Native Business Magazine - November 2018

NATIVEBUSINESSMAG.COM | NOVEMBER 2018

TRIBAL & SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE HAMPTONS MARTIN SENSMEIER TALKS THE BUSINESS OF MOVIES

MHA Chairman Mark Fox’s Vision for Economic Sovereignty

GARY & CARMEN DAVIS ON ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT: CAHOKIA TO TODAY NATIVE WOMEN LEAD: A GROWING FORCE INSIDE STRONGBOW STRATEGIES THE KEYS TO A YOUNG ATHABASCAN WOMAN'S SUCCESS SAP TO SYRUP: A PEQUOT TRADITION AND BUSINESS

TOCABE GEARS UP FOR EXPANSION

on the cover

IN THIS ISSUE NOV 2018 • Volume01 Number 1

Gary & Carmen Davis On Entrepreneurial Spirit: Cahokia to Today See Page 8.

BY NATIVE BUSINESS STAFF

OSAGE ENTREPRENEUR IS JUST GETTING STARTED Tocabe’s “concept” balances staying culturally aware, culturally connected and culturally appropriate, while maintaining success in business.

See page 62.

BY NATIVE BUSINESS STAFF

Features

“We’ve got it in our blood, we’ve got it in our genes, and we plan to maximize that and promote inter-tribal economic development.”

Profiles

“I love the coffee business. It’s new every day. We’ve been able to dance on our feet and expand our business and grow our family business.”

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A Vision for Economic Sovereignty: MHA Nation Chairman Mark Fox

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Martin Sensmeier Talks the Business of Movies

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Native American Coffee Grinds It Out

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BY ANDREW RICCI

A Blackfeet Woman Builds a Company From Heart and Sole

3 Questions with

BY LYNN ARMITAGE

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Lakota Butcher & Entrepreneur Lee Meisel

"To me, what I hope for is that it just helps open doors for other Native filmmakers and other Native actors to get more work and to share and tell more stories."

Meisel shares his indirect path to entrepreneurship and the knowledge he’s gained along the way.

BY ANDREW RICCI

BY NATIVE BUSINESS STAFF

BY MARK FOGARTY

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Joy Huntington, Uqaqti Consulting

How to turn two gas pumps and a rack of cigarettes into a multi-business enterprise

Hard work, positivity rooted in a firm cultural foundation are the keys to this young Athabascan woman’s success

When Willie Met Sally

BY THERESA BRAINE

BY DEBRA UTACIA KROL

Cover Photo By: Whitney Patterson Photography N OVE MB E R 2 0 1 8

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THE FUTURE IS INDIGENOUS WOMEN Native Women Lead is a tour de force, uniting, supporting and elevating the voices of Native women entrepreneurs See page 44.

BY NATIVE BUSINESS STAFF

Career

Innovation

Infrastructure

“I felt that the mission of the nonprofit sector was misaligned with the values and realities of Indian Country.”

“There aren’t many women in IT. We need more women in these roles.”

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Clara Pratte, Founder of Strongbow Strategies

Taking the Greed Out of Capitalism

Lance Gumbs: Thriving to Survive

For Robert J. Miller, the dilemma becomes how to extract and leverage the strengths of capitalism without selling our souls.

BY DEBRA UTACIA KROL

BY RENAE DITMER

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A Mashantucket Pequot Revives A Maple Syrup Enterprise Jeremy’s vision was to use the sugar shack as a “cultural education tool” to teach children in the community about the longstanding tradition

“My mother always told me that there’s no such thing as saying, ‘That’s not my job,’” says Pratte.

BY DEBRA UTACIA KROL

Construction/ Architecture

BY LYNN ARMITAGE

Cannabis

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In Memoriam: Larry Kinley Family and close friends point to his enticing leadership style and bold entrepreneurial spirit as his enduring legacies.

BY RENAE DITMER

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Kawi Café: Grounds for Entrepreneurship Training —and Transition The Cherokee Nation conceived of the concept when tribal casinos identified a need to foster more food service professionals for Cherokee businesses.

BY NATIVE BUSINESS STAFF

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Hemp Warrior — For Industrial Hemp Grower Alex White Plume, Sovereign Resolve Is Finally Paying Off

BY NATIVE BUSINESS STAFF

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Native Construction Company Protects Mother Earth While Reducing Costs Metcon has now completed or started 12 Energy Positive buildings and is about to start an Energy Positive high rise in Raleigh, NC.

BY MARK FOGARTY

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 • Renae Ditmer (Chippewa) Mark Fogarty • Clifton Cottrell (Cherokee) • Debra Utacia Krol (Xolon Salinan Tribe) Theresa Braine • Mary Annette Pember (Chippewa)

ADVERTISING & EVENTS

Director of Advertising and Events Yvonne Schaaf (Salt River Pima/Mojave/Quechan) - yvonne@nativebusinessmag.com

FO LLOW U S

@nativebusinessmagazine

@nativebizmag

@nativebizmag

@nativebusinessmagazine

NATIVE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

10900 NE 8th Street, Suite 1000, Bellevue, WA 98004 (425) 615-6400 | info@nativebusinessmag.com | www.nativebusinessmag.com © 2018 Native Business Magazine is published by Native Business, LLC, all rights reserved. Native Business is a monthly advertising magazine. All contents are protected by copyright and may not be reproduced without written consent from the Publisher. The advertiser is solely responsible for ad content and holds Publisher harmless for its advertising content and any errors or omissions.

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LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHERS

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hile Indian Country may comprehend the magnitude of its economic potential, it has yet to make it actionable. We can turn to ancient indigenous centers of trade and commerce, such as Cahokia, Tenochtitlán and Machu Picchu, for a glimpse of the prosperity that we’re capable of achieving. These thriving communities should serve as reminders to Indian Country of the economies of scale within our power to recreate and to cultivate on a global scale, thanks to modern-day technology and tools.

Pursuing the path of entrepreneurship involves leaning into an abundance mindset, opening one’s eyes to the possibility of growth and success. Entrepreneurship demands a vision not limited by the scope of what already exists. Before anything else, entrepreneurship is a frame of mind, a refusal to stay stagnant, and a determination to go all-in to fulfill one’s higher purpose and dreams.

Innovators and positive disruptors topple outdated systems and challenge our notions of what is possible. They change the playing field for their entire industries. These entrepreneurs are a vital component of creating expanded economic opportunity across Indian Country. Entrepreneurship is integral to indigenous sovereignty and economic success.

In our debut, entrepreneurship-themed issue of Native Business Magazine, we spotlight several impressive entrepreneurs and businesses—from the Osage co-founder of Tocabe

who aspires to expand his indigenous fast-casual restaurant with locations across the country, to a Lumbee tribal member-owned construction firm in North Carolina, to the founders of the groundbreaking Native Women’s Business Summit, to a Blackfeet tribal member-owned retail site for moccasins handmade by indigenous artists.

Each story in our entrepreneurship issue celebrates indigenous innovation, commitment and resilience. We honor the inspiring entrepreneurs who walked before us, and we champion those currently living and expanding upon their business visions.

We hope the entrepreneurship issue of Native Business Magazine informs and entertains. More than anything, we hope it inspires and motivates you to step up and launch businesses, or run yours with the invigorated passion of a new and hungry entrepreneur. We truly believe that when you rise, we rise, we all rise. We are far more powerful united, supporting and encouraging one another as Native entrepreneurs, and as Native people buying the goods and services of other Native people.

Thank you for your interest and support for Native Business Magazine. We are a platform to uplift the great work of entrepreneurs, businesspeople, tribal leaders and drivers of economic development. Native Business Magazine is also a business, embodying the very principles and ideas shared in these pages.

PHOTOS BY WHITNEY PATTERSON PHOTOGRAPHY

If you walk away with

only one message from our entrepreneurship issue, let it be this: Empower yourself.

GARY DAVIS Publisher

CARMEN DAVIS

Publisher & Executive Editor

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CAHOKIA TO TODAY

PHOTOS BY WHITNEY PATTERSON PHOTOGRAPHY

GARY & CARMEN DAVIS REFLECT ON INDIGENOUS ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT AND THE VALUE OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Aerial perspective of Cahokia at its peak by William R. Iseminger

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ndigenous people need only look back in time to realize their capacity for success.

Cahokia, an ancient indigenous epicenter of commerce and trade, thrived between 7001300 CE, just 8 miles east of modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, in southern Illinois. Larger than the city of London, the agricultural community teemed with self-determined, contributing members of society. At its peak, the population of Cahokia is estimated between 20,000 to 50,000 people.

Residents built hundreds of mounds across Cahokia, but the most substantial, 30 meters tall and 316 by 240 meters at its base, is the largest earthwork in the Western Hemisphere and still stands today. Known as Monks Mound, it covers more than 14 acres at its base.

By comparison, the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt covers 13 acres.

Today referred to as the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, an UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city was protected by a wooden wall that doubled as a sun calendar to determine solstices, equinoxes and other important dates.

Beyond Cahokia, the Aztecs flourished south of the border in Tenochtitlán, current-day Mexico City,

between A.D. 1325 and 1521. The Aztec economy prospered through agriculture, tribute and trade. Goods were exchanged via a system of canals and causeways, supplying an estimated 400,000 people who lived there.

The Incan city of Machu Picchu, built atop the Andes mountains in Peru, likewise reflects indigenous innovation and ambition.

“Our Native ancestors demonstrated entrepreneurship, sustainability and self-sufficiency,” said Gary Davis, publisher of Native Business Magazine. “They stand as an example of how we can empower ourselves and be sovereign in our own lives.”

Carmen Davis, executive editor and publisher of Native Business Magazine, underlined why the media business chose to focus on entrepreneurship for its debut print issue. Entrepreneurship is one of the most traditional activities that Native people can engage in, she said.

“We wanted to kick off our first issue with a topic that is vital to our communities—entrepreneurship,” Carmen said. “Traditionally, we’ve always traded and had thriving communities, and we weren’t dependent on anybody but ourselves.”

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“When you find your purpose, when you find what makes you tick and what you’re passionate about, I think that’s ultimately what drives you.”

- Carmen Davis

LIMITLESS POTENTIAL Limiting beliefs sabotage success, and one of the most crippling perceptions is a scarcity mindset that keeps Indian Country from prospering. “I think today, there is a tendency to think that there’s a limited scope of opportunity. That isn’t true,” Gary emphasized.

His anecdote for shifting from that small-mindedness to embracing full potential is trusting that the Creator puts everyone on the Earth to fulfill their very unique purpose. His message is not to let people or situations define your capabilities and competencies. “Get back to understanding that resilience and through ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ kind of mentality, you can make it happen,” he said.

Ancient communities thrived because people embraced their unique talents, gifts and desires to create something nu-

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anced and different than what the next person offered. “No doubt there would have been healthy competition. You also get diversity in the marketplace, and it works together for the greater good,” Gary said.

He continued: “No one individual person is put here to do exactly the same thing as the next person. That individuality, and the way that people see the world, that expression comes through in the things that they choose to do with their life. Subsequently, you have many, many different people doing many, many different things all in the spirit of giving back and providing to the community. It takes everybody. The idea that ‘it takes a village’ didn’t come from nowhere,” Gary said. “It was part of our general daily operating procedure.”

Carmen expanded upon that idea: “When you find your purpose, when you find what makes you tick and what you’re passionate about, I think that’s ultimately what drives you. It drives you to do better, to do your best, and to continuously work on and hone your skill. When you have that sense of purpose, you also have

that sense of pride. I think when you’re working toward something and you’re working toward a common goal, really, it’s everything. That’s what motivates you,” she said.

The Davises agree that the success of one person in Indian Country benefits the whole. For example, throughout history, people have gone on to achieve the “impossible.” And once something has been accomplished, it raises the bar of

PHOTO & ARTWORK COURTESY CAHOKIA MOUNDS STATE HISTORIC SITE

Yet across Indian Country today, entrepreneurship isn’t deployed nearly to the degree that tribal nations applied it within these indigenous centers of commerce.

“If we’re going to be successful, and if we’re going to have thriving communities, we need to take it upon ourselves to ensure that, every single day, we’re doing our best to engage in entrepreneurship and teaching the next generation by example,” Gary said. “I think today, we need to communicate to our people that we cannot sit around and wait for somebody to do something for us. We have to act like those who walked before us—get up, go out, and deploy the incredible capabilities, skills and resilience that we’ve been born with.”

There’s never been a better time for indigenous peoples to assert sovereignty over their livelihood. Today, technology is the greatest leveler of the playing field.

“We have an ability—no matter where we’re geographically located—to engage and to get our message out through accessible technology. We can utilize those tools to market and tell the world what it is we have to offer. We can retail our goods and get top-dollar via technology and implementation of e-commerce,” Gary said.

Above: Aerial view of 100 foot-high Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in the America's Below: Community life at Cahokia by Michael Hampshire

expectation and creates new opportunity for future feats and ventures. “It really is powerful when we understand that an individual may have been put here to do something that nobody else has ever done. It’s inspirational, it’s motivational,” Gary said. “How are we strengthening those people?”

Stagnation slows progress, Gary stressed. “We find people thinking that, because someone else couldn’t do something 10 years ago or 5 years ago, that that dictates what’s possible today. That simply means that it might have been the wrong person at the wrong time, and we shouldn’t stop working to figure out the solutions or to advance initiatives based on bad timing or on the inabilities of one person to get something done. We have to keep going at it,” Gary said. “And when we do find that synergistic timing and the right people or the right person to get it done, then it changes the whole trajectory of everybody that follows after that, because it’s no longer a limitation, it’s an inspiration.”

Carmen considers every individual a

critical part of the overall picture. Every person needs to step into their calling and their power to help the collective achieve its full potential. “If only 10 pieces of the puzzle are showing up, that takes away from the bigger picture,” Carmen said.

SUPPORTING INNOVATION AND POSITIVE DISRUPTION Gary and Carmen Davis believe that supporting those who take leaps, create opportunity and dismantle systems no longer serving the greater good is the way to empower Native people. “I think we need to support innovators. I think we need to support positive disruption, because that always keeps everybody on their toes, evolving. It keeps industry innovating,” Gary said. “The next generation is the beneficiary of all of that thinking, and all of that action. They’ll be brought up questioning, ‘Can we do it better? Can we do it more efficiently? What can I add to this conversation to find ownership in this?’ I think that that’s something that we absolutely could do a better job of in Indian Country.”

The most rudimentary definition of an economy is keeping a dollar in a community seven times, before that one dollar leaves the community and goes someplace else. “That’s the hope, and that’s the desire—that we can create enough businesses, and that we can create enough spirited, self-motivated, powerful entrepreneurs that we can have businesses and that diversity of economy, so that people can spend their money and not have to take it outside of the community to buy goods and services,” Gary said. “That’s one of the lessons we can extract from Cahokia and Tenochtitlán and all of these great epicenters, where our people came together and worked together.”

Driving and realizing those economies of scale requires embracing inherent selfworth. Put simply, “the key is understanding that we are good enough,” Gary said.

“We’re competent enough. We’re capable enough. We’re visionary enough.”

Gary and Carmen advocate for building core capabilities, strengths and thus trust in one’s dynamism as an individual. Believing in one’s own worthiness and competencies enables an entrepreneur to see the potential in another Native entrepreneur or business.

“We’re trying to get people empowered; we’re trying to get people to be self-sufficient and sovereign. As an entrepreneur, when you are successful, you’re not only helping your family, you’re uplifting the community and motivating that next per-

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son. You’re a demonstration of what used to be just an idea,” Gary said.

It’s victim mentality that cripples progress, Carmen noted. “Every day, we have a choice—to overcome what has happened to us, or to continue to live in the past and not heal from those hurts, and not heal from that trauma,” she said.

Generational trauma is an overwhelming obstacle to overcome. It can seemingly define the scope of possibility for a person or a group of people. “We have to break free from the lie that we aren’t “good enough”,” Gary said. “We have to understand the Creator did not put us here to just occupy some years on this Earth and move on. I don’t agree with that. I know that we’ve all been put here to do something amazing, something powerful with our life, that we’re not an accident, that our lives are not for no reason, that we all have something to contribute, and that’s what we’re here for.”

Gary emphasized that no one should stop another individual from accomplishing that—and especially not that person.

“We should be the last person that gets in our own way,” Gary said.

So many Native communities are logistically challenged with limited access to broadband or opportunity, but it’s critical to invest in hope and solutions. “If you want it bad enough, you can achieve it, you can accomplish it,” Gary said. “But you have to realize that you have an intense amount of power as an individual. Put your faith and your hope into sustaining yourself, into the Creator, and to create a plan, and be malleable—understand that you’re going to have to reshape and rework

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that plan, but find a way to sustain it, find a way to look at your surroundings, and look at how you could provide one step forward.”

Ultimately, the message Native people can take from the people who walked before us is: “Empower yourself,” Gary said.

“When you look at the cities they built— with the lack of what we would call today ‘advanced technology’—they were able to align buildings with the movements of the sun to tell time by the shadow on the steps of the smaller pyramids. Those are the people we come from. Given what we have today, I believe, if we just remember how amazing we are, we’ll be able to apply the same sort of genius, the same sort of wherewithal and self-sufficiency to accomplish more amazing things,” Gary said.

Entrepreneurship demands resourcefulness and intentional focus, Carmen underscored. Block out “any outside noise or thoughts of ‘what are people going to think.’ As an entrepreneur, you have to be all-in.”

HONORING OUR ANCESTORS, INSPIRING THE FUTURE Gary and Carmen Davis’ intention with the debut, entrepreneurship-themed issue of Native Business Magazine is to pay their respects and give honor to the indigenous business visionaries who walked the Earth before them, and to celebrate the indigenous entrepreneurs driving progress today.

“We hope that other Native businesses and businesspeople, Native leaders, and economic development-focused men and women across Indian Country realize that

there is a platform here to support their great work. We have to come together. We have to realize that there’s more collective good that can be done when we speak in an aggregated manner,” Gary said.

Beyond that, the publishers of Native Business Magazine consider their platform as a vital resource for encouraging and offering a model of success for “The Future”—young, aspiring Native entrepreneurs and business leaders. “We need to make sure that the next generation of our people is inspired, that we’re lifting them up, and that we’re pushing them forward to be the best that they can be, to help ensure that we’re ahead of the curve,” Gary said.

Economic self-sufficiency begins with an individual or community, and like a ripple effect, influences the rest of Indian Country.

“I think we need to understand the power we have collectively as an economic engine across the United States,” Gary said, “to be able, in short order, to stand up businesses and invest in businesses that can truly create a nationwide tribal economy.”

The entrepreneurship issue of Native Business Magazine aspires to shine a light on Native entrepreneurs who embody that same sense of self-sovereignty and determination demonstrated by our ancestors at Cahokia, Tenochtitlán and Machu Picchu.

Gary added: “To this day, these ancient epicenters serve as an example of where Native communities should raise the bar of expectation of what we aspire to be across Indian Country.”

PHOTO COURTESY CAHOKIA MOUNDS STATE HISTORIC SITE

“We need to understand the power we have collectively as an economic engine across the United States.”

- Gary Davis

MARTIN SE

“

Somewhere along the line [Angelina Jolie] decided to believe in me and in the project and help give it wings,” Sensmeier said.

PHOTO BY: DAVE STARBUCK/GEISLER-FOTOPRESS/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES

BEHIND

THE

SCENES

WITH

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

ENSMEIER EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF THE JIM THORPE BIOPIC

F

or several years, Hollywood production teams have been working on putting together a biopic about Jim Thorpe, the legendary athlete, Olympic gold medalist, and member of the Sac and Fox Nation. While it’s still in its early stages, the film has already amassed a roster of top names who have signed on to be involved with the project, including Angelina Jolie, Todd Black, and Steve Tisch as producers.

One innovative aspect of this film in particular is the tribal involvement in its financing. Currently, several tribes have joined together to support it, including the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians, the Mohegan Tribe, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, the Tonto Apache Tribe, and the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria.

According to Abraham Taylor, another of the film’s producers, “To tell an authentic Jim Thorpe story, we have to maintain control of the project. The only way to do this is with the help of Indian Country.”

A preliminary synopsis of the film on www.brightpathmovie.com describes the story as “a young Native American struggles to hold onto his identity in the face of a nation that attempts to strip him of his culture. Spurred on by the last words his father ever spoke to him, ‘Son, you’re an Indian. I want you to show other races what an Indian can do,’ Jim Thorpe tran-

By Andrew Ricci

scends every obstacle to become a beacon of hope for his people and ‘The World’s Greatest Athlete.’”

While the full cast has yet to be announced, Martin Sensmeier, who is also executive producing the project, will star as Thorpe. Sensmeier, an Alaska Native of Tlingit and Koyukon-Athabascan descent, is perhaps best known most recently for his roles in The Magnificent Seven and a recurring part on HBO’s Westworld.

Native Business Magazine™ recently spoke with Sensmeier about the status of the project, his role as a producer, what it means to play Jim Thorpe, what it means to be a Native entrepreneur, and a variety of other topics.

NBM: What is the status of the project and can you tell us how it’s coming along?

MS: Right now, it’s not even in pre-production yet. It’s been announced. They still need to lock down a director and a few other things. But it is mostly financed. A lot of that financing is happening through the Tribes and also UTA Independent. Obviously, they have a production team and my production team is working on it as well. I’m executive producer so I’ve been instrumental in getting a lot of these people to the table to sit down and have a conversation about getting this film pushed forward.

The script had been brought to me

two years ago by a member of one of the tribes who is funding it and one of the producers named Abraham Taylor. He’s been going around and raising money for the film, and he approached me, and I signed on. I was able to make a connection with Angelina Jolie and Todd Black, who produced The Magnificent Seven, so I’ve worked with Todd before. He also produces all of Antoine Fuqua’s films and all of Denzel Washington’s films. Todd brings along Escape Artists, and his producing partners are Steve Tisch, owner of the New York Giants, as well as Jason Blumenthal I think. They’re a powerhouse production team and they produce a lot of A-list movies that are in theatres every month.

Obviously, Angelina is a very accomplished filmmaker. She did Unbroken, which got nominated for three Oscars, and that’s a film about an Olympian named Louie Zamperini, who was a prisoner of war. That was based on a true story and it got nominated for three Oscars, so she knows how to make these types of movies.

Angelina actually has some Native ancestry through the Iroquois and Huron Tribes, I believe. She’s always wanted to do a movie about something that’s related to Native people. She saw this as an opportunity to do that, so I’m just super grateful and incredibly thankful that she’s chosen to be a part of it. It’s what’s

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There’s a lot of Native kids that will benefit from seeing that type of representation on screen. taking it to the next level and putting it on the map in terms of movies that are being made out there. We’re going to be able to make it at a very high production value because she’s involved and because Todd’s involved as well.

How do you think the Jim Thorpe story translates to today?

I think it translates a lot because we’re still fighting for exposure as Native people. We’re still looking for that exposure, on whatever platform that might be – whether it be sports, or entertainment, or what have you. I think that we’re still looking for that representation. I think that translates today because there’s still a lot of false stereotypes that exist about Native people. There’s a lot of Native kids that will benefit from seeing that type of representation on screen. It’s not just the warrior role, which I have no problem with because I’ve played it a couple of times. I like playing the warrior. But I think people are more able to identify with someone who lived in the early 1900s rather than someone who lived in the 1700s or 1800s because this person goes to school and they encounter other people.

Jim Thorpe went to Carlisle with a bunch of other people, and then he played professional sports and was in the Olympics. So he competed against athletes from other walks of life, other nationalities, and whatnot. There are so many levels that people can relate to this story on, whether you’re Native or not.

I think it should be a story about a man and an athlete, and I think a lot of people can identify with that. What it will mean to Native kids to see that type of representation – they need that.

From the business angle, what is the impact of so much of the investment in the film coming from tribes?

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Well I think we’ll have to wait and see how the film does. If it’s a success, that can open up a lot of doors, so there’s some pressure to succeed, obviously. We have to show up ready to work.

From a business standpoint, I think it’s an opportunity to help tell our own stories and believe that this isn’t just something where they’re throwing money away. Tribes can invest in storytelling to help change the narrative and put quality stuff out there for people to see.

That’s what I hope for. I’m not going to talk about what would happen if it didn’t work out, because I plan on making a good movie.

I just think there are so many stories within Indian Country that don’t just include Native people. Someone asked me that question recently. They said, “would you like to see an all Native cast in a TV show?” And I said, “you know what, that would be cool. But what would be cooler is to see a TV show with all Native leads and some strong supporting characters who are from other races.” That’s kind of like my life. I have strong Native leads in my life, but there were strong supporting characters who were white and black and other ethnicities I grew up with. But the main ones in my life were Native. So that’s kind of how I see it. I’ve never lived in an environment where there’s only specifically Native people, so I can’t really envision a TV show about that.

What does it mean to you on a personal level to play Jim Thorpe?

To play Jim Thorpe? Oh, man, it’s an incredible honor. It’s huge. I honestly can’t even put it into words, because I don’t know how to fully express how big of an opportunity it is. I don’t know if I can find the right words for that. I just have to show people. I just have to do the part and do the work.

You know, I have a lot of plans. I’m

training hard, working out every day – sometimes two times a day. I’m eating right. I plan to travel to Oklahoma because I’ve got to figure out the right dialect. All of these things, it’s all the work that goes into a role like this. I have to do the best that I can do and actually do the work, so that requires all this preparation.

The best thing that I could do to honor the legacy of Jim Thorpe and his story is to do that work. And aside from that, I can’t really speak much more. At the end of the day, this isn’t about me. This is about the people I’m giving this to. It’s about the people that are going to watch it and the people that are affected by it.

For me, the gift is to be able to play the role, but once I do it, I’m performing for other people.

For me, it just comes down to doing the best I can, and that’s what I’m going to do. That’s what I’m doing because that’s what it means to me. It means I have an incredible responsibility, and I have to fulfill that responsibility to the best of my ability. If I fail to do that, it doesn’t matter how I feel or what it means to me.

Is this the first film that you’ve produced?

This is the first film I’m producing, but I’ve worked with Todd before, and I was able to make the connection with Angelina. We had a conversation about it, and she was really interested, and we had just kept that conversation alive. Somewhere along the line she decided to believe in me and in the project and help give it wings. She has pretty good intuition as to what the right projects for her to be involved with are or aren’t, so hopefully we can do the story justice.

How did you end up becoming a producer? Is that something you’ve always wanted to do?

It is something I’ve always wanted to do. You know, I had studied acting when I first started out. I had taken acting classes because I just had a general interest in it. But I also was very interested in filmmaking, and so right around the end of my oil field career, I had applied to a couple of different film schools and got accepted. Filmmaking was something I had originally wanted to do.

But with this particular project, it was

FEATURE

an opportunity and I was at a big, powerful agency, and they back me and believe in me, so that’s been great. I also had some connections that I used to get some meetings and I was able to bring some people to the table.

You can have all the money in the world, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a movie made. It’s about getting the right pieces and somebody like Todd Black who has the ability to market a movie, and someone like Angelina Jolie who is a master storyteller herself. She’s an incredible filmmaker. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She knows what a story should be and I believe in her vision because she’s been doing it for so long.

It’s pretty cool listening to her talk about story and stuff like that. I think she wanted to do something with a Native project and was looking for something that was a meaningful story, and also she has a thing about doing films and making it authentic. With her last film, First They Killed My Father, they shot it entirely in Cambodia with Cambodian actors. She had a Cambodian writer, so she’s really supportive of the communities she’s telling stories about.

That’s obviously something that us as a Native people, we think about that kind of thing. I think we’re protective over a lot of our stories, as we should be. We’ve been struggling for a long time to get authentic representation in film. I look at it like if we do a good job, and it does come across as being authentic and something that could stand the test of time, then it’s like I did my part in helping that shift in Hollywood that’s needed. I think Hollywood is starting to realize that there are talented Native actors and actresses and filmmakers. It’s just cool to see people working.

But I’ve always wanted to produce.

Eventually, I’d like to direct at some point.

I’d like to write. In my mind, I think that’s a long ways away, but I’ll get there someday. Every time I’m on set, it’s like film school for me. I’m watching, asking questions, and genuinely interested in what I’m working on. So I think that it’s a great opportunity.

So you see yourself moving beyond acting and doing a little bit of everything at some point?

Oh yeah. I mean, if you think about it, if this film is a success and it’s funded by several different tribes, which a large part of the funding will come from several different tribes, if it’s a success the that’s going to open more doors for future opportunities. Future stories can be told where we’re the ones telling the stories.

We’re the ones controlling the narrative.

And we have yet to really do that on a large scale.

To me, what I hope for is that it just helps open doors for other Native filmmakers and other Native actors to get more work and to share and tell more stories. That’s what I hope for it. And that it stands the test of time. I think that’s important too. If they’re going to invest this much time, studios are going to get behind it. If you’ve got A-list producers behind it, then we’ve just got to execute and show that we belong in this space.

That’s the biggest thing. You’ve just got to do a good job.

Tell me more about your production company, Box of Daylight.

Box of Daylight is actually something that I started with Thorpe. And with the fact that these people came to me and they had the script. They said that they had raised money and they were in the process of raising more money to tell the story of Jim Thorpe. And I was just thinking about it because my manager had talked about Jim Thorpe and how I was going to play Jim Thorpe in a movie one day. I felt like he had just manifested it in a way.

get behind Native artists, because we’re storytellers by tradition. As a people, we’re storytellers. Our culture has never been static. It’s always evolving, always changing. We adopt technology as it’s readily available. I think that filmmaking is the evolution of storytelling. I think it’s important that we tell our own stories so that we can create positive new stereotypes about who we are and have authentic representation and have a voice in mainstream media and mainstream entertainment.

I’m going to produce a lot of stuff. I’m going to produce stuff that I’m not even in. I want to give opportunities to filmmakers that I believe in that can help tell great stories and get behind them and fund them. That’s what it comes down to.

Is it important for Native actors to get involved in the business side of filmmaking?

100 percent. I think there are great programs out there, like Sundance has a fellowship program. You can go out there and create opportunities. It’s important for people to learn about everything.

People want to get into filmmaking and

I know what my goals are. I believe in my

ideas. I work really hard.

I show up on time. I’m

honest. I’m committed.

What are your plans for Box of Daylight beyond just Bright Path?

We’re going to produce more movies! I just met with some investors here in LA about a project that I’m doing with some friends of mine in Seattle. And we’re going to tell some stories from that area. I think that’s what I’m going to start with – probably some indie films. I might do some short films.

I think that it’s important for tribes to

they don’t know where to start. I think we definitely need more Native actors and actresses. If there are kids that want to pursue it, if they daydream about it and think about it, I think as adults and mentors and teachers, if those kids are daydreaming about it and if they have that itch, we need to support those dreams even if they seem farfetched.

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FEATURE

How did you decide to become an actor and an entrepreneur?

You have to understand I was in an oil field for 8 years. I spent 5 years on an oil rig. When I quit, I was 26. I did a 180 and went the other way, and it was like I was pursuing a fresh start completely. I think a lot of people are afraid of starting fresh. I just had an awakening at one time and thought I was going to pursue this. I applied to film school and I was in New Mexico and it was kind of serendipitous because everybody that I met was telling me I should be in acting. I had auditioned for a couple things, but it wasn’t something I was really pursuing. I thought it was realistic for me to go to film school because at least you can get a degree and have a skill and learn it.

In the midst of all that, I got a chance to go work on Longmire for a day or two and that was really inspiring. So I was like, alright, maybe I can do the acting thing. And then I got some modeling gigs and next thing you know, people wanted to take pictures of me and wanted me to audition for their movies. So I thought ‘This is cool, I could do this for a little bit.’

And I just stuck with it.

How has acting helped you become a better entrepreneur?

I’ve learned how to handle rejection in the process of auditioning for project after project that I never booked. If you can learn to handle that, then you can handle pretty much anything, I think.

Basically, an audition is a job interview. I go in and audition and then walk out of there and forget about it. It’s the same thing with business. When I’m doing business now, I know what I want. I

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know what I’m pursuing. I know what my goals are. I believe in my ideas. I work really hard. I show up on time. I’m honest.

I’m committed. And I follow through on those commitments. So if an opportunity is there and it slips through my fingers, I think at least I exhausted everything I could, so on to the next. I’ve learned not to be emotionally attached to my business as much, and I think as an entrepreneur that’s important because some of it works out and some of it doesn’t. And that’s what being rejected with the acting stuff has helped me with.

Sports has also helped. Working out, playing basketball, and pushing myself to the limit every day in the gym. All of those things give you strength and sturdiness. So I believe in my product and I feel a lot of good things happening in the future.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I just think that this is a great opportunity for a lot of people, myself included.

Sterlin Harjo wrote an amazing script, and he’s from Holdenville, which is 30 minutes away from where Jim grew up.

He’s a great writer, and he’s a good director, and he’s doing some good work in Indian country. He’s Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole, so he did an amazing script.

A lot of times, this work and being an entrepreneur is like starting a fire. You’re going to start with small pieces of wet wood, and it’s going to be hard to get it going. Once you get it going, you just throw a little bit on there, and it keeps going and burning hot and you feed it a little bit.

That’s back to being an entrepreneur.

You ain’t never arrived. You ain’t never arrived. You’re always trying to make it every day. It’s a challenge. You’ve got to wake up and push yourself. That’s a challenge.

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To me, I don’t see why you can’t make it. If you do the work and learn the craft, then anything is possible. I know there’s not a lot of us doing it. I go to auditions and there are only a handful of actors.

I know who’s going to get the part. If I don’t get the part, I know who’s going to get the part. So I always encourage people to pursue it.

I’m very supportive of other Native artists on any level – even if they suck. Even if the films aren’t good, at least they’re doing it. To me, failure is not the opposite of success, failure is a part of success.

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3 QUESTIONS WITH

Lakota Butcher & Entrepreneur

LEE MEISEL

By Native Business Staff

Three 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 in-house—a skill Meisel garnered as a teen, working at a butcher shop in rural North Dakota.

Now the Lakota businessman is gearing up to debut Leeway Butcher, one door down from his current storefront.

In October 2018, for the second year in a row, Leeway Franks won a Minority Business Award from the Kansas Department of Commerce, which has helped Mesiel secure funding for his expansion project.

Meisel shared his indirect path to entrepreneurship with Native Business Magazine, and the knowledge he’s gained along the way.

What inspired you to launch a restaurant business?

My first year in college was a stereotypical disaster, unfortunately. After that, I was constantly trying to make a living through the food business, getting jobs in restaurants. My path to Haskell Indian Nations University was one of trial and error. I moved to Kansas to attend Haskell, which made more sense to me; the teaching process is much more holistic.

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“AS AN ENTREPRENEUR, YOU REALIZE, IT DOESN’T STOP. YOU’RE ALWAYS THINKING ABOUT HOW THINGS CAN BE OPTIMIZED OR IMPROVED.”

At Haskell, I realized that more work you put in, the more you get back. You get that two-fold in return. I decided to change the direction I was going in academia. After working tough kitchen and butchering jobs, I realized that I love this line of work— but that I didn’t want to do this work forever and not have something to show for it. I could create better recipes. I could use better meat than these guys. I could build my own business. I was really inspired by business courses at Haskell, including two semesters of accounting coursework.

I graduated with a business degree in 2008—a rough time for the economy. So, I got a job in food service at Kansas University, feeding hundreds of student athletes three meals a day and leading retail operations. From there, I transitioned to run a restaurant in Kansas City, and then moved on to work as a butcher for a restaurant. The owners and I worked on a plan for two years to open a butcher shop together.

Right when we were at the cusp of making a move, ready to sign the lease, the ownership group split up. I felt very defeated when that happened. I’d had a few setbacks already, throughout the course of my career, despite how hard I had tried.

I realized I had to take on the responsibility and do it myself. I found this tiny little place in a strip mall, wrote a business plan and had a meeting at City Hall to go over my building plans. I got a Small Business Administration loan. I didn’t have all the funds that I needed at that point.

A small business facilitator for the city happened to be at that City Hall meeting, and she said, ‘You’re a minority, you qualify for The Kansas Capital Multiplier Fund.

Through that connection, I was able to secure funding to open Leeway Franks. If I didn’t have that, it never would have happened. I felt super grateful that there was a program like that.

PHOTO COURTESY LEE MEISEL

You recently hit the three-year mark at Leeway Franks, and you’re about to open Leeway Butcher one door away.

What do you know now about opening a business that you didn’t know before?

We’re located in a small college town.

When you open the doors, when something’s new, everyone comes flooding through. There are people you’ll see that first week or two that you’re never going to see again. People who don’t like it, people who leave nasty Yelp reviews. I had to keep reminding myself: This isn’t the first time I’ve faced adversity. I had to remember that the vision that I had for this place is achievable. We can make it work.

Leeway Franks is a small operation. With

Leeway Butcher, I’ll be able to double production almost overnight, and the capacity to store meat and different products will open opportunity for us. I’m already trying to find ways to sell deli sandwiches and meat bundles, you name it.

As an entrepreneur, you realize, it doesn’t stop. You’re always thinking about how things can be optimized or improved.

I take responsible steps. 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.

I have the most incredible staff; they do everything better than me. I give them credit for the success. It would be impossible to do without them. I’m so grateful for them. We’re tight; we’re like a small family.

I have three full-time employees, and I’m currently looking to hire a couple part-timers to open the butcher shop, and hopefully move them to full-time.

When I open up the butcher shop, I’d like to take on an apprentice, if someone’s interested in that line of work. I’ve always wanted to teach, and butchering is a skill, a kind of dying skill. There’s been a resurgence in the higher-end foodie cities and boutique butcher shops. They’ve become trendy. I’m hoping to recreate the kind of butcher shop where I grew up working in as a teenager, and make it a little more community, neighborhood, family-oriented.

How does your Lakota cultural heritage influence your trade and business?

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. Because a life has been taken, and you need to honor that. By honoring that, you honor your family, you honor your tribe. Having a connection to something like that is really important.

I grew up pretty poor. Not being wasteful, it applies to more than not throwing away food. It applies to treating things with respect, and keeping things clean. It’s part of our philosophy to be responsible for our actions.

I do business with people who care about how they raise their animals and humane treatment. A big part of Leeway Franks is strengthening relationships for people— helping them to understand where their food comes from, having that connection to the Earth, and to those who harvest their food.

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FEATURE

A VISION

SOVERE M

ark Fox, Chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, has a dream for his Tribe’s future.

“I will wake up one day, I hope, many years from now – or at least my son will – and we will look around and we are generating our own power, we’re raising and consuming our own food, we’re exporting our own goods, and we’re creating products that will be sold out so dollars come back in,” Fox told Native Business Magazine™. “We going to do all these things and we’ll look around and say ‘We don’t depend on the federal government for anything, and in fact, we export goods, and we’re a major part of the economy of the United States.’

That’s the goal.”

Getting to the point where that is visible on the horizon wasn’t easy, though, and it has taken hard work, vision, and strategic planning to lay the foundation for a future marked by prosperity.

Historically, the MHA Nation arose from an alliance between the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples who were looked at as three separate sovereign nations. In the latter part of the 19th century, Fox says that the federal government began to view the three Tribes collectively as the Three Affiliated Tribes – something that persisted until approximately 20 years ago, when the MHA Nation

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opted to reemphasize their prior identity as three Tribal nations coming together to form one nation.

“It was important to show that we are a governmental system that has uniqueness, that has three different historical identities, but yet has come together to utilize our services together to maximize and protect what we have remaining as a result of failed U.S. policy,” Fox said. “We are very proud, but we also have three distinct languages and three distinct histories, but yet we remain unified.

That’s why we continue to think it’s very important that people understand and know that we’re three Tribal nations coming together to form one nation.”

The MHA Nation has always been an entrepreneurial Tribe. Thousands of years ago, Fox says, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara were part of an aboriginal trade system and operated one of only two major and significant aboriginal trade centers in North America prior to European interaction.

“We had a very important role in the indigenous economy that’s often described by anthropologists and historians,” Fox said. “They found, when they would dig up our sites, trading products from the East coast, West coast, Tribes from the Southwest, and even some things that had to originate out of Mexico and Canada all coming together.”

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FOR ECONOMIC

EIGNTY

By Andrew Ricci

“We're going to do all these things and we’ll look around and say ‘We don’t depend on the federal government for anything, and in fact, we export goods, and we’re a major part of the economy of the United States.’ That’s the goal.”

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Chairman Mark Fox

burden us. Start doing things for ourselves while holding the federal government and the state government’s feet to the fire for what is owed for what was taken away.”

As a modern Tribe, Fox says that the MHA Nation is more progressive than other Tribal nations. He says this comes from a focus on education that has helped the Tribe adapt and evolve.

“We have a way above average number of doctors, lawyers, businessmen with business degrees and MBAs than most Tribes have,” Fox said. “I think that’s really unique to the Three Affiliated Tribes. Some Tribes think that’s a mechanism for assimilation because it’s accepting a different culture in their minds or accepting a different way that they don’t see any value in. We understand that there are things we want to retain – our culture, our history, and our ways – but to become strong again is to put in place our ability to dictate our own future, and that means you have to have knowledge.”

Through all of the adaptation and evolution that the MHA Nation has had to undergo, Fox says that their entrepreneurial roots and focus on capitalism remain today.

“We believed in creating products, we believed in creating a system of sale for those products, and then creating a commercial system in which others interact,” he said. “So today we are further ahead in our recovery stage of understanding the needs of that, and so we can better enhance capitalism. Capitalism is how we will rebuild, how we will heal, and how we will repair. Capitalism

PHOTO COURTESY MARK FOX

The Missouri River, Fox says, was key to sustaining that pre-historical commerce center. As a semi-nomadic Tribe, the MHA Nation constructed earth lodges which became semi-permanent villages. They were successful in domesticating plants and growing crops, including corn, squash, beans, and watermelons, which created an economy that the more nomadic Tribes relied on – especially during times when food was scarce because of droughts or other issues that limited the food supply.

“The Three Affiliated Tribes were in a position to grow these things successfully, these domesticated plants and crops,” Fox said. “All the Tribes would come to gather the dried corn and the beans. They would use those things when they went out to the plains and lived their nomadic lifestyles. They had that to sustain themselves when they could not find game. So we became a centralized hub – a trading hub for North America’s indigenous population.”

Fox sees this history as a key part of the MHA’s future.

“It talks about where we’re coming from and where we’re trying to go again,” he said. “We want to again reestablish ourselves and Indian country as that hub of economic development. We’ve got it in our blood, we’ve got it in our genes, and we plan to maximize that and promote inter-tribal economic development.”

For Chairman Fox, this is how he plans to rectify the historical injustices that have been visited upon Indian country. He says that when the United States worked through the removal era, and then through treaty periods, and then the reservation era, many Native American nations were devastated as a result of being forced onto limited land, which destroyed their nomadic economies. This economic destruction, Fox says, “created a dependence on the federal government, which we still see today in a worse magnitude.”

For the Three Affiliated Tribes, this meant moving from having roughly 13 million acres of land to less than a million acres. But Fox says that even though the United States forcibly took away land, the MHA Nation managed to retain much of its economy.

“We were still self-sustaining,” Fox said. “We still grew crops.

We still had cattle. We had our own sawmill. We had our own hospital. We had our own road infrastructure. We had these things that we see as necessary to civilization and that we had before, so we didn’t depend on the federal government. We grew our own food, we managed our way through, and we were able to do that economically, socially, and politically.”

That all changed in the 1940s and 1950s when the United States government implemented the Pick-Sloan program, constructing a series of dams on the Missouri River. The construction of the Garrison Dam under this program, and the resultant creation of Lake Sakakawea, flooded the area where the MHA Nation planted their crops on the fertile bottom land, forced the Tribe to high ground, and, ultimately, into federal dependence.

Today, under Fox’s leadership, the Tribe is trying to regain what was lost, and that all starts with reducing dependence on the federal and state governments.

“Failed U.S. policy is not going to hold us back from my main goal,” Fox said. “The key to our nations’ thriving again – not just surviving, but thriving – is to lessen that dependence on the federal government, lessen any dependence on the state government, get rid of the intrusions and get rid of the regulations that

FEATURE

“We’re going to get involved with the development itself – the billions of dollars that is circulating around us and that we’re bombarded by.

We’re going to get involved with development – from upstream, midstream, and downstream – and that’s been our focus ever since.” is the answer.”

After the construction of the Garrison Dam that flooded the MHA Nation’s valuable land, they focused on this capitalism to aid in their recovery. Where they were not farming fertile lands, they began to lease them so they could still see revenue generated. And during the 1970s and 1980s, when economic development was at a low point, the Tribe began to focus on developing opportunities through tourism.

When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) was passed in the 1980s, the Tribe developed a casino within four or five years.

The casino revenues, combined with a $150 million compensation settlement for the flooded lands and other economic destruction, allowed them to start developing Fort Berthold as a destination resort. In recent years, the Tribe has complemented the casino with a new water park and will soon be opening a new beach and cultural center to entice people to come to MHA Nation lands.

Fox said that his vision is to make Fort Berthold a place where visitors from as far away as Minneapolis, Saskatchewan, New York City, or Sweden want to go because of the opportunities presented by a confluence of culture, tourism, recreation, and economic development. He likens it to the reasons that people visit Hawaii.

“There are reasons to come here other than to pull a slot machine arm,” Fox said. “We have all these things – fishing, hunting, and the culture itself. We’re not trying to limit access to our reservation by outsiders; we’re doing everything to entice outsiders.

Come here! Bring your checkbook! Bring your cash! Bring your credit cards! And come and enjoy what we have to offer.”

“That’s how we change our economy,” he said.

In addition to tourism, the MHA Nation has benefited significantly from the oil and gas boom on the Bakken Shale formation.

By 2008, when oil and gas came into play, the Three Affiliated Tribes saw a major opportunity to enhance their economic development efforts. Where the Tribe was at first unprepared to fully capitalize on this boom, the drop in price by 2015 allowed them to pause and develop what Fox calls their energy sovereignty model.

“What happened is that our Tribe lost between 2008 and 20142015,” Fox said. “We lost a lot of revenue because we weren’t prepared for this oil and gas boom. When the price of oil went down in 2015, that provided us an opportunity. Even though we had less revenue, it gave us a break to readjust ourselves, to refocus, and reprioritize our economy, to get our regulation in place, and then to begin what we call our energy sovereignty model.”

“We’re not just going to sit back and collect some royalties and taxes,” Fox said. “We’re going to get involved with the development itself – the billions of dollars that is circulating around us and that we’re bombarded by. We’re going to get involved with development – from upstream, midstream, and downstream – and that’s been our focus ever since.”

Today, the MHA Nation has done just that. They are drilling their own wells, which is increasing revenues and helping the Tribe maximize oil for its own benefit.

In addition to the MHA Nation’s work in the oil and gas sector, the Tribe is also looking at a future where their water is viewed as an increasingly precious commodity.

“You will always hear me say before I became chairman, and which you’re going to hear me say now and into the future: water is more valuable than oil and gas,” Fox said. “Water in the future is going to bring us more revenue and lend itself to more economic development than any other asset we’ve got.”

With a 20-million-acre-foot lake and gas that can be compressed and used to heat and light massive greenhouses, Fox says that the water they have ready access to can irrigate these greenhouses and allow the Tribe to start exporting plants to other Native nations as part of a food sovereignty initiative.

“In addition, with the water, we’re already doing industrial sales,” Fox said. “Every time you frack a well, you re-frack that well, and then you have to have water for maintenance. Every well is requiring 12 million to 15 million gallons of water. We have thousands of wells to go, and water plays a critical role in that.”

In the future, the Tribe is looking at commercial sales for water, which Fox says makes sense given the droughts that have hit the Western United States.

“I have no doubt in my mind that if we can figure out the logistics and the engineering, which we are working hard on, we will put ourselves in a position to take the water that is rightfully ours, water that is beyond our current usages for agriculture and domestic consumption, we’re going to push that water to the West.”

“Every gallon that comes out on the other end, we’ll be getting paid for that,” he said.

For Chairman Fox, it’s been a long time coming, but getting the MHA Nation back to their roots and breaking the cycle of federal dependency – that’s the goal.

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PROFILE

A

Blackfeet Woman

Maria Running Fisher Jones, founder of TPMOCS

From Heart & Sole

By Lynn Armitage

B U I L D S A COM PA N Y

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A

PHOTOS COURTESY MARIA RUNNING FISHER JONES

s a hard-working IP lawyer for Google, Maria Running Fisher Jones is creating some big legal shoes to fill someday. But it’s the little shoes that really fuel the Blackfeet Native’s passion.

In 2014, Running Fisher Jones invested $25,000 of her own money to launch TPMOCS―an all-Native business that creates handmade moccasins for infants and toddlers―for the sole purpose of creating economic opportunity for her impoverished tribe.

“The Blackfeet reservation has a nearly 69 percent poverty rate. When I would go home to visit my family and get my frybread fix,” she laughs, “I looked around and realized, ‘Wow, nothing has changed.’

So, I thought, ‘What can I do? How can I give back?’”

Then it hit her: moccasins! “Our tribe has been creating these shoes for years, by hand.” Inspired, Running Fisher Jones began taking apart her own pairs of moccasins and studied them. “I realized that they are not that challenging to make.”

TPMOCS was named for the owner’s fascination with teepees―“Someday, I plan to have one in my back yard!”― and pulled from the Blackfeet name, “niitsiTaPi,” which means the “real people.” The shoe company employs up to six artisans throughout the year, all Blackfeet Natives living in Montana who fashion the children’s moccasins out of soft, flexible cowhide.

“What differentiates us from competitors is that TPMOCS is one of the only companies that employs Native American artisans to handcraft its moccasins. Plus, it is the only company producing children’s moccasins that gives back to the community,” says Running Fisher Jones, who donates a portion of the proceeds to buy necessities for the Blackfeet Early Childhood Center.

Craftsmanship is an important cornerstone to the TPMOCS brand. Each pair of moccasins is cut, sewn, sinewed and

branded by Native artisans to “ensure quality from start to finish,” Running Fisher Jones explains. She is especially proud of the moccasin pattern. “Our pattern was created in-house and is exclusive to our company. Frankly put, you won’t find it anywhere else.”

Surprisingly, the owner has never taken a salary. “I have taken no profit from the company. I just want to see my passion project grow,” she says, adding that TPMOCS has received some grant funding from organizations that support Native and/or women-owned businesses.

As for managing the business, it’s a family affair. Living in California and working full-time for Google, Running Fisher Jones counts on her mother, brothers and aunts to run the day-to-day operations. “They do it out of their shared commitment to giving back to our community,” and ask for no compensation, she says with much appreciation.

The busy Google attorney and entrepreneur focuses on TPMOCs in her spare time. “I spend most of my Fridays through Sundays working on this business.” She

adds that Google has been very supportive of her business, as well. “I get nothing but warm wishes from my colleagues. Many managers and directors have bought my moccasins as gifts.”

Currently, her moccasins are sold only online at TPMOCS.com and at BeyondBucksin.com, a website created by Dr. Jessica Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa, that features Native American-made fashion. “Jessica has been amazing,” says Running Fisher Jones. “She was the first external business willing to work with us.

I am eternally grateful to Jessica and inspired by the work she does.” Other online vendors, as well as brick-and-mortar boutiques, are interested in selling the moccasins, too, and Running Fisher Jones is exploring these options.

TPMOCS are available in children’s sizes 0 to 7 in an assortment of colors and Native fabrics, and range between $69 and $79. Running Fisher Jones says her moccasins have international appeal. “We distribute worldwide, including in the United States, Australia, Europe and Canada. Our customers are both Native and non-Native.” Her most popular shoe is the Firewalker, and the option for customers to customize their own design has been a big seller, too.

Nearly four years into her business, the Native entrepreneur reflects on how far she has come. “As much as I have excelled in my legal career, this is one of, if not my proudest, accomplishments.”

However, she has many more mountains to climb with her moccasins. Her long-term vision is to operate out of one large production facility and give back to multiple Native communities on remote reservations. She also has her sights set short-term on expanding into children’s apparel, such as t-shirts and leggings.

And she is not ruling out mass production in the future, either. “I think eventually we will have to mass produce in order to get higher margins and give back even more money to Native communities.”

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How to turn two gas pumps

and a rack of cigarettes into a multi-business enterprise

By Theresa Braine

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I

t started with a welfare check and a dream.

In the late 1980s Willie Parry was pumping gas when he had a revela-

tion.

“I was on welfare,” said Parry, founder of Wolf’s Run, a restaurant, smoke shop, gas station and grocery on the Seneca reservation in western New York State. “I worked for this one business down the road and I figured out while working there that I could do it myself and make a living.”

He 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.

“I used to have to take my records to welfare every month to show them that I wasn’t making any money,” Parry, now 57, told Native Business. “All the profits I

PHOTOS COURTESY SALLY SNOW

when willie met sally

PHOTO COURTESY JOEY MONTOYA

dumped back into the business.”

Seven months later, he was making enough to get off welfare, and “I haven’t had to be on it since,” he said.

That was in 1988, when Parry was 27.

Three years later, Sally Snow entered his life—and the business. Since then, it has grown to a 50-seat restaurant, a grocery store, a fuel station, store selling Native crafts, and a trucking operation. They put on events and an annual customer appreciation day, awarding prizes as lavish as trips to Hawaii and featuring motorcycle stunt shows. The couple has also expanded to other locations, and is building a new, replacement restaurant on the current property.

A Day in the Life A typical day will see workers from the Seneca Nation administrative offices next

door, which employs 400 people; frequenters of the nearby community center, where people work out, swim, play lacrosse and skate; and elders from the old-age facility down the street. People buying gas pop in for home-cooked sandwiches, pizza or the daily special. Native dishes such as traditional corn soup—made with corn grown

by Willy himself, as part of a Seneca Nation program—and fry bread are also on the menu.

The restaurant is open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., though it can go as late as 11 on summer weekends. One of the 25 employees will open up, then Parry heads over at around 7. Breakfast is relatively slow, especially now that there’s a Tim Horton’s coffee shop, a McDonald’s and a Burger King each 10 minutes away.

“Lunch hours are our best time of the day,” said Snow, adding that customers

have become friends.

“We go and we’ll sit and have lunch or breakfast or supper with a customer when they come in,” she said. “We’ve got our own little crew that comes in and eats every day.

We used to get a lot of the elders in; they would ride their wheelchairs to the restaurant.”

As the business evolved, each phase revealed what the next one could be.

“We patched the thing together,” said Snow, 58. “When I first got with him in 1991, he just had a little rack of cigarettes and two gas pumps.”

Both were divorced. Parry was raising two children, and Snow, a heavy-equipment operator, had three. They glued the families together, a la the Brady Bunch, and moved in together. She continued to work at her construction job at first, but eventually the constantly dirty fingernails and

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PROFILE

“I look back on it now and think, I had to have been nuts. We worked all the time. We were always at the store." greasy pants got to Parry.

“I came home from work one day and he said, ‘Quit that job. I don’t want you working,’ ” Snow said with a chuckle. “I said, ‘But I like it.’ ” She capitulated on one condition.

“I said, ‘Well, build me a store then.’ ” Snow had moved in with her kitchen equipment as well as her children. So she began to cook.

“I used my stove for the pizza, and my toaster, my blender, anything I had in my house,” Snow said. “We were the only place to eat in town. Back in the day when we first opened the restaurant, it was packed all the time. People used to get mad because they had to wait in line to get something to eat.”

It didn’t hurt that Snow’s mother was known for her homemade pies—and had just lost her job.

“We put her to work with us,” said Snow.

“We worked long, hard hours every day feeding people—our own people. It was basically Native customers.”

From there, the business seemed to grow of its own volition.

“Every time we made more money we made it bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Snow. “One day I said, ‘Let’s start selling some groceries in here.’ ” They would load the children—aged 2, 4, 6, 9 and 11—into the family van, drive to BJ’s Club, and fill up with toilet paper, dish soap, paper towels and diapers. It was bootstrapping all the way.

“We had them on a milk crate and used a bungee cord for the seatbelt,” said Snow of the children. “I look back on it now and think, I had to have been nuts. We worked all the time. We were always at the store.

The kids would come home from school, they’d come to the store, and we’d feed them at the store.”

The children are grown now, ranging in age from 28 to 38, and have kids of their own. The Snow-Parrys have 17 grandchildren.

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Once the Wolf’s Run restaurant was launched, customers arrived asking to sell their handmade wares.

“We’d get people from all over the country that would be traveling through, and they’d be looking for somewhere to sell their dream catchers, their moccasins, their beaded work—so we started putting some of that stuff in, and now we have just a regular gift shop,” said Snow. “I’d get women

CAPITALISM IS NOT KING - ENJOY LIFE 1. 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.”

When it comes to finances, separate bookkeeping from the banking—don’t have one person both spending the money and keeping track of it, said Parry.

“Don’t let anybody have control of your bank account except yourself,” he said. “With us, the only ones who have access to our bank accounts is ourselves. The bookkeepers are just to follow the cash and payments and expenses.”

2. INSTALL CAMERAS Parry and Snow have 52 cameras on the property, both for customers’ and the businesses’ security.

“With our business, even though we’re closed right now, our pumps are accessible with a credit card,” said Parry. “Because we have a lot of correction officers who go through here.”

This way, people can stop any time and buy gas.

3. CUSTOMERS COME FIRST Be it a trucking company, convenience store or

"We’re supposed to give back to the community.

Everybody has to enjoy life.”

Laundromat, “you have to take care of your customer, or you’re not selling anything,” Snow emphasized.

“They have to be the first priority,” said Snow.

“There’s nothing more important than that person who just walked in that door. If you don’t have your customer walking in the door, you don’t have a business.”

That applies both coming and going, she said.

“Even just saying hello to a customer, and thanking them—thank your customers when they do business with you, because they can pick up and do business anywhere else down the road,” Snow said. “I’d get pretty upset with my cashiers if I didn’t hear a thank you come out of their mouth when a customer walked out the door.”

4. PERSISTENCE AND DETAILS ARE KEY Know that it’s going to take a lot of hard work, said Snow. Be persistent. Pay attention to the small things, such as taking care to stock exactly what your customers want or need, Parry said.

“You have to watch product that’s on your shelves, look and see what’s collecting dust,” he said. “If it's collecting dust you don’t need that product.”

on the reservation who would be learning how to make a traditional basket, and they’d come and say ‘I made this basket, I want to sell it.’ Or earrings, or cornhusk dolls—we have a whole assortment of Native things in there.”

But that wasn’t enough either. In 1997 the couple started a trucking company after Parry got the idea to haul his own gas.

“He wanted to drive a semi,” Snow said.

“It took me five months to buy my own truck, buy my own trailer, get the insurance I needed and licenses and permits, and get my account at a refinery,” Parry said.

He started it with $20,000 from the store business. Now he delivers to the stations in four surrounding territories. “I got rid of the middleman and became one.”

In 2015 the couple built a truck stop and restaurant right off of I-86 and Route 219, on another Seneca territory.

“We had pretty much tapped out at Wolf’s Run and the trucking company,” said Snow. “We got bored.”

ers. In yet another resourceful use of assets, the trips the couple give away are to places they have timeshares, accumulated over 24 years.

“We just throw a big party, and everybody has a great time,” said Snow. “That’s what we’ve always been taught by our elders. We’re supposed to give back to the community. Everybody has to enjoy life.”

Indeed, she attributes their success to this ethic.

“I think that’s why we’ve been so lucky, I think you would call it,” Snow said. “There have been a lot of people in business, but they don’t always succeed. Also you have to have that drive—which I know my husband has and I know I have.”

In addition, their skills were complementary.

“We had the right mix for our business because he did all the outside work and I ran the inside—greeting customers,” Snow said. “He and I had the right combination to do what we did.”

Customer Is King Each year, Wolf’s Run hosts a customer appreciation day, a daylong party complete with free food, prizes, motorcycle stunt riders, live music and giveaways—and that’s just for the adults. Also on hand were bouncy houses and slides for the kids. This year they gave away 30 prizes—one for each year—including a trip to Hawaii, and Pendleton blankets. One year the top prize was a motorcycle. Vendors contribute things like hot dogs, hamburgers, cases of potato chips.

Artemis Pyle of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd played at the 30th anniversary. There were also motorcycle stunt rid-

Looking Ahead The couple is excited about the new restaurant, which will debut next year. The current space may be converted into something for youth and the community, such as an arcade and banquet house—Chuck E. Cheese’s meets the Rez, is Snow’s vision.

At some point they plan to retire. In fact, that’s what they were initially looking to do once they built the truck stop.

“We thought well, this will be good retirement. We’ll get this truck stop built and we’d retire,” said Snow. “[But] we’re still working, and that was 2015. We’re still young yet. We’re still trying to figure out what we’re gonna do when we grow up.”

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PROFILE

NATIVE AMERICAN

Coffee Grinds It Out

H

ere’s a real hallmark for a successful Native entrepreneurial company: call them on a Saturday afternoon and they answer the telephone. And it’s the chief executive, the last guy still in the building, who answers the phone.

Bill McClure, whose grandmother was a full-blooded Creek Indian, has been in various online businesses for the past 20 years. He started NativeAmericanCoffee. com with his daughter, Ellie, in 2008. But he attributes a lot of his success to hustle and old-fashioned business practices.

“We’ve operated this online business like we were an offline hardware store or butcher shop where you came in and they knew the customers,” he says. “We answer the phone. We talk to you.” Native American Coffee, a business-to-business and

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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 has a strong hire-Native preference at his 12,000-square-foot operation in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which he has grown organically. Three quarters 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.

McClure has invested heavily in domain names, owning more than 1,000 URLs in the coffee and other businesses. He has a bunch of sexy ones in the coffee sector, like coffee,org, coffeesupplies.com and coffee.club. A portion of the subscription fees at coffee.club goes to help Native American kids through a charitable organization called “First Kids 1st.”

“We bought coffee.org from a growing family in Hawaii along with a number of other urls. We’ve just been grinding it out since.”

Besides the URLs, he has a heavy social media presence for branding.

“We have 256,000 on coffee.org’s Facebook page,” he says, and they hear from 20,000 of them every week. “That’s more

PHOTOS COURTESY NATIVE AMERICAN COFFEE

By Mark Fogarty

Bill McClure says his NativeAmericanCoffee.com is an online company run like an old fashioned hardware store.

Native American Coffee brands include Dancing Rabbit, named after a Choctaw Indian treaty

“I love the coffee business. It’s new every day.

We’ve been able to dance on our feet and expand our business and grow our family business."

than Folgers, Maxwell House and Green Mountain combined. We have been very serious, making sure we were communicating something that coffee drinkers like.”

He and Ellie also make themselves available for radio and morning television shows for branding purposes, he says.

“We roast and ship about 150160,000 pounds a year,” he says, and with monthly revenues at around $420,000, that’s about $5 million per year, more than double the business they were doing in their first years.

“We roast some really special coffee,” he says. “We have one that’s called Dancing Rabbit, after the Choctaw Dancing Rabbit treaty, and

it’s a really fine coffee. We blend three different beans, a Guatemalan, a Costa Rican and a Columbian to make it a really great coffee. We also roast a Buffalo blend. It has some Sumatra in it which is an Indonesian coffee.”

He makes an effort to buy some of his coffee beans directly from indigenous farmers overseas, to give them better prices.

McClure says NativeAmericanCoffee.com belongs to a “third wave” of coffee producers. “The first wave was canned coffee that came in either a red can or blue can. Then there were Starbucks products in 1970s and 1980s, using sugar and milk for lattes and cappuccinos.”

Then, “four to six years ago small

artisan coffee companies started launching across the country and started roasting a better grade of specialty coffee. It’s not mass produced.

It’s hand picked and hand roasted in a small batch.”

McClure is still enthusiastic about the operation. “I love the coffee business. It’s new every day. We’ve been able to dance on our feet and expand our business and grow our family business. Our son Gabe and different family members are involved.”

His secret? “You have to pick something you’re really passionate about.

The online business is up and down.

Just when you think you’re about to lose, you win. We work hard. It’s Saturday afternoon and we’re still at it.”

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INNOVATION

.

J T R E B O R

: R E L L I M

Th g n i k a T o t D Ou E E R G Greed may be good for Gordon Gekko, but it is not an Indian value. So, for Robert J. Miller, the dilemma becomes how to extract and leverage the strengths of capitalism without selling our souls.

M

iller, a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe is perhaps best known as Professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where he also serves as the Faculty Director for the Rosette LLP American Indian Economic Development Program. He is concurrently a member of the Navajo Nation Council of Economic Advisors, the Interim Chief Justice for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe Court of Appeals, as well as a Justice for the Grand Ronde Tribe Court of Appeals and Northwest Inter-Tribal Court System.

Miller’s curriculum vitae is as deep as it is wide, too, starting unabashedly with his 19 years working for his father’s used car business through clerkships at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Dis-

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“NATIVES LIVED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS AND WERE FAIRLY WEALTHY.”

trict of Oregon and the U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit. This launched him into a three-year stint at Stoel Rives Boley Jones and Grey followed by five years at Hobbs, Straus, Dean and Walker, then into academia in 1999, first at Lewis and Clark Law School where he taught concurrently at Portland State University Institute for Tribal Government and Tribal Leaders Forum, finally landing at Arizona State University in 2013.

That makes him one busy man—but not too busy for an interview with Native Business Magazine on his 2012 book Reservation “Capitalism”: Economic Development in Indian Country (Reservation Capitalism), and his recently published article, “Sovereign Resilience: Reviving Private Sector Economic Insti-

tutions in Indian Country,” (“Sovereign Resilience”).

Miller describes his thesis in both as, essentially, what he has been advocating for years: that Indians need to find their way home economically by returning to their economic cultural roots – which were largely capitalistic – to dig their way out of the endemic poverty they are entrenched across Indian Country.

Where to being? First, two questions.

One: what is capitalism? BusinessDictionary.com to the rescue. Capitalism is an “[e]conomic system based (to a varying degree) on private ownership of the factors of production (capital, land, and labor) employed in generation of profits. To make things even more complicated, there are different kinds of cap-

m e s i l Th a t i p a C f o r Ditme e a n

By Re

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INNOVATION

“WAITING FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT…HAS NOT BEEN A SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY FOR THE PAST 200 YEARS AND IS NOT GOING TO CHANGE IN THE FUTURE….”

italism, but that’s for another class.

Two: did Indians historically practice capitalism as we know it today? Not exactly. Miller describes the state of historically Indian economic activities as “all sorts of private economic activities.” Miller contrasts today’s extreme poverty with his argument that, “Natives lived for thousands of years and were fairly wealthy, because they practiced a form of capitalism that was not based on greed. Instead, he posits, Indians lived a short economic year, preserved surpluses, and lived winters out at home doing crafts, all of which point to the management of excess, or capital. This includes agriculture along with the production of “material goods necessary to maintain their lives and their communities.” And, in accordance with Indian culture and tradition, possessing wealth is not the ultimate objective of Indian capitalism. “When you got a lot, you had to give it away…like putting it in the bank, an investment scheme of sorts.”

Miller’s notion is that this would be not only to drive tribal capitalization of tribal entrepreneurial efforts but to fund the common good, which doesn’t sound much like Adam Smith at all. His rationale?

“There can be no higher goal than to improve the living conditions on reservations and to help ensure the future livability of reservations as Indian homelands and the continued existence of Indian nations and people.” And that is definitely not classical capitalism.

Miller rejects the notion that Indians could have survived “for millennia just by living off the natural bounty of the land.” Rather, he noted, as have historians of other ancient cultures, that indigenous peoples in the Americas had their own Neolithic Revolution, and moved from nomadic hunting and gathering to farming.

“Private and entrepreneurial business activities were not new to native peoples; in fact they had long been part of the economic institutions that were promoted, supported, and pursued by Indian peoples in historical times,” Miller reports. Not only that, but, “Many Indi-

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ans and communities were so successful in their work and ingenuity in gathering and preserving life’s necessities that their “economic year,” which was only 4 or 5 months long. This, states Miller, “left ample time for individual and communities to engage in leisure, culture, and ceremony.” Indians even valued wealth, as demonstrated by potlatching, the redistribution of excess by the glitterati to “[gain] fame and standing.”

He also claims in Reservation Capitalism that Indians “developed...property rights systems to protect the assets and items that individuals and families created.” More importantly, they controlled “most of the land and assets of the continental United States,” and were “relatively prosperous.” Indians also developed institutions to control their economic activities and maintain their rights, with well-established laws that “recognized private property rights in, for example, the ownership of homes, tools, art, crops, horses, captured animals, fish, and land.” And, “American Indian nations and cultures developed and possessed institutions that promoted and supported private economic activities for centuries. “Institutions” include the common law principles, traditions, behaviors, rights, laws, structures, mechanisms, moral beliefs, practices, customs, and governmental practices and norms of a culture and society.”

Per Miller, “Indian nations, cultures, and their institutions recognized and protected a wide array of individual and family owned private rights in land, even though the lands were owned in common by the government and community. These indigenous property systems encouraged entrepreneurial, individually directed, and privately owned food production and manufacturing activities on specific pieces of land.” This ownership extended even to things like intellectual property and things that today would be covered by copyright or

trademark like “images, dances, marriage ceremonies, names, stories, songs, medicines, masks, and rituals,” Miller observes. Moreover, these rights were inheritable.

Not only that, but Indian trade was rational, organized, institutionalized, and robust when colonists first came to the Americas. and contrary to popular belief that Europeans took advantage of Indians when trading, Miller argues that, “Indians were very aware of the value and prices of Euro-American trade goods and they negotiated vigorously.” Furthermore, “Trade was so important and integral to these communities and their economies and lives, that they did not allow longstanding animosities to get in the way of business,” according to Miller.

Some employed standardized measurements, had trade rules, gave guarantees, extended credit, and charged interest on loans. Indians even sought out non-Indian trading partnerships.

Compare this to Indians today who, “Not surprisingly,.…own private businesses at the lowest rate per capita for any ethnic or racial group in the United States and the businesses they own produce less income on average than others.”

So, what happened to us?

“Waiting for the federal government… has not been a successful strategy for the past 200 years and is not going to change in the future….” he states in Reservation Capitalism. But neither has “pure” capitalism, not that such a thing actually exists. “[The] transfer of wealth and other events….” haven’t helped either, Miller points out. Add reservation unemployment rates of 50 percent, the lack of basic infrastructure and services, and “leakage” – the failure of dollars earned on the reservation to circulate on the reservation given the above – and you have a recipe for “disaster for community building and preserving a nation and culture,” according to Miller.

What’s the remedy?

Even Miller wonders whether Indian Country can resuscitate this more idyllic form of capitalism.

“So, if we revive old practices, where

INNOVATION

does that take us?” he asks out loud.

For Miller it lies in reviving our “traditional institutions that promoted and protected private economic activities,” and looking at our historical roots and economic development traditions and efforts, especially those that revolved around the individual Indian and Indian family. Indeed, to reclaim our prior standing, Miller asserts that we need to get back to our historic entrepreneurship – who we were historically before

Miller pulls the “how to” together, summing it all up using the Harvard Project’s dissection of the key elements that “are required for Indian nation economic success.”

• The first key element is that tribal institutions – both formal and informal – matter. As Miller writes, “entrepreneurs, businesses, and human and financial capital will never locate on reservations that lack the rule of law, or if tribal governments do not stay appropriately out of the “business” “INDIAN COUNTRY IS PROCEEDING FROM of private businesses, or lack efficient SUCH A LOW ECONOMIC BASELINE AND governmental instiSUCH DIRE POVERTY AND DEFICITS,” MILLER tutions, courts, and bureaucracies.” And STATES IN “SOVEREIGN RESILIENCE.” indeed, they don’t.

• Second, tribwe were stripped of our land and real cultures matter, according to the sources.

Harvard Project. Miller highlights the But Miller cautions against new or ridiculousness of tribes hosting busiradical changes to reclaim their former nesses that violate tribal traditions, economic grandeur. Rather, he proculture, or religion because they are motes the revival of “their historical sure to fail. Cultural dissonance is not and traditional customs, laws, values, our friend when it comes to business. behaviors, structures, and mechanisms • Third, tribal sovereignty matters. In for engaging in economic activities and brief, per Miller, if a tribal governto restore their institutions and legal ment can exercise its sovereignty regimes that promoted, supported, and and carry out the will of its people, it protected Indian individual and family should be able to create a climate of economic activities.” success for private sector business deHow do we do that? velopment.

Miller turns to studies done on deStill vexing but critical to Miller is veloping nation-states and tribal public not only how these recommendations sector economic development to inform play out in Indian Country but how the research that tribes might do to “recreprivate property rights issues can be reate their private sector economies. The solved in Indian Country. result is nine fundamentals that indiMiller rejects private property rights vidual tribes can utilize to assess or conas the remedy to the complex problem struct their own particular economic of how tribes can fix what’s ailing their development strategy: economic development. Instead, he pro• Financial literacy motes an approach that “tribal nations • Human capital development utilized for hundreds and thousands • Creation of entrepreneurship of years: a mixed system of commu• How to fund private businesses nal ownership and private use rights.”

• Knowledge of state and federal “Buy Though morally compelling in a perfect Indian” policy world, the Tragedy of the Commons, • A supporting legal infrastructure with its roots in human greed, looms • A supporting physical infrastructure larger across history than the successful • How to attract human and financial use of common land ownership. Miller capital investment proposes that Indians may migrate away • How to leverage non-profit and from “private rights panacea” because of non-governmental social welfare ortheir historical association with how ganizations the United States acquired – and he’s

being polite here – Indian lands.

Even Miller is not sanguine that tribes might favor a mixed approach to property rights. Moreover, communal property rights are decidedly not capitalistic in nature. “Most political theorists and nearly all economists argue that capitalism is the most efficient and productive system of exchange. Though private property rights may be “historically tone deaf,” and though allotment and assimilation were used as tools of Indian genocide, Gordon Gekko might win this round if greed trumps cultural revival.

And Miller recognizes how daunting this revival might be since, “Indian country is proceeding from such a low economic baseline and such dire poverty and deficits,” Miller states in “Sovereign Resilience.”

For Miller personally, entrepreneurship is the lodestar of reservation capitalism, even if it is closer to Keynesian economics since the tribal government plays a larger role. But he cautions against a one size fits all reservation capitalism because tribal governments are sovereign. What type and how much tribal government involvement would be left up to each tribe, making for variations on the broader notion of reservation capitalism.

As to its chances of success, Miller is blunt, conceding that only a few tribes actually possess the capacity to pull this off.

“Creating private sector economies on reservations will take the intelligent and coordinated efforts of tribal governments, Indian individuals, reservation communities, the United States, and non-profit organizations. Indian nations and Indians will have to revive their private business skills, their legal regimes to promote and protect private economic activities, and their historic support for reservation based entrepreneurs and businesses.”

We are a long way from there yet, and Miller’s writing raises more questions than gives answers. Nevertheless, both his book and article provide a solid platform for discussing whether economic cultural revival in the form of entrepreneurship might be good medicine for Indian Country.

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By Debra Utacia Krol

THRIVING

to survive

PHOTO BY: ZUMA PRESS, INC. / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

LANCE GUMBS

L

ance Gumbs is talking while driving along the Long Island Expressway. He’s headed back to his home on the Shinnecock Indian Nation’s land near Southampton, New York.

It’s the only time he has for an interview. In addition to serving as a trustee on the Shinnecock tribal council and as northeastern vice president of the National Congress of American Indians, Gumbs owns and operates several successful businesses—a gift shop, smoke shop, delicatessen, café and a club venue. He’s also got a vision—that other tribal members and communities can make best use of their entrepreneurial talents.

Gumbs’ head for business has deep roots—more than 11,000 years to be precise. “We’re continuing the business tradition of trading,” says Gumbs. That tradition continued after the first Europeans came to the area. “We traded wampum with the Dutch,” he says. The Shinnecock were also whalers, harking to their marine heritage as the “People of the Shore.”

His first foray into business was a youth club.

“When I was attending prep school in New Jersey, my friend took me up to Philadelphia for a party,” says Gumbs. “It was in an abandoned building—that party was one of the hottest I’d ever been to.” It got the young man to thinking. “I can do this back on the rez!”

So Gumbs took a home that he had inherited from an elder, gutted it and turned 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. “We drew a big red

The Shinnecock Indian Outpost

“So, we opened a deli... during the U.S. Open, we sold 5,000 pounds of lobster,” Gumbs said.

PHOTO COURTESY LANCE GUMBS

record on the floor,” says Gumbs. “We called it Red Vinyl!” Later on, when Gumbs met Gary “Litefoot” Davis, the similarity between Davis’ own Red Vinyl Records and Gumbs’ club symbol became apparent.

But Gumbs’ plans took a tragic turn when his father passed away while Gumbs was in prep school. “My parents had a little business on the Montauk Highway,” Gumbs says. “My mom, who was a school teacher, closed the business after dad passed on. We went from being middle-class to dead broke.”

So Gumbs took his DJ show and built it up. “I started partly out of necessity and partly out of a love of music,” he says.

But he still had a dream of achieving a college education, so he began attending university with the goal of an accounting degree. That plan took a left turn as well in his freshman year. “The accounting professor came into the classroom and went off on everybody,” he says. “He told us, ‘You’re all going to work for somebody, and you’re never be rich.’” But Gumbs noticed what the professor was wearing: “He had Native jewelry on,” Gumbs recounts. “He had collar tabs, bracelets, rings—the works.”

It was like a light bulb flipped on in the young man’s head. “I got an idea and I had the building,” Gumbs says. The building was his dad’s old business which had sat empty. And Gumbs knew what to put in it. “I grew up around powwows,” he says. “We went out on the powwow trail every year.” Gumbs would sell Native jewelry, clothing and other Indigenous items in his shop.

After developing a business plan, which Gumbs says every business owner should do as a first step, he gutted the building and remodeled it during summer break. “I used the old tables and built the glass cases myself,” Gumbs says. “I didn’t have the money to buy them.”

A friend lent him $2,500, which was borrowed, and Gumbs took his $2,500 student loan payment and purchased stock. With the shop being right on a main highway, Gumbs figured he would make money off the wealthy clientele from the Shinnecock Golf Course, which was “across the street” from his establishment. “But I wouldn’t go caddy there like my friends did, because I had this thing about hitting a little white ball around like a white man,” he says.

That plan didn’t bear much fruit, as Gumbs and his friend made only $796 that summer. “They kicked me out of college because I had spent the tuition money,” he says, “but it gave me an opportunity to open the business in April.” Gumbs went to community college instead.

Gumbs’ fortunes were about to take a smoky turn. “One day a van pulls up and a Mohawk man jumps out. ‘Are you interested in selling cigarettes?’” Gumbs replied that he didn’t have any money to

purchase any. So, the man offered him about $10,000 of inventory in consignment. “I didn’t know anything about the tobacco business,” says Gumbs, “but the Mohawk man helped me.” They visited a nearby store to learn what cartons of cigarettes were selling for, and Gumbs offered the same stock for $5 less. “I made $2,800 my first day,” he says, “and the third day, I ran out of stock.” After settling with the Native distributor for the first batch, Gumbs got $20,000 more in consignment.

“The rest is history.”

Gumbs and his business were also part of the great New York state tax wars, as the tribes exerted their sovereign rights to not collect the state sales tax. But Gumbs realized it was time to diversify. “So we opened up a deli,” he says. Gumbs also returned to music production and the powwow trail. He made use of the building he built to house his RV by building a portable club and catering facility, which he fittingly called “The Warehouse.”

When the state decided to tax major brands before they got to retail hands, Gumbs simply switched to Native-produced brands. He gave free samples to customers to lure them away from name brands.

It worked.

Most recently, Gumbs added a lobster roll concession to his café.

Just as his fried chicken is touted as the best on the island, so are his lobster rolls. “During the U.S. Open, we sold 5,000 pounds of lobster,” Gumbs says.

And he did most of this before the Shinnecocks became federally recognized in 2010. Gumbs recommends to other business owners to “find your niche, understand your market and create a business plan” to have the best chance of success.

He’s using this business acumen to help steer the tribe into more businesses as well. The tribe has the first solar oyster hatchery on the East Coast, and they are exploring plans for outdoor advertising, a gas station and convenience store, a hydroponic fish farm and class II gaming. “We can do anything!” he says.

Gumbs’ business philosophy: the empty pie plate. “You fill that plate with slices of economic development,” he says. Each “slice” represents a diverse business, so the community won’t be solely reliant on one source of income.

Gumbs is also a firm believer in intertribal business dealings and in a balance between tribal- and privately-owned businesses. “We could create our own GDP in Indian Country!” he says, pointing to other ethnicities who buy and sell from each other. “We’re starting to see this happen, but it needs to happen a lot more.”

But Gumbs continues to grow his own businesses while helping his nation to do the same. He calls it “thriving to survive.”

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White Plume partners with Evo Hemp on CBD tinctures and capsules

HEMP

WARRIOR

For Industrial Hemp Grower Alex White Plume, Sovereign Resolve Is Finally Paying Off 40

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“A

ll living things deserve respect,” says Alex White Plume, Oglala Lakota, who performs a ritual before each hemp harvest. “We tell the plant, ‘Thank you. We’re going to use you.’”

After 1998, when White Plume planted his first acres of hemp, thoughts kept him up at night: “Are we doing the harvest ceremonies right?

Are we singing the right songs?” White Plume told Native Business Magazine.

His concern about cultivating hemp while honoring Lakota tradition turned into a living nightmare between 2000-2002, when dozens of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents raided his hemp fields on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Descending with “weed wackers,” they chopped the towering plants to the base of their stalks, and ripped others up from the roots. “It gave us PTSD; it shocked us,” White Plume said. “They call it ‘eradicating.’ To us, it was theft of our property.”

Little did the agents know, the violent assault shook loose new seeds. “The DEA successfully replanted our field for us. We called it a DEA/FBI hemp field, and used it as a tourist attraction for a while. People had a good laugh about it,” White Plume said.

DEA agents didn’t arrest White Plume or his family. Despite misperceptions, hemp is not classified as a drug. While its mirrors the marijuana plant in appearance, hemp does not contain high levels of the psychoactive chemical THC. Industrial hemp lends itself to three categories of products: fiber, seed and cannabidoil (CBD). Hemp offers vital nutrients in food or supplement form.

While White Plume wasn’t thrown in jail, his battle to grow and process hemp was hardly over. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a permanent injuction against White Plume, banning him from planting hemp. A federal judge lifted the one-of-a-kind ban in 2016.

In spite of numerous legal setbacks and discrimination, White Plume remained steadfast in his mission—to raise industrial hemp to generate vital income for his family and tribal members on the most impoverished reser-

PHOTO COURTESY EVO HEMP

By Native Business Staff

“Ten acres will produce well over a million dollars’ worth of industrial hemp,” said Ari Sherman, president of Evo Hemp.

PHOTO COURTESY JOEY MONTOYA

vation in the United States.

“I live in the poorest community and the poorest county in America today. I was desperate to bring some type of economic development in, where we could use the land without destroying the land,” White Plume told Native Business Magazine.

For the White Plume family, that time has finally arrived.

The White Plume family has partnered with Evo Hemp to produce full-spectrum CBD extracts. The Boulder, Colorado-based Evo Hemp is known for its line of Hemp Bars sold in more than 3,000 retailers, including Whole Foods Markets and Kroger.

Today, anyone can purchase organic HempX Extract and HempX Capsules, made from White Plume’s organic, cannabinoid-rich hemp flower. His products are sold on EvoHemp.com, Walmart. com, and on the shelves of dozens of retailers across the country.

“We’re hoping that it will be Wal-Mart brick and mortar stores soon,” Evo Hemp President Ari Sherman told Native Business Magazine.

“We decided to partner on 10 acres [of hemp] with Alex White Plume, because with CBD [as opposed to fiber or seed], you need a lot less acres. Ten acres will produce well over a million dollars’ worth of industrial hemp,” Sherman said.

Evo Hemp brings a wealth of advantages to the table including a sales network of more than 100 people deployed across the country. The company’s products can be purchased in more than 3,000 retail stores including Kroger, Costco, Whole Foods Markets, and a number of small natural food chains. “We’re really hitting the mainstream consumer with our hemp products,” Sherman said.

Evo Hemp anticipates that the White Plume hemp line of ex-

tracts will account for 25 percent of Evo Hemp’s revenue in 2018.

The parties are in the process of moving toward an equal partnership.

“For this first round [of CBD products], we paid the White Plume family a significantly higher price—over the market price—and put a premium on the [hemp] flower to ensure that they had a solid income from their work,” Sherman said. “We’re moving to a profit-sharing model, where it’s about a 50-50 partnership.”

For White Plume, seeing his name on CBD bottles and finally earning income off his labor is fulfilling. But his greatest joy comes from driving economic opportunity for his family and future generations of White Plumes. “Whatever I make, I’m going to reinvest for my daughter and grandchildren to continue this effort to support our family,” said White Plume, who has appointed his daughter Rosebud White Plume as CEO. “We’re matriarchal in our clan,” White Plume said. His grandson, who at age 3 watched with tears in his eyes as DEA agents removed their hemp plants, now serves as manager of the land.

Alex White Plume is also proud that his farming operation is providing jobs on a reservation plagued with a 90 percent unemployment rate. This fall, he hired 16 people for harvest.

“I’m having an impact on my community. Unemployment has been here so long; people here don’t know how to work. Physically, they work for three hours, and they’re tired,” White Plume laughs.

“I tell them: You’ve got to exercise, so you can work.”

White Plume also aspires to expand beyond the CBD supplement market to produce hemp byproducts with Evo Hemp. “I want to do everything they [Evo Hemp] do—make hemp candies, hemp

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CANNABIS

Building Tribal Partnerships Beyond business with White Plume, Evo Hemp is in discussions to partner with the Oglala Lakota Nation on a 250-acre project for grain production and seed.

“We’re collaborating on CBD products with Alex [White Plume], but for the tribe, we’re working on a larger project. We hope that in 2019, we’ll have over 200 acres of industrial hemp in partnership with the Lakota Tribe,” Sherman said.

While Evo Hemp has partnered to process 10 acres’ worth of White Plume’s industrial hemp for CBD, the company is eyeing significantly more acreage for its partnership with the tribe—but there’s a reason for that. “When you grow for seed production, you need a lot more land,” Sherman explained. “You get about 2,000 pounds per acre of seed, but that’s still no way near the dollar amount you would get for an acre of CBD plants. Your average-sized grain farm is 100-200 acres.”

Evo Hemp hopes to bring economic prosperity to other tribes as well. The company’s ultimate mission is to revitalize economies through industrial hemp, bringing high-paying agricultural jobs to poor, rural communities.

“My main mission is to show that you can revitalize these poor communities just by introducing industrial hemp. We’re trying to spread that message globally. We have projects in Belize, in Columbia, and in South Africa as well,” Sherman said.

Evo Hemp plans to collaborate with more tribes across the United States— and Sherman hopes White Plume will facilitate those relationships. “Alex White Plume is forming an indigenous consulting group that’s going to help other tribes get their projects off the ground,” Sherman said.

The window of time from idea to hemp product is insignificant—roughly four months. The hemp plant requires about three months to grow. Hemp needs a couple of weeks to dry, and then a couple of weeks to manufacture.

“You can grow hemp in greenhouses during the wintertime in controlled environments. Evo Hemp would need to survey the land and provide the genetics. Most of that is done through clones now that can be shipped internationally and statewide. It probably takes a month of consulting, depending on whether they were an agricultural community or not. From initial idea to finished product you can do it in about four months,” Sherman said.

Farming, though, is just one side of the industry. Processing is the next part of the equation—whether it’s processing grain, pressing hemp seed oils, or extracting CBD. “You really need two separate processing plants: one for food and one for CBD production.

That entails bringing in those CO2 extractors. People are going to find a lot of economic growth in those ancillary jobs,” Sherman said.

Beyond processing, Sherman envisions the Oglala Lakota Nation ownings a genetics program to test for genetic quality and to create hemp seed clones.

“My vision is to have the Lakota Tribe build their own processing plants and process their own hemp seeds, make their own protein powder, and mill their own oils. Evo Hemp would just be there to help them market and sell their products. Our interest lies in marketing, branding and selling, and pushing this message further [about the viability of industrial hemp to revive economies].”

Meanwhile on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Alex White Plum is planning his retirement. “I had all these wild dreams. I was young and wanting to do something,” he said of his ambitious foray into industrial hemp. His determination is paying off, turning a new chapter for the White Plume family. “I wrote a path that’s easy to follow,” he said.

“We won’t use chemicals to get maximum yield, maximum growth,” White Plume emphasized.

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PHOTO COURTESY EVO HEMP

foods, hemp breads—use the hemp for all of its means. And I want to replace everything plastic,” said White Plume.

White Plume’s hemp is ideal for CBD extracts and food products, because his fields are completely organic. “We won’t use chemicals to get maximum yield, maximum growth,” White Plume emphasized.

Organic farming is also critical, because industrial hemp absorbs everything in the ground. “Hemp plants can absorb heavy metals and pesticides. They’re really good at cleaning up the soil, which is a kind of double-edged sword. It’s called phytoremediation,” Sherman explained.

“That’s great if you’re trying to clean up a place like Chernobyl that had a nuclear disaster, but it’s also really bad if you’re then trying to consume that hemp. Making sure that industrial hemp is grown on very clean, organic soil that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides and chemical fertilizers is very important.”

Evo Hemp’s CBD extraction process is called “sub-critical CO2 extraction.” Traditionally, CO2 extraction is performed “super-critically” at higher pressures and higher temperatures. Sub-critical extraction applies lower pressure and lower temperatures on the hemp flower, preserving the terpene profile and other compounds like anti-oxidants. “It’s a little slower and costs us more money, but it gives us a superior oil, when you look at the terpene profile.

That’s the beauty of full-spectrum,” Sherman said.

The health benefits of consuming CBD extracts are innumerable, whether an individual is taking CBD to alleviate symptoms of epilepsy or an auto-immune disorder, to reduce pain, or for preventative measures. “I take CBD because my grandparents have Alzheimer’s and dementia,” Sherman said. “I know it’s genetic, so I’m trying to take things like fish oil and cannabinoids as a neural protectant and to prevent further brain problems. I take it every day and try to take it with my multi-vitamins.”

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THE FUTURE IS

NATIVE WOMEN LEAD is a tour de force, uniting, supporting and elevating the voices of Native women entrepreneurs

By Native Business Staff

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W

hat began as a grassroots movement is growing the personal and collective power of female entrepreneurs across Indian Country. A cohort of eight women banded together to create the inaugural Native Women’s Business Summit in April 2018, a two-day event that initially lacked traction, and in mere days leading up to the summit, sold-out and additionally attracted high-profile attendees including Deb Haaland, who stands to become the first Native American Congresswoman, if she’s elected this month.

“On the night of the reception, people were still trying to buy tickets, and we were completely at capacity. Over 200 people showed up,” Stephine Poston (Pueblo of Sandia), co-founder of Native Women Lead and the Native Women’s Business Summit, and founder of the full-service communications firm Poston & Associates, LLC, told Native Business Magazine.

Women even snuck in to the venue, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to claim their space at the table and participate in the conversation. It quickly became clear that Native

PHOTO COURTESY JONATHAN SIMS

INDIGENOU

US WOMEN Last year, Native Americans and Alaska Natives owned 1.4 percent of all women-owned businesses (an estimated 161,500 businesses), employing 61,300 workers and generating $11 billion in revenues. Since 1997, womenowned businesses grew by 114 percent, while Native women-owned businesses grew by 201 percent.

—2018 NATIVE WOMEN LEAD REPORT

PHOTO COURTESY HENRY JAKE FOREMAN

Women Lead was more than an organization, and that the Native Women’s Business Summit was more than a convening of 200-plus Native businesswomen.

The movement has ignited the fires within the hearts of women across Indian Country and harnessed the power of a united force. It has built the framework for a vibrant economic ecosystem of Native women who partner, collaborate, co-create and uplift one another. Native Women Lead has awakened the spirit of community and sovereignty of Native women— who today are the primary breadwinners

of Native households.

“Native American women are opening businesses twice as fast as our Native men; we’re two-thirds of the breadwinners; and we only make 57 cents to the dollar of a white, non-Hispanic male,” Vanessa Roanhorse (Diné), co-founder of Native Women Lead and founder and CEO of Roanhorse Consulting, LLC, told Native Business Magazine. “Knowing those statistics, how are Native women going to get ahead?

Business development is a great way for Native women to have self-autonomy and self-determination of how they take care

of their family.”

The idea for the Native Women’s Business Summit took seed and root organically in a fitting hub— Albuquerque, which boasts one of the largest urban Native American populations, and in New Mexico, home to 23 federally recognized tribes. In Albuquerque, the Native Entrepreneur in Residence (NEIR) Program, offered by New Mexico Community Capital (NMCC), serves as a business incubator and accelerator. Through the program, relationships among Native women entrepreneurs flourished, becoming a breeding

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DISRUPTORS

“AS NATIVE WOMEN, WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD TO WORK HARDER, STRONGER, FASTER AND BETTER.” — Vanessa Roanhorse

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spire ELEVATE, a gathering of 75 women in October 2017 to connect and cull input to design the inaugural Native Women’s Business Summit. “ELEVATE was more World Café style. At the free event, we brainstormed and asked the women what they wanted and what they needed. We built our Native Women’s Business Summit from the information and data that we collected,” said Kalika Tallou (Diné, Ute), summit co-founder and founder of Salon Tallou, an Albuquerque-based boutique salon for “holistic hair artistry.”

“We are dedicated to developing creative spaces for women's voices to be heard and acknowledging our interwoven strengths and larger commitments to social and environmental responsibilities.

Creating and maintaining vital relationships is essential to our individual and collective growth as Native entrepreneurs and for women who are in the beginning phases of starting their own business,” Tallou said.

The ELEVATE gathering served as a catalyst for the inaugural Native Women’s Business Summit, and the subsequent summit, slated for spring or summer 2019, larger in magnitude and scale.

“Creating the Native Women’s Business Summit was a collective effort. Each one

Native Women Lead was founded to create networks for Native women to succeed in business that builds capacity, encourages financial freedom, and honors their core values, “BEWE”: BACKBONE:

We are the backbone of our communities.

EMERGING:

We are emerging as entrepreneurs.

WEAVING: EMPOWERING:

We are weaving our ideas, resources, and community to manifest change.

We do this while empowering one another.

PHOTO COURTESY KALIKA TALLOU DAVIS

ground for Native Women Lead.

But the true impetus for the organization and the Native Women’s Business Summit came when Roanhorse was invited to lead a Native women’s business panel at the Women’s Economic Forum, which empowers women globally. For the first time in May 2017, the international forum was taking place in the state of New Mexico. Roanhorse gathered five, inspiring Native businesswomen in the state to participate on the panel, including Native Women Lead co-founders Poston and Jaclyn Roessel, founder of Grownup Navajo, LLC. “We created a panel about how we can create more thoughtful mentorship opportunities for our young Native women,” Roanhorse shared.

“Not a single person attended our panel,” Roanhorse confessed. “I was so embarrassed and heartbroken. I felt terrible.”

So, they did what Native women do— they used the opportunity to create a talking circle. They wrestled with the difficult questions: “Why aren’t people here?

Why can’t we find the resources and support that we need?” And then they dove into the meaty questions about entrepreneurship: “How did you build your company? How did you get access to money?

How did you find employees? How do you deal with having a company on tribal lands or off tribal lands?”

“It just turned into this incredibly healing discussion,” Roanhorse said. “We all left happy and uplifted—and motivated to recreate that magic again and again and again. If we don’t take control of this ourselves, then nobody is going to do it.

The world is not built to support Native American women in business and within the economy. As Native women, we have always had to work harder, stronger, faster and better.”

That was the genesis of the Native Women Lead movement that would in-

of us has a unique skillset that we bring, and everyone showed up and brought it.

That’s why the summit felt so different. It wasn’t led by money; it wasn’t led by selfishness. It was truly led by the heart—as well as listening to the community to see what they wanted us to talk about,” Roanhorse shared.

Roanhorse took on the role of program management and raising capital through multiple stakeholders. She connected with and engaged in conversations with foundations, companies, and tribal governments. “We also realized that we had a lot of friends in the community who were non-Native, who wanted to see us succeed, so we also launched a crowdfunding campaign,” she added.

The cost to attend the two-day summit was $75, which included meals and childcare. Offering daycare services for attendees reflects the lengths that the co-founders will go to for fellow women entrepreneurs. They reached out to Michele Justice, a Navajo private investigator and founder of Personnel Security Consultants, who put them in touch with a daycare service that had passed her background and security checks. “They were happy that the nanny service was not only a woman-owned business but that they were already vetted,” Justice told Native Business Magazine.

Roanhorse added: “We really wanted to create this space where women could concentrate on the work, yet feel safe and confident that their kids were being cared for and have access to them throughout the day. It was a real community lift. We want to be responsible for what we’ve built.”

Poston underscored how the health of Native families is connected to economic

DISRUPTORS well-being: “From my perspective, when Native women and youth are safe and secure financially, so is the community,” she told Native Business Magazine. “So how do we build more Native women entrepreneurs?”

Poston first realized her desire to create a movement that advances the numbers, confidence and success of women in business when First Lady Michelle Obama tapped the most powerful women in the world to create the United State of Women. “I wanted to do that for Pueblo women.

I wanted to have a gathering about career, as well as balancing childcare, engaging in the community, and running your business,” Poston said.

Much of Indian Country considers the timing of the Native Women Lead movement as serendipitous—even those watching and cheering on Native women entrepreneurs from the sidelines. “There is a very interesting confluence of things that are going on in our country in terms

of gender politics,” Clare Zurawski, NEIR Management Advisor and 360° Grant Specialist at NMCC, told Native Business Magazine. “To have this group emerge and be very successful very quickly in terms of their reach and resonance of their message, to attract hundreds of people from several states at their first event—indicates a real untapped potential, need and energy for Native women to get together.

There is a need for women to step up. It’s an expression of the empowerment that a lot of women are feeling, and it’s amplified by all the additional layers that Native women experience. This year was the right time and the right place to put something like this together. They’ve been very methodical about addressing their needs and wants and very professional about everything they’ve done.”

Native men, as well, are taking notice and standing in support of the growing power of Native women in business.

“There are so many talented Native Amer-

THE STATE OF NATIVE WOMEN IN BUSINESS A recent report from Native Women Lead sheds light on the incredible ascent of Native women entrepreneurs and business leaders nationwide. It pulls data from national research and insight from the 2018 Native Women’s Business Summit. The consolidated information reinforces the need for continued support to American Indian women entrepreneurs, the co-founders of Native Women Lead stated, and it spotlights the need to foster a culturally focused empowerment program for Native women business leaders.

“Far too often, the voices of Native American women are left at the edges of already marginalized communities,” Roessel (Diné) said. “Therefore, our goal was simple: to demonstrate that Native American women are community leaders, CEOs, mothers, wives, elders, and the critical drivers of Indigenous businesses that contribute $11 billion to the economy.”

Key findings include: • In 2016, two-thirds of all American Indian and Alaska Native women in the U.S. were the primary breadwinners in their families, according to data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

• Native women are paid only 57 cents to every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

• Since 1997, women-owned businesses grew by 114 percent, while Native women-owned businesses grew by 201 percent, according to American Express’ The 2017 State of Women Owned Businesses Report.

• 82 percent of the 200 attendees representing over 30 tribes at the Native Women’s Business Summit would like to be a mentor in the future.

Among other initiatives in the works for Native Women Lead is creating a comprehensive list of Native women-owned businesses.

“Attendees asked for a resource guide, a listing of Native women-owned businesses, similar to an Angie’s List, so we could use each other’s services,” Poston said.

ican women, just here in the state of New Mexico. I feel like the growing collective of Native business women is a response to all the spheres where women are underrepresented, like the political sphere,” said Henry Jake Foreman (Absentee Shawnee), husband of Tallou, founder of Cycles of Life and Karuna Colectiva, and program manager of the Financial Literacy and Business Basics course, offered by NMCC. The Native Women’s Business Summit also exemplifies the “huge need and a huge interest for women interested in entrepreneurship,” Foreman added. “I just happen to think that Native American women are the most intelligent, most creative, most caring people that I’ve ever met. Native women are becoming more visible in these leadership roles. We want to do everything that we can to support that. In our Financial Literacy and Business Basics course, 90 percent of our participants are Native American women. That is no coincidence.”

2ND ANNUAL NATIVE WOMEN’S BUSINESS SUMMIT: BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM

The inaugural Native Women’s Business Summit featured a diverse array of content from speakers and panelists, who spoke honestly about challenges faced and overcome. “We heard from people who know about venture capital, social media, people who have built their business from the ground up, and people who run multi-million-dollar government contracting businesses,” Poston said.

Between content-rich sessions, attendees stretched and reinvigorated with “energizing movement breaks” led by instructors with Hozho Total Wellness, a yoga business founded by Haley Laughter (Navajo).

Discussions are currently underway to plan the 2nd Annual Native Women’s Business Summit, slated for spring or summer 2019, as well as a lead-up series to the summit. “I think our charge for this next year is being responsible to the women—to continue to think about ways to honor their feedback,” Roessel said.

“The summit will be bigger,” Roanhorse added. “What we learned after the first one was that people wanted more opportunities for sector-based and thoughtful networking; they wanted more opportunities to be in a space together.”

Key topics remain at the forefront: “How do we run a business and be the spiritual center of our families and homes on our tribal lands?

How do we, as Native women, create a professional movement rooted in lifting each other up? How do we compete in the world knowing that the cards are stacked against us?”

In addition to offering a place for women to connect meaningfully, the next summit will hone in on ways to build social capital. “Our goal is not to recreate the wheel. We don’t want to be creating curricula or creating new strategies or tactics. What we know from our work is that there are several Native organizations that do that work, and they do it well. We hope to be the convening piece that brings those people in, and let them drive the conversation,” Roanhorse said.

She added: “All we need to do is be a lightning rod to get that information out, to funnel funds to people, and ultimately, to raise the voice of Native women on a national platform. We want to be ecosystem builders in a direct way and specifically within Indian Country.”

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MEMOR IA M

The Man, Not The Legend

By Renae Ditmer

Fisherman’s Prayer I pray that I may live to fish Until my dying day.

And when it comes to my last cast, I then most humbly pray: When in the Lord's great landing net And peacefully asleep That in His mercy I be judged Big enough to keep.

-Unknown

PHOTOS BY WHITNEY PATTERSON PHOTOGRAPHY

I N

LARRY KINLEY

B

ig enough to keep will not be Larry Kinley’s problem. Capturing his stunning “fish story” in Indian Country in a few brief words might be, though.

Kinley, who succumbed at the much too young age of 71 to lung cancer this past February, left behind a palpable void in Indian Country that now must be filled by those he mentored so well. But what a task when the words used to describe him are these: Soldier. Chairman. Vice Chairman. General Manager. Senior Tribal Advisor. Member. Advocate. Negotiator. Relationship manager.

Fisherman. Risk taker. Visionary. Coach. Instrumental. Dedicated. Humble. Passionate. Integral. Key. Golfer. Friend. Father. Soulmate.

PHOTO COURTESY ELLIE KINLEY

For most people a couple of words would suffice to describe their lifetime achievements. But not here, not for this man. And a list of Kinley’s accomplishments here simply won’t do him justice, because ultimately, it was Larry the philosopher fisherman that people who talked to Native Business Magazine remember best.

Now the fish story.

A soldier-scholar, Kinley graduated from Chaminade University in 1970, the same year he mustered out of the Army and started back into commercial fishing. Within four years, he ascended to the Lummi Council Chairmanship, serving in that position for 12 total years in the 1970s and 1980s, while concurrently serving on the Lummi Indian Business Council from 1974-2001—much of that as its Chairman, and while continuing to fish.

Many consider Kinley instrumental in ensuring Native fishing rights in the 1974 Boldt Decision. Yet family and close friends point to his enticing leadership style and bold entrepreneurial spirit as his enduring legacies.

Kinley was fundamental in the development and expansion of the Lummi fishing fleet into the largest tribal fishing fleet in the world. He saw fishing as a way to generate working capital for other Lummi commercial efforts that he captained. A born leader endowed with competitive spirit and the self-discipline required to take it to the bank, Kinley, who was always a fisherman first, looked beyond fishing as the Lummi grew from 1,000 in the 1970s to 7,000 today.

But every upside has a downside, too, as his brother Steve Kinley put it, “The unintended consequences of Lummi success were both good and bad—good in the sense that fishing for herring was very lucrative at the time and provided significant capital to reinvest in vertical industries for fishing—public infrastructure, bigger boats, better harbors, cold storage and transportation; bad in that the sheer number of people drawn back to the reservation due to its success then competed for that capital to cover basic needs—housing, education, health and social services.” It wasn’t always pretty, politically speaking, Steve Kinley recalled. But Larry Kinley’s unique approach to governance, management and problem solving in general proved effective in setting the Lummi and other tribes he worked with on a true course over his nearly 50-year career.

As luck would have it, just as the fishing rights were getting sorted out, “people problems” as Steve Kinley calls them, had an unexpected negative impact on the tribe’s fishing income. “Warming water from El Niño degraded the habitat the fish ate and spawned in, and Japanese fisherman intercepted fish on their way to spawn,” Steve recounted, seriously cutting into the number of fish available in traditional Lummi fishing areas. The politics the problems spawned weren’t pretty either, often pitting tribal members’ needs against the capital required for the economic development they needed to sustain their lives.

Larry, however, was fearless, and applied his trademark problem solving style to encourage the Lummi to generate their own solutions that they then put into play. They ended up establishing Fisherman’s Cove, a convenience store serving the Lummi fishing community, along with several other mini-marts, a bingo hall and a black jack parlor that, over a number of years, ultimately morphed into the Silver Reef Casino and Spa, and a processing plant.

The take from the casino is now three times the take from fishing—to put a point on how shrewd this move was.

But the Lummi never stopped fishing, and neither did Larry. Fishing was their identity, as Larry astutely recognized. It was also the key to getting buy-in from tribal members as they tacked toward more lucrative economic development projects.

“Larry always injected Lummi philosophy into his reasoning. Larry would tell people to look into their culture when looking for an answer. His philosophy was that our Lummi philosophy always gives us the answer.”

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CAREER As lifelong friend and former Lummi Chairman Darrell Hillaire noted, “Larry did a lot of great things for our people by creating a sense of family.” Now Executive Director of The Children of the Setting Suns Productions, Hillaire elaborated, “He always tried to create ‘we’ moments, not ‘I’ moments,” so that the tribe owned its solutions.

And he was politically savvy, “able to convince the Lummi that they were self-determining, self-governing, and self-sufficient” and able to solve their own problems instead of relying on the government for a handout, even as they were only developing these capacities. Larry sincerely credited others, even if he was captaining the discussion, according to Hillaire. That afforded him a lot of political capital when it came to presenting new business projects that required capital some might have preferred to see applied to tribal social services.

Larry’s knack for getting people to come to consensus “by getting the best out of you – helping people find the answer while weighing the consequences of each of the options left people ultimately satisfied with their accomplishments,” Dan Tucker, another

Larry was also pragmatic and very disciplined, having grown up in a commercial fishing family and having spent time in the Army, Steve Kinley noted. “Fishing is like the military in that it involved being away from family most of the time, it was male dominated, and very competitive.” As a young man, Larry loved sports, especially football. Although “kind of a small guy,” according to his brother, he played cornerback— a speed position. “Larry was fiercely competitive with anything he did, including politics,” Steve recalled, and always about the crew and teamwork,” whether on the boat or on the football field.

Steve Kinley noted that his brother rejected the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, convinced that Indians could do better at managing federal dollars themselves. And though he burned out after being Chairman of the Lummi after twelve years, according to his wife, Ellie Kinley. Larry was instrumental in shaping other tribes he worked for in downstate California during the off season. There he implemented the best practices that he had developed for the Lummi.

And finally, what memorial would be complete without a love story?

Ellie Kinley, Larry’s wife of 24 years and 17 years his junior, grew up knowing Larry as Chairman of the tribe.

Both crew leads, they “spent a lot of time sitting in coffee houses – kind of like a designated driver – keeping an eye on their crews while they were off duty,” Ellie recounted. And, well, we all know where coffee leads, and in this case, it was a meeting of the souls that culminated for a much too short time for Ellie. As anyone who has every fished commercially knows, it takes a toll on the family. Though they kept their home base in Bellingham, Washington, where they raised their sons Luke and Kyle. Meanwhile, Larry spent some 20 years working in downstate California in the off season, spreading his message and economic development methods to the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Tribe, the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, and others. And while Ellie held down home base, she exudes great respect for the man – not the legend – she called her soulmate.

“What set Larry apart was his wonderful ability when working with the tribe. It was never about Larry. It was always about helping people make sure they got things. He would never take credit for anything. If someone came to him with a question, he would turn it around to bring their own ability to answer their own question. He had a natural appeal and charisma, which is hard to describe. He was always one to sit back in the corner and think about it and get everyone to come around to the right decision calmly,” she recounted from the deck of her fishing boat in mid-October.

The unfairness of the lung cancer that took his life of this nonsmoker so young still lingers. He was concerned to the end that “the fights aren’t done….it always feels like our rights are at risk with all these people trying to whittle away at our rights,” Ellie told Native Business Magazine.

So what is Larry’s legacy? His brother Steve put it best.

“The Kinleys were taught to be very proud Lummis, and the work that we did should never be done for the greed of it, but making the Lummis better. And that work is never easy. We never backed down from that challenge.”

And that is a fish big enough to keep.

of Larry’s long time friends and Indian Country gaming dignitary from the Sycuan Band, explained. “There was no wrong answer for him. He guided people through thought processes to make decisions for themselves. He turned the light on for a lot of tribes in California through his work on Proposition 5 and Proposition 1A, so that they could make their own decisions, too.”

Hillaire added. “Larry always injected Lummi philosophy into his reasoning. Larry would tell people to look into their culture when looking for an answer. His philosophy was that our Lummi philosophy always gives us the answer. But Larry also asked people what their own philosophy was, too. Kids learn philosophy at school that clashes with the tribe’s, and Larry was very aware of that. Larry got a white man’s education, but looked at it through a Lummi lens. It was one of his greatest gifts.”

Hillaire summed Larry up, “Larry was spot on when he said, ‘We have everything we need to solve some of our problems as Indians or Lummi people. Do we have the will to do what needs to be done?’” And he believed that was true for all tribes. But, Tucker reminisced, “His favorite saying was, ‘Sovereignty without works is dead,’” and he expected everyone to work at retaining it as hard as he did.

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PHOTO COURTESY ELLIE KINLEY

“He always tried to create ‘we’ moments, not ‘I’ moments.”

CLARA PRATTE

OWNER OF STRONGBOW STRATEGIES

By Debra Utacia Krol

“M

PHOTO COURTESY CLARA PRATTE

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, GIS services, emergency management and even facilities support.

Pratte (Navajo) says she’s always had an entrepreneurial streak. “My dad was a business owner in the hospitality field,” she says. Her parents owned and operated three Northern Arizona nightclubs, or as Pratte calls them, “honky tonks.”

Her childhood was filled with country music, and with observing her parents working hard to manage the clubs and provide for their family. “My mom would sweep floors and manage the bars with my dad or on her own.”

However, Pratte spent much of her post-university career—she has a bachelor’s degree from the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona and a master’s degree in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University—working in the public sector before launching Strongbow in 2013.

Pratte has served as the national director of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Native American Affairs, where she says she encountered many tribal-owned businesses and individual tribal entrepreneurs—and many different management systems. “I’ve been both the customer looking for services and a GS-grade federal employee who must comply with procurement policies,” says Pratte, who’s

an SBA 8(a) program specialist. “The varied experience helps to balance and round out my perspective on different aspects of management.” She’s also considered a subject matter expert on tribal policy, law and economic development, and has testified before Congress on these subjects. And, she received one of the National Center for American Indian Economic Development's 40 Under 40 awards in 2010.

Pratte says she continues to be amazed by the energy and drive of tribal business owners. “Every entrepreneur has a deep drive to give back,” she says. “They’re also amazing corporate citizens.”

“EVERY ENTREPRENEUR HAS A DEEP DRIVE TO GIVE BACK.” Pratte also served as chief of staff for Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye and as executive director of the nation’s Washington, D.C., office, which provided her with even more valuable tribal government experience.

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. However, now that she’s jumped off the cliff of 9-to-5 job security in favor of creating her own paychecks, Pratte is enjoying the sensation of growing her wings.

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,” she says.

“The cargo must meet the agency’s criteria and needs. Those scientists need their Doritos!”

One issue that Pratte sees in the tribal business world is a gender gap, especially in the IT field. “There aren’t many women in IT,” she says. “We need more women in these roles. I recall the words of one expert who says that society can’t cut half of its workforce and be able to have 100 percent of its brainpower.” And, she would like to see more investment in the younger generation to create new entrepreneurs.

Pratte also is thankful for the support of various organizations such as the Udall Foundation and New Mexico commercial capital programs for Native entrepreneurs. “I wouldn’t be where I am without the Udall Foundation,” says Pratte, who was a Udall congressional fellow and presidential management fellow.

And of course, family plays a strong role in her success. “My mother, grandmas, auntys and my husband’s parents are the best!” says Pratte, who’s the mother of a 1 ½-year old son and will welcome her second child in January 2019. Pratte moved home to the Southwest both to be close to family and so her children would grow up fluent in the Navajo language. “It’s hard to do when you’re far from your homeland,” she says.

In fact, she has words of advice for other working moms: “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she says. “Work hard to balance work and life. And look for resources in your area.”

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CONSTRUCTION / ARCHITECTURE

Native Construction Company

“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.”

By Mark Fogarty

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aron Thomas knows exactly who to credit for the knowledge and drive that allowed him to make a success of Metcon, the Native-owned construction business he started in 1999.

It’s his grandfather, Curt Locklear, who taught him the building trades from the hardware and building supply store he owned for more than 50 years in Pembroke, NC, capital of the Lumbee Nation.

Thomas worked with his grandfather from the age of 10 until he was 23, building the skills necessary to be ready to start his own firm, which is notable for its emphasis on Energy Positive buildings that produce more energy than they consume.

“He trained all the kids to work hard.

He pushed all of us to go to school,” said Thomas, who is president and ceo of Metcon. School was what is now the Universi-

ty of North Carolina-Pembroke, a successor to the Pembroke State College for Indians, where his grandfather and grandmother, Catherine, were early graduates.

In what proved to be a very satisfying completion of a circle, Thomas’ firm was later hired to construct buildings at UNC-Pembroke, and now is in the process of building a business school on campus, he told Native Business Magazine.

“We’ve constructed a lot of buildings there,” said Thomas of the college, which dates back to 1887 when it started up as the North Carolina Indian Normal School.

Metcon, based in Pembroke, now has five offices around the Carolinas and employs 80 people. It has been involved in 650 construction project completions over the years.

How the firm got into Energy Positive building was a case of necessity being the

PHOTO COURTESY METCON

Protects Mother Earth While Reducing Costs

• • • •

mother of invention, Thomas said. A project to build a school, Sandy Grove Middle School in Lumber Bridge, NC, suffered a dramatic budget cut, so Metcon and partners SFLA (the architect) and Firstfloor (the developer), had to huddle on how to bring costs down. Energy costs is what they decided to tackle.

Solar panels figured in the solution, but they weren’t the only thing implemented.

Here’s the list of all the energy reduction features of the school, which when completed in 2013 was the first privatized energy positive school in the country: • Solar power 589.5 kw of Photovoltaic.

• Geothermal heating and cooling systems.

• High efficiency LED lighting.

• High performance building envelope with spray foam.

• Indoor air quality monitoring.

Electric car charging stations.

Thermal mass.

Whole building generator.

Control of all building systems on and off-site through the Building Automation System.

In addition, Thomas says, the natural sunlight was used to contribute a significant portion of the lighting for the LEED Platinum building. Construction materials were recycled or salvaged.

The firm remains involved with the school. “We didn’t just build it and leave,” Thomas said. Metcon has stayed on to optimize the building, “like fine-tuning a race car.”

Metcon estimates Sandy Grove Middle School “will save nearly $16 million in energy cost alone over the next 40 years.

Combined with other operations and maintenance efficiencies, SGMS will save Hoke County over $35 million during the same period.”

Metcon has now completed or started 12 Energy Positive buildings, including a public utility, and is about to start an Energy Positive high rise in Raleigh, NC. “Each one has gotten better than the last,” he says.

Thomas comments “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.”

Other construction areas Metcon targets are commercial-retail-corporate; education, government, healthcare; hospitality-multifamily and infrastructure.

The company emphasizes its minority business orientation. “Our approach to minority business development is anchored in the following values: community development, inclusion, opportunity and reciprocity,” it says.

The firm name Metcon is a hybrid of “metal” and “construction.”

It then morphed into a full-service commercial construction company. Its current delivery methods break down to 28 percent general contracting, 51 percent construction management, and 21 percent design build.

Thomas enjoys the recognitions Metcon has received. It was recognized by the U.S. Department of Commerce as the 2011 and 2013 U.S. Minority Construction Firm of the Year, and more recently two Metcon schools were recognized as the Best K-12 projects in the U.S. by Engineering News and Record for 2013 and 2016.

He also enjoys talking about Lumbee tribal history. Thomas is enthusiastic in listing the accomplishments of distinguished members of the Lumbee tribe, including distant cousin Jim Thomas, a developer and former owner of the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association, UNC Pembroke Chancellor Robin Cummings, the first Native Cardiothoracic surgeon, and his own daughter, Ashtyn Skye Thomas, the reigning Junior Miss Lumbee.

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

—Research assistant Priestess J. Bearstops, Oglala Lakota, contributed to this article.

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GROUNDS FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING & TRANSITION

K

By Native Business Staff

awi Café gives new meaning to a caffeine “pick me up.” Kawi, which means “coffee” in Cherokee, is more than a neighborhood café in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It’s a place for aspiring entrepreneurs to receive hands-on experience in management and the restaurant industry, while crafting business plans of their own.

The Cherokee Nation conceived of the concept when tribal casinos identified a need to foster more food service professionals for Cherokee businesses. At Kawi Café, employees create menus, manage staff and purchase orders, handle cash and transactions, and interact with customers on a daily basis. Participants additionally receive financial education and guidance on creating business and marketing plans.

“Some graduates have successfully opened up their own businesses. Others realized that they didn’t want to open a business, and we view that as a success as well,” Stephen Highers, who oversees the business incubator program at Kawi Café, told Native Business Magazine.

Two years ago, the Kawi Café entrepreneurship program—which does not have an official name—shifted its focus, electing to expand opportunity for Cherokee Nation citizens who were recently released from incarceration or rehabilitation. Coordinating with the Cherokee Nation Reintegration (Re-Entry) Program and the tribe’s Small Business Assistance Center, Kawi Café acts as a catalyst for ambition and self-sovereignty. The program continues to promote entrepreneurship—“but now we’re working with people who are reintegrating into society after prison,” Highers said.

Kawi Café makes the transition back into the workforce smoother through structure and support. “They need that six months of steady employment and job training, and someone to help them incorporate back into the ‘real’ world,” Highers said.

To qualify for the Kawi Café entrepreneurship program, individuals must participate in the reintegration program, also known as the Coming Home Program, and be at least three months out of prison.

“They’re still self-identified as entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship lends itself well to the

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KAWI CAFÉ:

INNOVATION

Caption: Kawi Café brews organic, fair-trade coffee beans grown and harvested by indigenous peoples and craft-roasted by Tribal Grounds, a business founded and operated by Eastern Band of Cherokee citizen Natalie Smith on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina.

formerly incarcerated and felons, because there is not a lot of opportunities for them in the corporate world,” Highers explained. “A company may have a policy not to hire felons, or perhaps the individual doesn’t possess a necessary skillset. Entrepreneurship is a good way for them to make a living.”

Former Kawi Café employee Dusty Rollice, who now manages a restaurant on the outskirts of Tahlequah called The Wheelhouse, credits the program for her professional growth and stability. “It definitely gave me the opportunity to re-integrate into the community and get around people. It taught me customer service, responsibility and public relations. I learned inventory, open and close paperwork, ordering, logging of day to day funds,” Dusty said. “My managerial background at Kawi lead to my manager’s position now at The Wheelhouse.”

Beyond preparing Rollice for the next phase of her professional career, Kawi supported Rollice through earning her GED, and the program planted seeds of intention for a future business she hopes to launch—a sober living house in Tahlequah.

“At Kawi Café, they not only provide the opportunity to work while getting a GED, they help you create a business plan. It helped me to think about the future, what I might want to do later on, and how I would go about doing that,” Rollice said.

Within the past two years of the program, Kawi has graduated 32 or more participants. “They’ve gone through the program, and then we’ve been able to place them in a career,” Highers said.

Current Kawi Café employee Mallory Creel was promoted from assistant manager to manager when Rollice moved on to manage The Wheelhouse. Creel appreciates how Kawi grooms employees for the job search process after graduation, helping

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An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Kawi Café is part of the Cherokee Nation Career Services’ greater entrepreneurial ecosystem. The tribe owns an historic building in downtown Tahlequah called the Court Mall, which houses Kawi Café, as well as a spa, a couple business incubator spaces, and Spider Gallery, a venue for Cherokee artist entrepreneurs to sell their work.

The Cherokee Nation commerce division has operated a loan fund for small businesses since 1998, “and it’s been immensely successful in putting people to work,” Highers shared. “We started keeping track in 2010, and since then, there has been a total Cherokee Nation investment of $14.1 million into 294 small businesses that have created more than 1,300 jobs throughout the 14 counties.

It’s been a successful entrepreneurial program through the CDFI (community development financial institution). We understand that small businesses are the backbone of our communities, especially our rural Cherokee communities.”

Highers added: “Working with entrepreneurs to start up and expand businesses is a powerful testament to the Cherokee Nation Career Services and the Cherokee Nation Small Business Assistance Center. Every place wants to attract that new Amazon Fulfillment Center but, in reality, those are few and far between,” Highers said.

“If you can continue to support entrepreneurs and to help small businesses grow and thrive in your rural communities, then you are really making an impactful difference on generations to come.”

PHOTO COURTESY CHEROKEE NATION COMMUNICATIONS

participants to hone their resumes and prepare for interviews.

She also underscored the value of Kawi’s classes on budgeting and managing personal finances.

Creel’s business plan is to birth a transition program for formerly incarcerated mothers or mothers who recently completed rehab, to work while taking steps toward earning the rights to get their children back. Creel herself is adjusting to life as a full-time mom again, including preparing meals and assisting her kids with their homework, she said.

Creel’s advice to other individuals interested in participating in the Kawi program is straightforward and spoken from experience: “Life isn’t easy; you have to work for it. If you work hard, you’ll get what you want in the end.”

Hands-on experience illuminates the realities of operating a business for employees, Highers emphasized. “What people think opening their own business will be like, and the reality of opening their own business, is typically totally different. I think it’s powerful for them to see what operating a business is like from the inside,” Highers said.

As Kawi Café empowers employees from within, it also plays a role in reframing perceptions about the formerly incarcerated, Highers said. “We’ve been able to change some mindsets. We’ve worked to get businesses to hire people and to understand that not everybody with a felony is someone that you don’t consider or seek to hire. When they leave, we haven’t turned them all into entrepreneurs, but we have been able to place them all in a job that is helping in some way, and we’ve sparked that seed of entrepreneurship in some of them as well,” Highers said.

Through Kawi Café’s entrepreneurship program, manager Mallory Creel is learning the importance of budgeting and clear communication with staff, she said.

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PROFILE

HARD WORK, POSITIVITY ROOTED IN A FIRM CULTURAL FOUNDATION ARE THE KEYS TO THIS YOUNG ATHABASCAN WOMAN’S

By Debra Krol

SUCCESS

JOY HUNTINGTON Owner of Uqaqti Consulting

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PHOTO COURTESY JOY HUNTINGTON

By Debra Utacia Krol

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young Koyukon Athabascan girl who once was expelled from an Alaska boarding school for being rowdy is now one of Indian Country’s business success stories. She 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.

At age 15, Joy Huntington received word that she had received a full scholarship to attend an exclusive boarding school in Sedona, Arizona. The Verde Valley School is more than 2,600 miles—and a world apart—from Huntington’s home community of Stevens, Alaska. The tiny community with a population of less than 100 lies 90 miles northwest of Fairbanks, deep in rural Alaska, and lacks electricity, running water, roads or phone service. But Stevens offered Huntington and her brothers a cultural way out of their troubled adolescence: a rich foundation in their Athabascan heritage.

“My mom made a deliberate move to Stevens to connect us to our village and culture,” says Huntington, now 34. “I was getting in trouble in town, and my brothers had dropped out of high school.”

Stevens Village offered another benefit that didn’t seem like such a wonderful thing to a teenager at the time: “I had to work hard to contribute to our family’s survival when it was 40 or 50 degrees below zero,” she says. Huntington chopped wood, helped with cooking and other chores essential to staying alive in Alaska winter weather. “One time, I had to bring home two 5-gallon containers of water in a plastic sleigh which had a crack in it. The temperature was 60 below. It was rough going, but we needed water!” That “get it done” attitude, instilled in her psyche, has become a way of life for Huntington.

But it wasn’t until after Huntington was expelled from a boarding school in Galena that she made the fateful decision to turn her life around. “When I came home, it hit me like a slap in the face that I didn’t want to live like this,” Huntington says. “I saw a 12th-grade student reading out of an eighth-grade math book and that’s what tipped it for me.”

So, Huntington began pursuing another education option—she visited a boarding school site on the internet and loaded in her profile information. That’s how she found Verde Valley School, which offered a far different educational atmosphere than the tiny school in Stevens Village.

“I’m wearing Carhartts to school, but the kids [in the school’s brochure] were wear-

ing uniforms,” says Huntington.

So, Huntington took the plunge after receiving the scholarship to Verde Valley School. And, thanks to a family member who donated his frequent flyer miles, the teenager was able to make the trip and begin a whole new life at the world-class institution. “My world got really scary,” she says. “There were students from Croatia, Macedonia, Turkey and China there.” She also had to catch up academically—and fast. “It’s a highly rigorous school,” Huntington says. “But after my first year, I received awards in chemistry, English and Spanish.”

Huntington next journeyed to Dartmouth, where in 2006, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Native American studies with a minor in environmental studies.

She returned home to Stevens for a year, and then moved to Fairbanks, where she’s lived ever since.

Huntington discovered that she excelled as a community relations facilitator and in building relationships for her clients. Maryellen Tuttell of DOWL, a civil engineering and planning firm, says that Huntington’s ability to stay positive and calm in any situation—including during very contentious public meetings—makes a huge difference. “I don’t think people can learn her communications skills,” says Tuttell. “Joy has a unique skill of reaching out and being open in stressful situations.”

She started her new career out as a registered lobbyist, supporting outreach and community relations for Tanana Chiefs Conference. After realizing that her hoped-for path to a fulltime job wasn’t panning out, and after a false start in the business world, 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

“JOY HAS A UNIQUE SKILL OF REACHING OUT AND BEING OPEN IN STRESSFUL SITUATIONS.”

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 to transportation planning meetings. “Any time we work in rural Alaska, we call Joy,” says Tuttell. “Her calmness and warmth make a huge difference in sometimes very contentious meeting situations.”

In fact, DOWL thinks so highly of Huntington and Uqaqti’s work that they lend her office space when she’s in Anchorage or Seattle.

“We have to stay on the productive side” in facilitation, says Huntington. “We want everybody to enjoy the time they spend working with us.” And this positive attitude and ability to bring people of disparate opinions together is what sets Huntington and Uqaqti apart from other such firms. Not to mention: “You never know if a future client is in the room,” she says.

That sense of service and open communication is reflected in the testimonials on Uqaqti’s website, which include a glowing recommendation from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “Her knowledge of Alaska Native issues and our rural communities is a great addition [to our team],” Murkowski writes. “I’ve been fortunate to know Joy for many years and she is truly an exceptional woman. She is a seasoned communicator who will help us reach Alaskans in every corner of the state.”

On the home front, Huntington balances growing her business and mothering her two girls, age 10 and 7. She recently finished serving a term on the Fairbanks City Council. “I had to make a decision to take better care of myself,” Huntington says. “So, I gave up my seat on the council.” In addition to opening up more time for self-care, it also frees up Huntington to continue growing Uqaqti. She’s brought on two employees and may be working on up to nine projects at a time.

And of course, this dynamic woman continues to look forward, not backward.

“Go all in,” she says; “Grow your skills, push yourself to the next level.”

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A

Mashantucket Pequot revives a

MAPLE SYRUP

By Lynn Armitage

ENTERPRI S E W

hen Jeremy Whipple was 10 years old, his uncles, Robert and Richard Hayward, took him and his cousins down to the sugar shack on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation to show them how to make maple syrup. Uncle Richard “Skip” Hayward, the tribal chairman at the time, launched and ran the operation for nearly a decade. He made a little money for the tribe, selling bottles of the sweet stuff at the pizza parlor on the reservation. But mostly, making syrup was intended to be a cultural activity that brought tribal families together.

After the Foxwoods Resort Casino was built in 1986, the Pequot tribe turned its attention to further developing what is widely respected today as one of the largest, most successful resort casinos in North America. Making maple syrup was no longer on the radar, an activity from a bygone era. And the sugar shack fell into shambles.

But that sweet childhood memory of tapping trees and turning sap into delicious maple syrup stuck with Jeremy, now 36 and the transportation and project manager in the tribe’s Public Works Department. “I never lost interest

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INNOVATION

PHOTO COURTESY JEREMY WHIPPLE

in it,” he says.

So in 2010, Jeremy brought the sugar shack back to life with the help of his sister-in-law, Crystal Whipple, tribal vice chairwoman and chair of the Historical Cultural Preservation Committee, where Jeremy also serves. “We started raising money, doing pancake breakfasts and selling t-shirts,” Jeremy recalls their early efforts to resurrect the sugar shack. “We raised about $7,000, which was enough to build a new foundation and floor.”

Jeremy’s vision was to use the sugar shack as a “cultural education tool” to teach children in the community, from pre-school to high school, about the longstanding tradition of making maple syrup using the natural resources on the reservation. “I started teaching the kids how to tap the maple trees and put up the buckets,” like his uncles taught him so many years ago.

At the same time, the tribe saw long-term revenue potential.

“The bigger picture, as we saw it, was how can we make the sugar shack a profit center eventually for the tribe and not lose the cultural aspect of bringing the community together?” shares Crystal.

Today, thanks in large part to Jeremy’s driving force, equipment grants from the government, and support from the tribe—“We support Jeremy wholeheartedly,” says Crystal—the sugar shack is back. It’s a humming, buzzing, thriving syrup-making operation on nine acres of tribal land, pumping out about 150 gallons of delicious Mashantucket Maple Syrup every year. “We have 4,000 taps right now in maple trees surrounding the sugar shack. But we hope to go to 10,000 taps soon,” says Jeremy of plans to expand sap extraction to trees growing on 19 acres of a golf course on tribally owned land.

The determined entrepreneur has faced many challenges in reviving the sugar shack―namely, updating decades-old equipment.

A $50,000 grant from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and a generous $30,000 contribution from the Pequot tribe helped purchase a new filter press, an evaporator, two 1,200-gallon tanks, one 800-gallon tank, new tubing and tapping equipment, and his pride and joy—a reverse osmosis machine.

“It cuts cooking time from eight hours to two hours. So, we can make 10 gallons of maple syrup every two hours now,” Jeremy says, thrilled by the increased production.

So, how does Mashantucket Maple Syrup taste? “Oh, it is unbelievable! It’s not like Aunt Jemima.” Crystal explains that it is light, not heavy like store-bought syrups.

As of now, the tribe sells the syrup at the Pequot Outpost, a gas station and convenience store on the reservation. Prices range from $8 for a 4 oz. bottle to $25 for a 16 oz. bottle. It is also used at one of Foxwoods’ many restaurants. Plans are to sell the syrup off the reservation sometime in 2019, likely at local grocery stores.

And Jeremy envisions making maple candy and maple cream in a few years as well, to “create even more economic opportunity for the tribe.”

“I think what Jeremy has built here is really beautiful,” Crystal applauds the sugar shack revival. “The younger generations absolutely love it. They get to see from start to finish how to produce maple syrup and it really gives them a sense of pride about their culture.” She adds that the Tribal Council will continue to support the revitalization of the sugar shack “so that our family and greater community can continue to enjoy a cultural pastime that we all value.”

And preserving the Pequot culture is what Jeremy is so passionate about. “It means a lot to me, but it means even more to the kids because they will have something to pass on, just like I am passing on this tradition to them, and like my uncles passed on to me.”

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PROFILE

We’re designed and have always been a place to serve food and community.

A Decade After Launching Tocabe, Osage Entrepreneur

Ben Jacobs Is Just Getting Started ack when Tocabe, An American Indian Eatery was a one-shop operation in Denver, Colorado, Ben Jacobs would begin his mornings sipping coffee, donning an apron and prepping the Tocabe kitchen for service.

“Now, 10 years in, we have the two brickand-mortar locations, plus a food truck. I am a man of many hats,” said the Osage co-founder of Tocabe, which means “blue” in Osage.

These days, Jacobs, 35, often starts his days meeting with Tocabe area or store managers, food suppliers, or event partners—and he’s generally the one operating the food truck.

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Meanwhile, he’s knee-deep in plans to expand Tocabe beyond Colorado’s borders, bringing exquisite ingredients sourced from Native vendors and the unique flavors of regional American Indian cuisine to urban Natives and the masses across the nation.

He’s got his eye on a few new locations in unnamed states—Tocabe insider information. Jacobs is holding his cards close until it’s time to unveil the brand’s next moves, one by one. But he did shed light on his grand vision for strategic expansion during an interview with Native Business Magazine.

“We’re hoping to have two new loca-

Tocabe co-owners Matt Chandra (left) and Ben Jacobs, Osage

PHOTO BY RACHEL GREIMAN, GREEN CHAIR STORIES

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By Native Business Staff

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STAR ATTRACTION Tocabe hosts Native musicians whenever possible, such as Frank Waln, a Sicangu Lakota rapper, and Choctaw singer Samantha Crane.

“We’re actually going to start creating artist spotlights and putting little things on our tables that say ‘Shazam, our artists! Did you know that we play 100 percent Native artists?’” Jacobs said.

Jacobs added that he loves when the American Indian comedy troupe The 1491s pop into Tocabe for a bite. In addition to Native celebrities, local professional athletes are known to dine at Tocabe, and prominent figures in the food world have visited the eatery, including celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez. In 2012, Guy Fieri filmed an episode of his hit Food Network show, “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” at Tocabe, in which he raved about the “off-the-hook hominy salsa.”

yearning for more for themselves,” Jacobs said. “It’s kind of pushing us to go beyond.

People who have been working with us for several years are willing to relocate to operate a store.”

Tocabe will additionally offer job training and development, Jacobs said. He takes a personal approach to cultivating brand representatives, because to patrons, frontof-house staff are the faces and voices of Tocabe. New visitors often pepper the Tocabe team with questions. “That was our goal. We want people to come in and engage with us. We want people to question our interiors. We always have people who come in and expect to see dreamcatchers or moccasins, and I always say that I love and appreciate those things, but we focus on food. What we want is for people to come in and question and engage and conversate with us about why we do what we do. I always go to staff meetings and drive home my point that there are not a lot of Native restaurants in our community. What we need to understand is that we represent a community and a culture,” Jacobs emphasized.

While staff members are representing a brand, Tocabe also encourages individual personalities to shine. “We’ve seen multiple people flourish, because they are in an environment where they can openly share who they are and be proud of that,” Jacobs said.

Above: Ben Jacobs, Osage, Co-Owner of Tocabe Top Right: Angel Oaxaca, Assistant General Manager at Tocabe

Community interaction, engagement and response has been great. “Our employees get rave reviews, because they believe in the concept; they believe in what we do; and they believe in the approach.

It’s not just about serving people and getting them in and out; they are actually serving an idea,” Jacobs said.

Serving a Concept Jacobs speaks of Tocabe as a “concept” more so than a restaurant. Given that Tocabe is the only indigenous eatery in Denver, and few Native restaurants exist across the country, Tocabe is more than another kitchen serving up culturally distinct food.

“We often say that this is more of an idea than anything,” Jacobs said. “That’s why we don’t have an executive chef in our restaurants. It’s not designed that way.

There is no one who is barking orders. It’s about development through community.”

Central to the community-led approach to business, every Tocabe team member tastes each new food item (unless, of course, a dietary restriction or preference prevents them from engaging). “We always say that we are a kitchen by committee. Some of the best dishes that we’ve had have been dishes that the group has provided input on,” Jacobs said.

For instance, one of Tocabe’s most pop-

PHOTO BY RACHEL GREIMAN, GREEN CHAIR STORIES

tions open in 2019. We’re currently in negotiations on one location and in conversation about a few other sites,” Jacobs said in October.

Don’t underestimate this Osage businessman. That’s just the cusp of his vision. “The plan from the beginning was to become a regional if not national brand. I think within the next five years, we should be in multiple states; my goal is for six to eight additional restaurants,” said Jacobs, adding that he hopes to roll out one or two per year, and then pick up the pace.

With a boutique-hotel approach to the restaurant industry, each Tocabe eatery is connected yet unique, reflecting the region’s indigenous foods and local Native arts. “Our goal is to constantly evolve on our concept as each new store opens.

We’re evolving the approach, the interior identity and where we source ingredients,” Jacobs said.

First and foremost, Tocabe stands by its philosophy: “Native first and local second.”

Jacobs has watched as the entire indigenous food movement has taken off. Native food purveyors have increased in presence and capacity over the last 10 years. When Tocabe launched in 2008, they often encountered one of two problems—either a Native vendor didn’t have the volume to meet the restaurant’s needs, or Tocabe couldn’t meet minimum order requirements. “I couldn’t bring in 400 pounds of wild rice. One, I couldn’t afford it, and two, I couldn’t store it or ship it,” Jacobs said.

“Now we’re ordering that [amount] every two weeks. It’s a real symbiotic relationship, where we’re all sort of thriving as one and growing together.”

Native food producers are prospering, increasing in number and capacity, Jacobs said. Tocabe, likewise, has increased its economies of scale. Today, Tocabe sources indigenous ingredients consistently from at least five Native producers: wild rice and pure maple syrup from Red Lake Nation Foods as well as Spirit Lake Native Products; olive oil and elderberry balsamic vinegar from Séka Hills, a Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation brand; wheat berries and tepary beans from Ramona Farms; and Indian corn and blue corn from Bow & Arrow.

As Tocabe multiplies across the country, loyal team members are committed to growing with the company. “They are

ular sides is wild rice—co-created by four employees. “They suggested de-glazing the pan with our bison stock, and all of a sudden, we have this amazing dish that people love,” Jacobs said.

Sometimes, Jacobs and co-owner Matt Chandra even take a back seat to menu creation. At Tocabe’s south store, Jacobs’ cousin and a Potawatomi team member collaborated to make some incredible blue corn cakes. “We did them for the Denver March Pow Wow and people went crazy over them,” Jacobs said.

When Jacobs and Chandra do take the lead in the kitchen, they’re often inventing ways to defy common notions about a fast-casual restaurant—particularly to differentiate Tocabe among a rising tide of fast-casual concepts burgeoning throughout the Denver market. For example, last year, the duo fully braised a rabbit in a homemade spice rub of powderized Osage corn and New Mexican chilis, among other specialty ingredients. “Fast-casual restaurants are usually lumped in with pizza and burrito places. What we wanted to do is show people that we can develop things and use ingredients that no other fast-casual place would even approach,” Jacobs said.

Tocabe also likes to keep things innovative by replicating the flavors of outdoor cooking in a commercial kitchen. “We made a butternut squash soup, but instead of roasting the butternut squash, we took applewood and smoked it. It tastes like it was cooked outside,” Jacobs explained.

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A TIP FOR FIRST-TIME TOCABE GUESTS: Jacobs recommends ordering the braised bison or bison ribs, served with house-made seasonal berry barbeque sauce—a customer favorite.

Business Sense In a nutshell, Tocabe’s “concept” balances staying culturally aware, culturally connected and culturally appropriate, while maintaining success in business. “People are supporting our food and our food systems, which I think is incredibly important,” Jacobs said, adding: “We can stay culturally driven, but we have to remember that we are a business.”

Speaking of business, Tocabe, a privately held company, has received support from Small Business Administration loans. And as entrepreneurs, he and Chandra have invested their own money. “We’ve been willing to take the risk. We’ll continue doing that, because if it is successful, it’ll be beneficial to so many different people in so many different sectors. If it fails, then that’s okay, because we can always start again,” he said. “We have looked at investors, but it would have to be someone who understands what we’re doing and believes in our concept.”

The friends and entrepreneurs got their start at a young age, 25, taking inspiration from Jacobs’ parents, who opened Grayhorse: An American Indian Eatery in downtown Denver in 1989. Growing up, Ja-

cobs bussed tables, washed dishes, served customers, and learned the ins and outs of managing a restaurant.

Jacobs mother, an Osage entrepreneur and former Denver Indian Center employee, and his father, a man of Scottish-Norwegian descent who embraced the culinary traditions of his wife and her mother, informed the original Tocabe menu. “They taught us the basics,” Jacobs said, acknowledging that today, Tocabe is “much more of an ingredient-driven restaurant.”

Beyond designing the food menu, Jacobs’ parents were instrumental in guiding the budding entrepreneurs’ introduction to the restaurant business. “We’re not trained to do what we do,” Jacobs noted. “I was a history major in college [at The University of Denver]; my business partner majored in digital media. We don’t have that background, so they both taught us some of the business acumen.”

Fortunately, Jacobs and Chandra are quick to admit what they don’t know— and thus avoid common pitfalls and mistakes of new business owners. “We did have an accountant right off the bat who did payroll. As we’ve expanded, we’ve added two assistant general managers—one at each store—plus an area manager, and a manager of catering and business development,” Jacobs shared.

Beyond that, Jacobs and Chandra work with people “all over the country” on branding, expansion plans and the Tocabe website. “Our website developer Ryan Red Corn is Osage, and we try to incorporate

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A Decade of Growth The first Tocabe venue, in North Denver, spans 2,100 square feet. Service is streamlined—guests order at the counter and then find a place to sit. In March 2015, Tocabe debuted its second location at 2,500 square feet on the south side of town, featuring a similar set-up with an expanded brand identity. At Tocabe version 2.0, cooks prepare food in large cast iron pots, reflecting the community-driven nature of the brand, and the interior design showcases more indigenous art.

Jacobs and Chandra added a food truck to the mix in spring 2016, which made off-site events more accessible. Tocabe is event-heavy, whether the crew is traveling to pow wows or other Native-specific events, weddings or rehearsal dinners, or community gatherings. “For years, we were doing things out of a van. We would load it up with food, tents, everything. It would take three days to do a four-hour event,” Jacobs said. The food truck has enhanced the quality and efficiency of service.

Tocabe also plays host to many on-site events. “We’re designed and have always been a place to serve food and community. For years, we have opened our doors to people to host fundraisers. We’ve featured

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GOING RED Sustainability is a core value of Tocabe. The eatery has transitioned to silverware, plates and bowls in-store exclusively, and all lights are LED. Tocabe donates kitchen scraps for compost to Four Winds American Indian Council, which operates an indigenous garden and distributes vegetables to the community. Tocabe also adheres to a strict recycling program—to the point that stores had to schedule an additional pickup per week. “We try to take the right approach to going green. I have a friend who says that going green is going red, because we are the original protectors of the Earth,” Jacobs said.

Beyond sustainability efforts, Tocabe supports Indian Country by regularly collaborating with The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). “That’s really important to me, because sometimes FDPIR has a negative connotation for people. As food professionals, if we don’t advocate for better foods, then who is going to do it?” Jacobs asked.

musicians and comedians,” said Jacobs, adding that Tocabe is a great event space for organizations, schools or individuals.

Speaking of parties, December 18, 2018, marks Tocabe’s 10-year anniversary. Celebration plans are underway.

With a decade of entrepreneurship behind him, Jacobs’ passion for Tocabe and his hunger to spread the Tocabe concept across the nation has only intensified. The restauranteur is also quick to point out that it’s the business-side of Tocabe and

building a brand that feed his desire. “I love cooking, but I really love the interaction with guests and the growth and development,” he told Native Business Magazine. “That’s where I thrive.”

The Osage man of many hats has another role to play, as well. At the end of the day, Jacobs transitions from restauranteur to dad. He said with an audible smile, “I have two little boys and a baby on the way.

One is four [years old] and the other is two, Charlie and Jack.”

PHOTO BY RACHEL GREIMAN, GREEN CHAIR STORIES

elements of the Osage belief system into our philosophy,” Jacobs added.