON STAR NATURALS

NAVAJO HOHZO TOTAL WELLNESS

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aley Laughter’s yoga studio is Mother Nature and conference venues. “Giving Natives access to yoga means that I have to be mobile. I’m bringing yoga to our people,” says Laughter (Navajo), founder and CEO of Hozho Total Wellness.

Laughter launched Hozho Total Wellness in 2015 to help Natives release stress and historical trauma through yoga, a practice intended to heal the mind, body and spirit. Today, she travels to host energizing yoga classes and brief breaks of stretching and movement at business conferences across Indian Country.

In summer 2019, Hozho Total Wellness will begin offering 200-Hour Registered Indigenous Yoga Teacher Training. Laughter is also in the process of formalizing an Indigenous Yoga Instructors Association, launching a YouTube channel, and creating a crowdfunding platform to build an Indigenous Yoga app — ”so every reservation has access to yoga,” she says. A Hozho Total Wellness t-shirt line is coming soon.

B

ison Star Naturals makes all-natural lotions, bath salts and more — infused with the beauty and intoxicating scent of the land of Taos, New Mexico. Not only is Bison Star Naturals in harmony with nature, it’s rooted on the Taos Pueblo, where Angelo McHorse, co-founder of Bison Star Naturals, was born and raised.

In March, the Native-owned startup broke ground on a storefront and workshop on the Pueblo, surrounded by herb and floral gardens vital to the company’s lotions, which anchor the Bison Star brand. Angelo and Jacquelene McHorse, the husbandand-wife team behind Bison Star, received an injection of support from the Native American Venture Acceleration Fund to fund production of their liquid jojoba and yucca root soaps, released this spring.

“It’s really great to be back home and starting a project for some economic development for our Tribe,” said McHorse, who earned his Agricultural Science and Business degrees from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. “It’s awesome, be-

MARISSA FRAZIER LAKOTA ARTISTRY SALON

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arissa Frazier always dreamed of running her own business, envisioning a modern, sleek salon like those in New York or Los Angeles. Last year, the entrepreneur, who grew up on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, opened Artistry Salon in Rapid City, South Dakota — so named because she believes hairdressing is an art. “I have brought that metropolitan vibe to the Midwest,” she says.

Currently, she’s renting out chairs to stylists for a rate of $500 a month, in addition to

cause I think entrepreneurship is a growing sector. Our only economic development was basically a casino. Years down the line, the Tribe is developing a convenience store and possibly a gas station on the Taos Pueblo. It’s really cool to be able to start a business, to grow it, and to break ground on a storefront and a warehouse on Tribal land. It has enormous potential and economic value for our Tribe, as far as employment and putting Taos Pueblo on the map.”

Bison Star Naturals has engaged primarily in direct-to-consumer sales through farmers’ markets, trade shows, and arts and crafts events. Their online store at BisonStarNaturals.com also leads to great returns, accounting for approximately 2025 percent of Bison Star’s overall revenue.

Bison Star Naturals products can also be found throughout New Mexico and at stores in four different states. The McHorses have their visions set on new horizons in 2019 — acquiring more wholesale accounts to expand their reach.

PHOTO COURTESY ANGELO MCHORSE

HALEY LAUGHTER

counting hundreds of clients of her own.

Frazier is already looking ahead to her next big dream: opening an old-time, traditional barber shop right next door to Artistry Salon in about two years. “We don’t have any barber shops here in Rapid City, so there is definitely a huge hole to fill in that market.”

And her inner artist is not stopping there, either. This energetic entrepreneur, wife and mother is also exploring options to start her own product line and hair-care company as she says she wants to keep her hands in as many pots as possible in the cosmetology industry. “After your first dream comes true, you need new ones, then you just keep going,” she says.

PHOTO COURTESY MARISSA FRAZIER

B EAUTY & WELLN ESS

ANGELO McHORSE

B EAUTY & WELLN ESS

MONICA SIMEON & MARINA TURNINGROBE

iblings Monica Simeon and Marina TurningRobe established their company Sister Sky in 1999. Both are citizens of the Spokane Tribe and utilize ancestral herbal wisdom and ethics to create natural hair and skin merchandise, and they continue carrying these principles into their newest venture, Sister Sky Inc.

natural products rooted in Native American teachings.

“It's been a great opportunity for us to build upon that anchor that we've always had for Sister Sky’s products division,” Simeon said.

With two decades now under their belts, the sisters have served as leaders in the all-natural movement of today. They strive to honor traditional plant knowledge and herbal wisdom in everything Sister Sky does.

“By that I mean the natural ingredients that our ancestors used when there wasn't a Walgreens or a Wal-Mart or a drugstore that we could go to,” Simeon added. “And anything we put in our blog or any products that we release or offer to the public, we really do ask ‘Will this pass the test with our elders?

Will they think this is OK?’”

Origins Sister Sky’s products started as a homebased business, and in the beginning, both sisters held full-time jobs outside of their company.

“We were mixing lotion, making candles and doing all these hobby-type things,” Simeon said.

Simeon and TurningRobe enjoyed working together, packing their merchandise for trade shows and events every weekend, but they wanted to invest more time and energy into their business.

“And as fate would have it when my son Kevin was born with severe eczema, we really started looking at traditional herbal ingredients from our heritage,” Simeon added.

Kevin’s struggle with dry, sensitive skin furthered the company’s mission to create

Branching Out The company began creating a business growth plan several years ago, and the siblings decided to launch Sister Sky, Inc. The offshoot enterprise expands the company outside of the beauty industry and into federal contracting. However, throughout its development, completing the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) 8(a) Business Development Program remained at the forefront of TurningRobe and Simeon’s minds.

TurningRobe headed up the project, and two and a half years after applying, they received the certification notice from the SBA. “It takes dedication, and it takes teamwork with whomever you're working with,” TurningRobe recalled. “You really have to stay focused through the 8(a) ap-

SPOKANE SISTER SKY

By Mary Belle Zook

PHOTO COURTESY MONICA SIMEON

S

plication process.

“It was from our intentions of diversifying that we now find ourselves with two companies, but our products division is still alive and well and running very healthy.”

The services division, Sister Sky Inc., targets federal agencies that provide resources or health and wellness initiatives across Indian Country. It currently collaborates with several federal agencies, including the Administration for Native Americans, to support language revitalization across five Tribes. The company also holds an Indian Health Services contract with 12 Tribes who are currently integrating behavioral health into primary care.

“Not only is the approach to treat the patient who may have primary care symptoms — physiological symptoms — but it also addresses behavioral health as a potential link to some of the things that are going on with the physical,” Simeon said.

“Our company has been deeply anchored in health and wellness, whether it's through products or services,” she added.

The Future Simeon and TurningRobe’s children have returned home from college to carry on the Sister Sky legacy.

“They’re talking about products they want to launch and divisions of the company they want to start, and … I can look ahead and see an amazing vision that is yet to unfold,” Simeon said.

The sisters are proud that the brand they have built together, with its foundations in Native American traditions, will continue for generations to come.

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NAVAJO McCABE CPA GROUP

PHOTO COURTESY SEAN MCCABE

F

or 22 years, Sean McCabe, Diné, from the Fort Defiance Chapter of the Navajo Nation, has been crunching numbers to help businesses and organizations with their accounting practices. For the past 12 years, he’s done so under his own banner, McCabe CPA Group, LLC, which offers full-service accounting,

ROUND VALLEY INDIAN TRIBES GALANDA BROADMAN, PLLC

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PHOTO COURTESY GABRIEL GALANDA

SEAN McCABE

including bookkeeping and audit services. He also has a payroll company that handles third-party payroll processing for his clients. Licensed in both Arizona and New Mexico, McCabe works nearly exclusively within Indian Country, focusing on Native governments and their entities like housing authorities, schools and casinos.

McCabe is passionate about hiring and training Native accountants. “At the end of the day I’m just a Native guy who loves to help our people and utilize as many Native American people as possible,” McCabe says.

Speaking as an entrepreneur and a CPA, McCabe emphasizes the importance of Native-owned business engaging in solid accounting practices.

“A lot of times, plans go wrong or things don’t work out because the numbers aren’t quite right, so getting a professional to help you out is a good thing,” McCabe says.

GABRIEL GALANDA

abriel Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, formed his own law firm in 2010. Galanda Broadman, PLLC, is dedicated to advancing Tribal legal rights and Indian business interests. With offices in Seattle and Yakima, Washington; Bend, Oregon; and Tuscon, Arizona, Galanda Broadman, PLLC, counts eight lawyers, and tackles critical and complex litigation, bet-the-company business matters and regulatory disputes for Tribal governments, enterprises and citizens.

In addition to being recognized for his staunch disenrollment advocacy, Galanda is widely respected as a proponent for Tribal economic diversification. “Tribes need to start doing an inventory of what makes them a Tribe and what industries make the most sense for a diversified economy,” he told Native Business.

Galanda writes frequently about Tribal litigation, sovereignty and Indian civil rights issues. He’s been published more than 100 times and been interviewed and quoted by mainstream and international news outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Le Monde.

Galanda also founded the non-profit Huy (which in Lushootseed means “see you again/we never say goodbye”), dedicated to enhancing religious, cultural and other rehabilitative opportunities for American Indian prisoners.

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T

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LEGA L & ACCO UN TIN G

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

B R EWIN G

Missy Begay, co-founder, Branding & Design, Diné, a member of the Navajo Nation (standing); and Shyla Sheppard, co-founder, President & CEO of Bow & Arrow Brewing Co., a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes

THREE AFFILIATED TRIBES

MISSY BEGAY NAVAJO

BOW & ARROW BREWING CO.

S

hyla Sheppard and Missy Begay met while students at Stanford University in California’s Bay Area, where they also received an introduction to craft beer. “There’s a brew pub in Palo Alto and they specialized in German beer styles. We realized that there is a whole world of beer and it relates to geography and history and science,” shared Sheppard, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. “It became a side interest or hobby of ours. Whenever we traveled, we’d seek out distilleries and breweries.”

Sheppard studied economics at Stanford and started her career in venture cap-

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ital and social impact investing. “We were in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was really eye-opening to learn about the power of capital and how it can accelerate growth and innovation,” Sheppard told Native Business.

Meanwhile Begay, a member of the Navajo Nation, pursued her M.D., and today serves as full-time sleep physician, in addition to working part-time at the brewery, overseeing branding and marketing.

In 2015, the partners in business and life personally invested in their dream to open a brewery, and friends from Sheppard’s venture capital days chipped in as well, “because they believed in us and wanted to support us,” Sheppard said. They also secured a loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Sheppard, who was a founding team member at New Mexico Community Capital (NMCC), knew from experiencing consulting small businesses at various stages of growth that the first years of running a

To house their brewery, Sheppard and Begay purchased a former electrical contractor’s warehouse and remodeled it. The on-site tap room is “the bread and butter of the business,” Sheppard said, accounting for 90 percent of Bow & Arrow’s revenue. “That’s why it was so important to pay attention to the details around that experience.”

Their award-winning conceptual design is a testament to their meticulous vision — and desire to create a space that cul-

PHOTO BY ROBERTO ROSALES

SHYLA SHEPPARD &

startup is “all-consuming in terms of your time and energy.”

As Sheppard can personally attest now, it’s true. Fortunately, she and Begay are passionate about craft beer and could talk about malt, hops and wild yeast all night.

“Regardless of the industry you’re in, there’s always just the nuts and bolts that you need to get done. Those parts aren’t always exciting, but the parts of the business that drive your passion are what really get you through the challenges along the way,” she said.

One of those logistical pieces for Sheppard was navigating the legalities of federal, state and local licensing. “The fact that we have our small brewer’s license and our wholesale license, and that I did that myself, is something that I am really proud of,” Sheppard said.

The regulatory environment can shape how a business approaches craft beer. Bow & Arrow is essentially three businesses in one: production with a 15-barrel brew house, an on-site taproom, and a wholesale distributor. The business model also lends itself to intimate brewer-led tours, tastings and private event rentals.

Bow & Arrow currently self-distributes exclusively across New Mexico to restaurants, bars, hotels and retail accounts, including big names like Whole Foods and Total Wine. Plans to expand distribution across the Southwest are on the horizon.

The brewing company additionally has the legal ability to open three satellite taprooms in the state. “Five years from now I envision multiple locations with maybe a unique concept at each one, but the heart and soul is still Bow & Arrow,” Sheppard said. “We want to keep people on their toes and keep things interesting and continue to grow our production, but at a rate that we don’t sacrifice quality.”

PHOTOS BY DON JAMES

tivated a sense of community. “We have long communal tables that were custom designed and built locally. Missy and I would sit across the table from each other with a measuring tape, because we wanted to think about what is the ideal distance between customers. I wanted something that fostered the elbow-to-elbow experience with your neighbors,” Sheppard said.

In addition to considering how design informs the behavior of customers, they wanted to incorporate textures “to bring about this warmth, because it is an industrial space with concrete floors. We wanted people to feel comfortable and at-ease,” Sheppard said.

An all-wood herringbone design graces the wall behind the bar, and visuals of the vast southwest landscape reinforce the brewery’s connection to the land.

While they’re seasoned home brewers, Sheppard and Begay hired a professional brewer with experience brewing on a commercial scale. Bow & Arrow head brewer Ted O'Hanlan previously crafted the unique “Plow to Pint” beers that Fullsteam Brewery in North Carolina is known for, before heading to the award-winning Black Tooth Brewing company in Sheridan, Wyoming.

The couple still partake in the creative brewing process. “We collaborate on new beers and unique ingredients, and we’re very much involved on our sensory and tasting panels,” Sheppard said.

Bow & Arrow makes small-batch brews, often infused with southwestern ingredients like roasted blue corn kernels or wild sumac. They actively embrace incorporating “a sense of place, whether that’s geography or culture” in their branding, Begay said. The brewery sources ingredients locally, and from Native producers when appropriate, such as Navajo Agricultural

Products Industries, an enterprise of the Navajo Nation.

Fun names like Cosmic Arrow Saison take inspiration from Native and popular cultures. “It’s been helpful for us to draw from our unique Native backgrounds. We’ve found that having a story around the beers resonates with people.

It’s been really well-received,” said Sheppard, adding that they strike a careful balance between drawing from their Native backgrounds while being culturally appropriate and respectful.

Dale Deforest, an Indigenous comic book illustrator, and Begay’s high school friend, designs the beer labels. “I think that gives us a real unique style and look in the beer scene, and it also feels authentic. That’s very important in terms of branding and marketing,” Begay said.

Begay’s favorite brand is the Bolos & Bling Brett IPA — featuring several different types of Bolo ties on the label. “It pays tribute to the fashion of the southwest,” Begay said.

A recent addition to the roster is “Coyote Cool,” which pays homage to Native stories of the coyote “being a trickster and getting into trouble,” Sheppard said.

The Denim Tux Blue Corn Lager takes the prize for the most popular beer in the taproom and in wholesale accounts.

“That’s one where we have incorporated local roasted blue corn, and people really love it. Most people haven’t tried a beer with blue corn, but that was an intentional move that we made to incorporate an

ingredient that is local,” Sheppard said.

Raised on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Sheppard’s entrepreneurial spirit is inspired by her grandma, who designed regalia and more.

“She made star quilts and moccasins and traditional foods that she would sell” at pow wows from her pop-up camper. “It instilled in me a sense of self-determination and persistence — whether it was going to Stanford, working in venture capital, or entering the craft beer movement,” Sheppard said.

Begay, Diné, likewise grew up on the reservation, where her father operated a transport company for more than 20 years, in addition to holding down a career as a physician. “I was exposed to that physician/entrepreneur side of things early on, which I think is pretty unique for somebody who grew up on the rez. We definitely have a lot of respect for mentors. Mentors are very important culturally,” said Begay.

“Being Navajo, I’ve learned to integrate culture into a business model.”

And that’s exactly what Sheppard and Begay have done — infuse the lessons of their Tribal heritages and the beauty of the southwest landscape into their craft beer business.

As Sheppard puts it modestly: “Our backgrounds have given rise to what we found is a unique approach in the greater craft beer industry.”

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NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

JAKE KEYES IOWAY TRIBE SKYDANCE BREWING COMPANY

f anyone owns the romantic version of a startup, it’s Jake Keyes.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Keyes converted a passion into a bona fide business.

But getting there involved a dark twist.

Keyes, a member of the Ioway Tribe, and owner, brewmaster, and head of the sales department at Skydance Brewing Company in Oklahoma City, grew up dirt poor in Little Axe, Oklahoma. Raised by a single dad

with a knack for home brewing, Keyes had a tendency of “getting nosey and messing up a couple of batches when his dad wasn’t looking.” So, his dad taught him to brew at age 12, and by age 20, Jake “fell in love with the business.”

“My dad and I always dreamed about opening a brewery,” Keyes recounted. But that dream was dashed when his father quickly succumbed to multiple sclerosis at age 56.

MORGAN OWLE-CRISP EASTERN BAND OF CHEROKEE SEVEN CLANS BREWING

By Renae Ditmer

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organ Owle-Crisp, president/ owner of Seven Clans Brewing and the Native half (Eastern Band Cherokee) of the Crisp duo with her husband Travis, operations manager/owner, is a serial entrepreneur.

Well-embedded in the hospitality and beverage industry, her first foray into entrepreneurship was her purchase of a company that published and distributed Cherokee books. Now, after 15 years in hospitality, Owle-Crisp has launched into craft brewing in North Carolina, with Seven Clans, the first Native-owned craft brewery in a state with $2.1 billion in craft beer sales in 2018.

But Owle-Crisp’s impetus wasn’t just the love of beer. She was out shopping when she noticed Cherokee symbols that she had grown up with on merchandise, but which were not Native

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PHOTO COURTESY JAKE KEYES

I

But not before Jake “found his dad’s old beer recipes in a book, brewed some up, and took one up” to his ailing father. His dad liked it so much that Keyes took it to a home brewing club that encouraged him to enter a Dallas competition.

Keyes won that medal, so he learned via a phone call. But it was another phone call that day that changed his life. “By the time I got to my hotel room, a second call relayed that my dad had passed away. I decided then and there to open a brewery, and not procrastinate like my dad,” Keyes recalls.

Skydance Brewing Company — the first Native-owned craft brewery in Oklahoma City — opened in late 2018. Currently housed in a co-op, Keyes has a 2020 plan to expand in the Oklahoma market where he wants to pay homage to his Native heritage. made. It prompted her to think about the food and beverage industry where “Native designs and concepts are often appropriated, but not Native-owned,” and wondered out loud, “Why aren’t we branding us?”

Then came the moment when she began looking at companies from all over that carried Indigenous names and symbols but had no ties to Tribes and no real thought given to what being Native American meant. Commercialization and mass marketing were separate from the people those symbols came from.

“I thought it was important for Native people to come out and take their stance and show who they are in the industry,” Owle-Crisp said. “It was a matter of how we present ourselves as Cherokee to the rest of the world and how people on the outside look at Native people,” she said.

The importance of having a good message and sharing it with everyone else now drives her brewery business model. Today Owle-Crisp tells the story of her people in everything she does, and reception has been good. The Crisps partnered with a local brewery and debuted their first product at a local casino in March 2018. They now look forward to the day when they can both produce and sell on the Cherokee reservation.

PHOTO COURTESY MORGAN OWLE-CRISP

By Renae Ditmer

HEAT LALIBERTE CREE-MÉTIS ONE ARROW

PHOTO COURTESY HEAT LALIBERTE

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distinguished chef, Heat Laliberte has worked in Vancouver’s top restaurants and hotels. His resume includes positions at Blue Water Café and the Fairmont and Westin Hotel brands, since his cheffing career started in 2005. He’s even cooked for world-class athletes at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janiero, and for the 2018 Winter Olympic games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

But Laliberte (Cree-Métis) was hungry for more.

During the time he was refining the charcuterie and butchery program at the Fairmont Pacific Rim in Vancouver, he came across an ad for the Aboriginal Business & Entrepreneurship Skills Training program at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre. That altered the trajectory of his career. Laliberte applied, got accepted, and learned how to develop a busi-

ness plan and start a business.

“Because I’m a chef, I knew that I wanted to do something around food. I’m very passionate about making charcuterie — especially sausages and bacon. It’s something that I’m really good at,” Laliberte told Native Business Magazine.

After Laliberte graduated from the Aboriginal Business & Entrepreneurship program in November 2016, he put his salary toward self-funding One Arrow, his artisanal, naturally-smoked bacon business.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to be a vendor at the farmer’s market, so my idea was to open a stall at the farmer’s market selling my artisan bacon. We had a couple months to prepare for the final presentation [through the Aboriginal Business & Entrepreneurship program], so I was working on different recipes, glazes and different kinds of pork belly,” he said.

In January 2017, Laliberte won the best business idea and presentation for the course. “That gave me the confidence to apply to the Vancouver Farmer’s Market as a vendor,” he said.

Today, Laliberte is all about making customers smile. His client-base is growing at

the farmer’s market. “People want to hear about your product and how you make it and where you source everything from,” he said.

So, what’s his spiel? Laliberte tells potential customers that he’s a First Nations entrepreneur who started One Arrow to make small-batch, hand-cured, naturally smoked, hormone-free bacon.

“I use natural ingredients to support the local B.C. [British Columbia] economy. I have different flavors. I have a hickory-smoked maple bacon; the maple syrup is from Squamish. I have a black pepper and honey; and I use honey from White Rock, which is a suburb of Vancouver — so it’s local, wild flower honey. I have a Chinese Five Spice; and I have a bacon that I call Salt and Smoke that has no sugar added — which is great for people with health issues like diabetes. That is actually selling quite well, because a lot of people are trying to stay away from sugar these days.

I take a lot of pride in my product, and I just want to share it with the people of Vancouver,” he told Native Business.

In addition to the farmer’s market, One Arrow supplies small butcher shops in the greater Vancouver area, and residences and small businesses in Vancouver can order the bacon through a delivery service called SPUD.ca. Laliberte is also talking with a grocery store chain right about supplying four of their stores.

When it came to developing his brand, Laliberte turned to his friends skilled at website or logo design. “My new logo with the pig is done by an Ojibwe artist-in-residence at our Aboriginal Hotel downtown,” Laliberte shared.

Laliberte currently works full-time as the butcher at the highly regarded Culinary Capers Catering & Special Events in Vancouver, where he additionally rents 6,000 square feet of space for One Arrow — “ideal for product storage,” he said.

Still, Laliberte’s considering when he can make the leap to full-time entrepreneurship.

“It’s also about that fear of the unknown,” he said. “If you quit your full-time job, you’re going to have to make your business succeed.”

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NAVAJO/HOPI CHIEF BURGERS

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homas Begay (Navajo, Hopi) had to overcome a series of logistical challenges to launch Chief Burgers, a gourmet burger and picadilly business on wheels, based in Window Rock, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation reservation. “We’re winning the trust of the people with the quality of the food and the quality of our service,” Begay told Native Business.

Begay graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2016 with degrees in management and marketing. Immediately after graduation, he struggled to land a job — so he looked to entrepreneurship. He took his detailed, 80-page business plan for a food truck business and began scouring for funding sources. He turned to the Navajo Nation, his local Veteran’s Affairs office, organizations near Window Rock, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. Yet his applications for business loans were denied.

“They wanted assets and three years of sales history and also projections. I had the projections, but I wasn’t in business long enough to secure funding,” he said. “I kept working on my budget, doing personal budget cuts.”

Eventually, he turned to microlenders.

“The gist of all their statements was ‘no-capital for food truck start-ups,’” Begay said.

Left with little options, Begay turned to banks and credit unions to see if he could obtain a loan as a startup.

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“Not being brick and mortar is one thing, but a startup that most envision as a taco truck, let alone trying to sell the idea of getting a slice of the burger industry — people think it’s crazy or disruptive. Lack of business startup history was a common objection I was often confronted with,” Begay shared.

Ultimately, he needed to self-fund.

Grinding it out in the restaurant industry, Begay and his wife Kindra Begay (Navajo, Hopi) saved $15,000 to purchase an old FedEx truck to house Chief Burgers. (Kindra oversees marketing, customer service and sales for Chief Burgers.)

He took a job as a server at Applebee’s. “It was sustainable, earning about $200 per day

Chief Burgers is a gourmet burger and picadilly food truck based in Window Rock, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation reservation

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

in tips,” Begay said. The vast majority of that money went toward Chief Burgers—outfitting the FedEx truck with cooking equipment, painting it and buying vendor space.

While high-quality, homemade burgers are the focus, his business actually began to soar when he introduced a novelty food from his youth. “We’re known for our fresh ingredients for our burgers; they’re fresh-pressed every day,” he said.

But Chief Burgers needed an edge. He started selling Picadillies. “Koolaid and pickles is one of my childhood favorites. It really took off and helped revive the Chief Burgers brand. Our picadillies are known for quality and attention to detail. They have to be picture-perfect and it has to look crazy. It never fails, the first thing people do is take a picture,” Begay said.

He added with confidence: “They’re not over-powering flavors. It’s perfectly balanced, and hard to replicate.”

Begay has encouraged customer loyalty through a rewards program. “When you earn enough points, you get a free picadilly or burger. The redemption codes are sent directly to customers’ phones,” Begay said.

Ultimately, Chief Burgers is a reflection of self-sovereignty, he emphasized. “It’s a Native brand. Chief Burgers is trademarked, patented and copyrighted by the Navajo Nation.”

But Begay has high-hopes for expansion.

He hopes to bring in and set aside enough earnings to travel to pow wows, operating as a vendor across the country. He also envisions Chief Burgers locations across the country, with logos redesigned to reflect the Tribe.

“I can tailor Chief Burgers’ logo to any state or to any Tribe. They could plug-into an established growing network that allows for location-based alterations and additions, while practicing their sovereignty and independence,” he said.

PHOTOS COURTESY THOMAS BEGAY

F OOD

THOMAS BEGAY

LEE MEISEL

KARLENE HUNTER

LAKOTA LEEWAY FRANKS & LEEWAY BUTCHER

LAKOTA NATIVE AMERICAN NATURAL FOODS

hree years ago, Lee Meisel, opened Leeway Franks, a beloved sausage shop and restaurant in Lawrence, Kansas.

Meisel and his “tight-knit crew” of employees make the all-natural, locally sourced frankfurters, bratwursts and sausages inhouse — a skill Meisel garnered as a teen, working at a butcher shop in rural North Dakota.

“There’s a parallel between indigenous values and resourcefulness — not wasting anything, and making sure that you are doing the best job that you can,” Meisel, Lakota, told Native Business.

In December 2018, Meisel opened his second operation, a

door down from Leeway Franks.

Leeway Butcher, a full-service, whole-animal butcher shop and retail store, offers “a variety of locally-sourced, humanely-raised meats from small family farms in the surrounding area,” Meisel said.

Reflecting on entrepreneurship, Meisel shared: “I’m a sole proprietor. My whole life is tied up in the restaurant, and my intellectual property in the brand. When you think of it in those terms, decision-making becomes more real. You know you can’t take big gambles. I think having some restriction on funds, it makes you more responsible.”

PHOTO COURTESY KARLENE HUNTER

PHOTO COURTESY LEE MEISEL

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K

arlene Hunter and her business partner Mark Tilsen founded Native American Natural Foods on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation more than 10 years ago. A member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Hunter previously founded Lakota Express (LEX), a full-service direct marketing company located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She holds an MBA from Oglala Lakota College, and also counts decades of experience working on educational and economic development on the reservation.

In 2007, Native American Natural Foods debuted its first food product, the Tanka Bar. Today Native American Natural Foods’ products are sold at more than 8,000 retailers, including REI and Costco.

Based on traditional wasna and pemmican, the Tanka Bar combines high-protein, prairie-fed buffalo and tart-sweet cranberries.

The lean meat has provided fuel to Lakota warriors for centuries.

“Our runners used buffalo and berries when they would go out on hunts; they’d pack it in a buffalo horn,” Hunter, co-founder and CEO of Native American Natural Foods, told Native Business Magazine.

SEAN SHERMAN

PHOTO COURTESY SEAN SHERMAN

OGLALA LAKOTA THE SIOUX CHEF

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hef Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota founder of “The Sioux Chef,” is on a mission. He wants to help indigenous peoples across the world reclaim their ancestral food knowledge, while creating sustainable economies around indige-

nous foodways.

Sherman and his tight-knit, indigenous Sioux Chef team, including co-owner Dana Thompson, are working on two major projects in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, area.

This summer, they plan to debut the first

of many Indigenous Food Labs, featuring a nonprofit restaurant. The following year, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, a for-profit restaurant, is scheduled to open in the popular Water Works park pavilion.

The Sioux Chef restaurant will churn out healthy, indigenous foods, primarily from the Minneapolis-St. Paul region — cutting out foods not ancestral to Turtle Island, like wheat flour, dairy, processed cane sugar, and even beef, pork and chicken.

“We prioritize our purchasing from indigenous vendors first, and then use a lot of partners and growers growing indigenous foods in our region,” Sherman said.

Meanwhile, the premiere Indigenous Food Lab will help to create opportunity for indigenous foodpreneurs: chefs, producers, educators and other food industry professionals. The live, nonprofit restaurant will feature a classroom kitchen, created through The Sioux Chef’s existing 501(c)3, NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems).

In 2019, the James Beard Foundation awarded Sherman another honor, a Leadership Award. Last year, his cookbook The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen won the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook.

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BEN JACOBS

SHINNECOCK LOBSTER FACTORY

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ver the course of his entrepreneurial career, Lance Gumbs has succeeded as a club venue operator and DJ, as well as a proprietor of a gift shop, smoke shop, delicatessen and café. He recently added co-owner of the Shinnecock Lobster Factory in the Hamptons to that list.

Gumbs’ first foray into business was a youth club.

While still attending prep school, Gumbs gutted a home — a gift inherited from an elder — and turned it into a teen club. “I didn't understand entrepreneurship,” he says, “but I made a ton of money!”

Each Friday and Saturday night, Gumbs would open the club and spin tunes. That's how he started out as a DJ. While a freshman in college, he opened an outpost to sell Native jewelry, clothing and other indigenous-made accessories. Although situated across the street from the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, he struggled to turn a profit. Good fortune came knocking in the form of a Mohawk man, driving a van, who asked Gumbs, ‘Are you interested in selling cigarettes?’ The man offered Gumbs $10,000 worth of inventory in consignment. “I made $2,800 my first day,” he says, “and the third day, I ran out of stock.” The rest is history.

When it came time to diversify, Gumbs opened a deli and café at his Shinnecock Indian Outpost.

Most recently, Gumbs added a lobster roll concession to his portfolio. Lance Gumbs’ lobster roll joint, located on the reservation, on the East End of Long Island, opened for business Memorial Weekend 2017.

The Shinnecock Lobster Factory serves up variations of the Hampton’s quintessential lobster roll — from the BLT to the Cajun to the Shinnecock. The menu also boasts bisques, seafood sides, sea burgers (think crabcakes and yellow fin tuna) and more.

He and business partner Chef Marco Barrila are so busy, they can barely keep the lobster in the pot.

“During the U.S. Open, we sold 5,000 pounds of lobster,” Gumbs says.

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decade ago, Ben Jacobs opened the doors to Tocabe, an American Indian Eatery in Denver, Colorado.

Tocabe, which means “blue” in Osage, stands by its philosophy: “Native first and local second.” The fast-casual restaurant purchases ingredients from Native vendors whenever possible to put money back into Native economies. Tocabe also embraces an ingredient-driven concept, meaning they’ll create a unique dish around one exciting, indigenous ingredient.

Tocabe also takes a community-led approach to business. Every Tocabe member tastes each new food item.

“We always say that we are a kitch-

Matt Chandra (left), Ben Jacobs (right)

en by committee,” Jacobs told Native Business.

Today the successful operation counts two brick-and-mortar locations, plus a food truck, and the Osage co-founder and his business partner Matt Chandra are in growth mode, looking to expand beyond Colorado’s borders.

“The plan from the beginning was to become a regional if not national brand,” Jacobs said. “I think within the next five years, we should be in multiple states; my goal is for six to eight additional restaurants.”

PHOTO COURTESY BEN JACOBS

SHINNECOCK

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BILL McCLURE MUSCOGEE (CREEK) NATIVE AMERICAN COFFEE

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ill McClure started NativeAmericanCoffee.com with his daughter, Ellie, in 2008. The proud Muscogee (Creek) owner attributes a lot of his success to hustle and old-fashioned business practices. Native American Coffee, a business-to-business and wholesale company, has sent out 40,000 handwritten notes with its orders, and generally includes cookies with each one. About one million cookies to date, in fact.

McClure employs a strong hire-Native preference at his 12,000-square-foot operation in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and three quar-

ters of his 14 full-time employees are Native American, he says, from the Choctaw, Cherokee and Creek Tribes. “I love training young people,” he says. “It opens the door for young Native Americans to build a new career.”

He also counts some Tribes as his customers, including the Muscogee (Creek) Nation where he supplies both their casinos and some of their offices as well. In addition, the firm supplies a number of small airlines, as well as Campbell’s Soup, a number of different Fortune 500 companies, and some hospitals and hotels.

PHOTO COURTESY BILL McCLURE

LANCE GUMBS

PHOTOS COURTESY LANCE GUMBS

OSAGE TOCABE

Your Success is Our Business.

With 35 companies, Cherokee Nation Businesses blends a heritage of ingenuity with modern business experience to deliver service and solutions that produce results for its customers.

777 W. Cherokee St. l Catoosa, OK 74015 918.384.7474 l cherokeenationbusinesses.com

VICTORIA VASQUES DIEGUEÑO TRIBAL TECH, LLC

T

oday Tribal Tech, LLC, Victoria Vasques’ 8(a) startup, has an impressive and growing collection of awards as one of the fastest-growing small businesses in the Washington, D.C. federal marketplace.

It has a spot on the 2018 11th annual list of the 50 Fastest Growing Woman-Owned/ Led Companies for 2018 from the Women Presidents’ Organization for the third consecutive year. It’s on the Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s 23rd Annual List of Virginia’s Fantastic 50, and it’s been included on Inc. Magazine’s 5000 list for four consecutive years. And in 2015, Vasques earned her own recognition as the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Person of the Year in the Northern Virginia Region.

But the journey from her start 19 years ago, when she decided to retire from the federal government, to her stunning suc-

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cess today has been anything but overnight. With 25 years of public service at the U.S. Departments of Education and Energy, Vasques stepped down from her position at the U.S. Department of Education in 2000 to launch her own business on the advice of friends.

Initially, acquiring clients was a slow roll, by her own account. Although she thought she could easily snag contracts with both federal agencies she had worked for, the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) made that difficult without past performance as a business — even as a woman-owned, Native-owned small business. (Vasques is part Diegueño of the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians based in Valley Center, California.) Consequently, she describes the period from 2000 to 2009 spent “literally knocking on doors to

get people to give her work.”

Eventually, she got a single person on a contract doing work as Tribal Tech. It was enough to get by, but not flourish, and when the opportunity to run as a Republican candidate for state delegate in Virginia’s largely blue 45th district in 2009 came about, she took it.

There, however, she suffered a stinging political loss that led to the epiphany that drove Vasques back into business. “If I can knock on all the doors in the district and work as hard as I had to run for delegate, I could work that hard to start my own business,” she told Native Business Magazine.

And so she did. Thus, it wasn’t until 2010 that she “did anything serious” and “really put the pedal to the metal to build Tribal Tech’s past performance” that would greatly improve her ability to bid competitively in the federal marketplace.

During that time, she also garnered U.S. Small Business 8(a) certification, which was approved in 30 days — something nearly unheard of. Vasques is a huge advocate of the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) 8(a) program, and advises everyone considering getting into the federal space to get certified as soon as possible. “The education, training and technical support that the SBA offers can be the difference between success and failure,” she advises.

To help fund Tribal Tech’s growth, Vasques “established a close relationship with a banker at a financial institution,” she said. “We took baby steps, growing Tribal Tech together. I would also add that establishing a realistic line of credit, especially if you’re in the government contracting business, is essential.”

Today, Tribal Tech has a healthy portfolio of over $8.3 million with about 100 people working nationwide for Tribal Tech, providing training and technical assistance to various entities including Tribes, federal agencies and private businesses.

Tribal Tech’s specialized services include training and technical assistance, grants management, communications, outreach and event planning.

“People, Performance and Partnership” are Vasques’ watchwords — and woven into every aspect of her company.

Her advice to fellow Native entrepreneurs is confidence and devotion. “Definitely go after what it is that you do, and do it well,” she said. “If you have a passion, go after it! Stay true to who you are, and be truly committed.” Vasques concedes that entrepreneurship requires a “110 percent effort… and one you have to be engaged in every day” — yet effort well worth it.

PHOTO COURTESY VICTORIA VASQUES

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

PHOTO COURTESY CLARA PRATTE

NAVAJO STRONGBOW STRATEGIES

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y mother always told me that there’s no such thing as saying, ‘That’s not my job,’” says Clara Pratte, CEO of Strongbow Strategies, a multi-disciplinary firm that supports agencies and private companies in need of IT and cyber security support, geographic information system (GIS)

JOY HUNTINGTON KOYUKON ATHABASCAN UQAQTI CONSULTING

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CLARA PRATTE

strategies services, emergency management and even facilities support.

Pratte, Navajo, spent much of her post-university career working in the public sector before launching Strongbow in 2013.

She has served as the national director of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Native American Affairs, as chief of staff for Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, and as executive director of the Nation’s Washington, D.C., office.

Even after starting Strongbow, she worked nights and weekends to build her small company until 2016, when she brought in a minority partner to grow the firm.

One of Strongbow’s most unusual contracts involves Antarctica, Doritos tortilla chips and expensive, sensitive scientific equipment. “Strongbow supplies workforce augmentation for various needs,” says Pratte. “Our staffers are used to inspect cargo that will be loaded on barges to supply the National Science Foundation’s facilities in Antarctica.”

Koyukon Athabascan entrepreneur is achieving her goals through a combination of grit, an inborn ability to foster productive communications between people, and a firm footing in her Tribal heritage.

Huntington launched Uqaqti Consulting in 2011. Uqaqti, pronounced “oo-kuk-ti,” is Inupiaq for “one who speaks.” The title was given to Huntington by the Northwest Arctic Borough Assembly, and Huntington accepted the honor by renaming her business, saying that being the recipient of the title from another Alaska region signifies how she builds bridges across the state.

Uqaqti’s main business lines are planning and facilitating community meetings, coordinated communications and marketing strategies, and government relations. Huntington is a DBE-certified public involvement consultant. Combined with her cultural ties and knowledge of Tribal protocols, she’s become a sought-after facilitator for jobs ranging from meetings involving environmental impact statements on the North Slope of Alaska to transportation planning meetings. “Any time we work in rural Alaska, we call Joy,” says Maryellen Tuttell of DOWL, a civil engineering and planning firm. “Her calmness and warmth make a huge difference in sometimes very contentious meeting situations.”

Her advice to aspiring Native entrepreneurs? “Go all in,” she says.

“Grow your skills, push yourself to the next level.”

ROXIE SCHESCKE LAKOTA INDIAN EYES, LLC

PHOTO COURTESY ROXIE SCHESCKE

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fter holding down several positions in construction and management, Roxie Schescke decided to make good on her dream of owning her own business. In 2005, Indian Eyes, LLC, was born.

The Lakota entrepreneur bootstrapped her operation out of a two-car garage made into living quarters and an office. Getting started required sacrifices. “It’s tough to live within your means when you don’t have any means,” Schescke says. For several years, Schescke put everything she made back into the business.

Headquartered in Pasco, Washington, with offices across the U.S., Indian Eyes specializes in project management, staffing, plant operations and construction interface, equipment logistics, human resources, environmental and waste management services, and more. Indian Eyes has performed work for the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security; as well as major

prime contractors.

Today, her original team of two has grown to more than 60 employees, but has peaked at more than 100 (the variance is due to the contract-driven nature of her business). The company’s revenue holds steady between $25-27 million annually. To date, Indian Eyes has generated more than $100 million in total revenue.

“It took many years to get to that point, because I never had anyone to lean on or help me out,” she says. “But I was determined.”

Focusing on their core competencies is part of the reason Indian Eyes has had zero incidents since their founding — a nearly unprecedented feat in the fields of staffing, security, equipment logistics, and construction and engineering. “We only do what we know,” Schescke says.

She believes that if she can show the outcomes of drive, perseverance and tenacity, others in Indian Country might follow her lead. “For me being all by myself, with a 100 percent Native American Woman Owned business, I’m pretty proud of what I’ve done,” she says. “If anything can be told or heard from my story, it is to motivate other fellow Native people to make a difference.”

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he scale of Eighth Generation’s success is totally unprecedented for a Native-owned business in the arts space. Among the fastest growing Native-owned companies in North America, Eighth Generation represents what founder Louie Gong refers to as “a radical update to the American dream.”

“Our success has come while subtly giving the middle finger to large brands with a tradition of selling fake Native art, and an outdated gallery system that has not made much of a difference for Native artists,” Gong said.

But Gong (Nooksack) isn’t wasting time being outraged. He’s creating avenues for the self-determination of fellow Native arts entrepreneurs.

A former nonprofit president and educator, Gong has never lost sight of Eighth Generation’s purpose. Just a decade ago, he was illustrating contemporary Coast Salish art on Vans in his living room. While the Tribal-inked shoes became the impetus for Eighth Generation, that phase of the company’s development only reflects its formative years.

In 2015, Eighth Generation became the first Native-owned company to produce high-end wool blankets fea-

NOOKSACK EIGHTH GENERATION

BETHANY YELLOWTAIL

SALLY SNOW & WILL PERRY

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ethany Yellowtail, Northern Cheyenne/Crow, founded her fashion label in 2015 in Los Angeles. As CEO and designer of the B.YELLOWTAIL label, Yellowtail specializes in storytelling through wearable art. One day when the young entrepreneur was visiting the Crow Reservation in southern Montana, where she was born and raised, she recognized that local Native artisans were undervaluing their handmade, heirloom-quality jewelry, textiles and accessories. Recognizing that technology could bridge the gap, Yellowtail launched B.Yellowtail Collective in 2016. The online shop features handmade work by Native American artists, and provides the respective artist with the majority of the proceeds.

“With tradition and culture at the heart of what we do, we've set out to share our indigenous creative expression, while providing an empowering, entrepreneurial platform for Native peoples,” states the website BYELLOWTAIL.com.

While B.YELLOWTAIL primarily manufactures in downtown Los Angeles, Yellowtail continually seeks ways to bring jobs back to the Crow community.

artners in life and business Sally Snow and Will Parry founded Wolf’s Run, a restaurant, smoke shop, gas station and grocery on the Seneca reservation in western New York State. It all started in 1988 when Parry was 27 years old. While on welfare, Parry convinced a company by the name of Shorts Oil to front him a load of gas, scraped together enough money to buy two 5,000-gallon tanks and a dispenser tank, and started pumping gas. Three years later, when Snow entered his life, they added a 50-seat restaurant, a grocery store, a fuel station, store selling Native crafts, and a trucking operation. The couple has also expanded to other locations, and is building a new, replacement restaurant on the current property.

The couple’s advice to new entrepreneurs? Grow the business, and don’t borrow. “We always kept investing our money back into our business and adding on,” said Snow. “We never ever got a drop of money from a bank.”

PHOTO COURTESY SALLY SNOW

LOUIE GONG

turing stunning Tribal designs. Business has more than doubled each year, and Gong anticipates even bigger strides going forward.

“Even though we’re doing business of much greater scale, our values haven’t changed,” Gong emphasized.

Since Gong launched Eighth Generation in 2008, the company has remained committed to community engagement and collaboration. “Eighth Generation sets the gold standard for how businesses should align with cultural artists,” Gong said.

Unlike traditional gallery system, Eighth Generation gives Native artists direct access to buyers. “I believe that’s the true pathway to sustainability,” Gong noted.

Eighth Generation also gives artists leverage to produce in mass, which is critical to meet consumer demand before a larger company swoops in and replicates ideas and aesthetics. “The key is being able to transition from producing one-off pieces to producing art in quantity,” Gong said.

In addition to e-commerce, Gong’s rapidly growing empire showcases its products from a storefront with prime real estate: Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

PHOTO COURTESY LOUIE GONG

NATIVE BUSINESS TOP 50 ENTREPRENEURS

PHOTO COURTESY STEPHAN CHENEY

LAKOTA HIGH REZ WOOD COMPANY

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tephan Cheney, a 29-year-old Lakota entrepreneur, hunts for wood around his Northern California home to make his signature furniture. “I am self-educated and it all starts with the belief, ‘Yeah, I think I can do that!’” Cheney told Native Business.

Cheney has worked with many different types of wood, including birch, madrone, redwood (from his own backyard), maple,

cedar, Douglas fir, pine, oak, eucalyptus, Chechen, cherry and walnut. “Whenever I am working with any piece, I am doing it in a prayerful way and offer up tobacco. As indigenous people, we have a relationship with trees, so I am thanking the wood for the gift it is giving and whatever it might become next,” Cheney said.

Cheney made his first dining table because his Relatives were sitting on the

ground when they came over to visit him and his wife.

The self-taught furniture artist has since grown his product inventory. To date, he has created dining tables, coffee tables, benches, cutting boards, serving trays, spoons, paddles and eel hooks, a traditional fishing tool. He says it can take anywhere from two days to two weeks to complete a project, depending on the complexity and size of the piece.

The Lakota Native’s dream is to one day have his own wood shop and create furniture in a much larger capacity “than what I am able to do right now in my little laundry room.”

To get there, he knows he needs to follow his own advice: “It takes knowing ourselves and believing in ourselves to really grow,” he says.

For now, he is content “bringing new life to wood” when he is not working fulltime for Seventh Generation Fund as the special assistant to the president.

JUSTIN NOTAH NAVAJO NOTAH'S SOUTHWEST CONNECTION

By Lynn Armitage

PHOTOS COURTESY JUSTIN NOTAH

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hen Justin Notah went off to college at Colorado State University, his mother gave him a shoebox filled with trinkets from the family jewelry business his father started in 1970. “She wanted me to sell them on weekends to make extra cash for school,” Notah, a Navajo, explains.

After selling jewelry at some powwows, Notah was smitten and jumped into the business full-time. Now 44, Notah, who says he’s married to the business, has been peddling handmade sterling silver bracelets, rings, earrings and necklaces at Native American conferences and jewelry

shows for 20 years.

He is both jewelry maker (with his brother Larson) and wholesaler, representing 18 jewelry artists from the Zuni, Hopi and Santo Domingo Pueblo Tribes. His mother, Eleanor, is still by his side ― literally. She, too, owns a sterling silver jewelry business and usually sells in a booth right next to her son.

Notah laughs, “We have some friendly competition going. But she’ll always be my mom.”

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CHRYSTAL ANTAO CHEROKEE CHEROKEE DATA SOLUTIONS

By Suzette Brewer

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or Chrystal Antao, becoming the CEO of Cherokee Data Solutions wasn’t merely a career move — it was stepping forward to lead a family company that had been started from scratch by her mother nearly two decades ago.

“My mother, Pamela Bickford, started this company with the money in her pocket,” says Antao. “She started with an idea and a vision to provide for her family and her community and she did exactly what she set out to do.”

Antao says that her parents, both of whom were citizens of the Cherokee Nation, were forced by economic necessity to move away from their home community to find meaningful work. After landing in Dallas, Texas, the family stayed there for 13 years before they grew tired of being away from their families and their roots.

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“We always commuted back home to Oklahoma for every single holiday,” says Antao. “Our parents wanted us to keep that connection to home and to know who we are, but eventually, they just wanted to go home.”

In 1999, the family moved back to Claremore, Oklahoma, where Antao’s mother began strategizing and planning the company by day while taking on extra work as a wallpaper hanger at night to save capital for its launch.

“Two things she always told us: ‘Never, ever let anyone tell you you can’t do something,’” she says. “And that’s exactly the mindset with which she started this company. Nobody was going to tell her she couldn’t do something.”

In October 2001, she started Cherokee Data Solutions, Inc., a woman-owned/ disadvantaged minority business providing sales and support for technology and office products — a one-stop solution for businesses that also offers full lifecycle management and environmentally responsible recycling for technology products.

“My mother was an entrepreneur, but

Embracing Change — and the Future By the early 2010s, CDS’s target market had grown to over 300 customers including federal, Tribal, state and local governments, as well as mid- to large-size corporations. Additionally, its portfolio had been expanded from technology and office products to include durable medical equipment and promotional items. The company that began in a small house behind the Bickford’s family home had now moved to a new office building in Claremore.

In 2013, however, Antao’s father Paul, who was CDS’s president, passed away, which came as a blow to the small, closeknit, family-owned company. Three years later, Pamela, the matriarch of the family and the founder and CEO of CDS, also passed away after a struggle with lung cancer.

But before she died, Bickford made sure the company had a contingency plan to ensure its continuuity for future generations. From a traditional matrilineal Cherokee perspective, in which the women owned the homes and all of the property, the passing down of female ownership made sense.

PHOTO COURTESY CHRYSTAL ANTAO

she hadn’t had a proper job since getting married and had zero credit,” says Antao.

“So when she went to open the business checking account for CDS, the bank not only rejected her for a credit card, they wouldn’t even give her a debit card.”

Unswayed, Antao says her mother framed the rejection letter and hung it in the entryway of the company. Moreover, she refused all debit and credit cards that the bank sent after the company became successful, placing the unactivated cards in the frame with the rejection letter.

“After they saw the money in her account, they couldn’t send them fast enough,” says Antao. “But I’m proud to say that we still operate debt-free. To this day, we still don’t carry any credit balances.”

Later, as the company began turning a solid profit, Antao’s father, Paul Bickford, quit his job in IT sales to join his wife in growing the company. From the beginning, Antao and her two brothers, Matthew and Benjamin Bickford, also helped their mother with the operations of CDS. “I’d been involved and worked throughout college,” says Antao, who holds a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences with an emphasis in microbiology from Oklahoma State University. “I also worked there while I was getting married and having children, as have my brothers. We are definitely a family business.”

“My mother was very specific that she wanted CDS to continue to be a woman-owned company,” says Antao. “It was very important to her that the company continued under female leadership.”

Her brothers also continue to work for the company. Today, Benjamin is president of CDS and handles marketing and graphic design, while Matthew handles the company’s IT division.

For Antao, who comes from long line of Cherokee entrepreneurs and business owners, the transition into filling her mother’s considerable shoes was eye-opening.

“There’s so much to running a company like this, but the trickiest part is the work-life balance, because I have four children of my own,” she says. “Also, it was important to learn how to say ‘no,’ because I was always the type to wreck my own life to help others, so now I’m learning to set my own parameters.”

As a business woman and mother, Antao created a work environment at CDS that meets the expectations of the company’s diverse customers while also fulfilling the demands of modern parenthood. Whether someone likes to come in an hour early, or work remotely with a sick kid, flexibility is

key, she says.

“The digital revolution changed everything. We bring the kids into the office with us and they help out,” she says.

“They help with copies, they make labels, sort supplies, take out the trash, sweep the floor — just like me and my brothers did.

It’s in our blood.”

Antao’s commitment to continuing her mother’s vision for providing for the social and economic needs of Northeastern Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation and other

historical and contemporary Cherokee woman who leads her family, as well as her community.”

Today, Antao has taken the lessons learned from her parents and has continued their legacy in her role as the CEO of Cherokee Data Solutions — with her mother’s guiding wisdom close at hand.

“A big part of the reason my mother started this company was to keep Native people from leaving home to find a job,” she says. “So for us, it’s not about money — it’s a desire to make a place for families to stay together so they’re not torn apart by logistics.”

As for the future, Antao says she intends to continue the company as a family-owned business that will support her children and their children when they are old enough, as well as giving back to the community.

“I would love to see Cherokee Data Solutions become generational in sustaining our family and our surrounding community,” says Antao. “We do a lot of outreach with STEM programs to support Native youth in their education and other initiatives, because for us, it’s about pouring what we have back into the community and the kids.”

“I’m proud to say that we still operate debt-free.

To this day, we still don’t carry any credit balances.”

Tribes has won her many prominent admirers among other Native women business owners.

“Chrystal Antao is highly intelligent, eternally optimistic, driven to succeed, graciously patient and always striving to understand the needs of her customers,” says Dr. Cara Cowan Watts, CEO and principal owner of Tulsa Pier Drilling. “She epitomizes Cherokee leadership and the

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