New Approaches to Native Business

StartMN

New Approaches to Native Business

A new generation of Native American entrepreneurs has ambitions rooted in their communities' cultures and traditions.

By Gene Rebeck

May 22, 2022

Faces of Native Business (clockwise from top): Sean Sherman, Owamni; Susan Roper, Mission Trucking; Madonna and Mel Yawakie, Turtle Island Communications; a Solar Bear crew; Sarah Agaton Howes, Heart Berry; Herb Fineday, Round Lake Traditions Illustration by Randall Nelson

In 2014, Sarah Agaton Howes got a call that changed, well, almost everything.

For several years, Howes had been crafting custom beadwork, quilts, and moccasins out of her home on the Fond du Lac Reservation west of Duluth. Her customers were mostly fellow Ojibwe.

Then Louie Gong called. A member of the Nooksack Indian Tribe in the Pacific Northwest, Gong had founded Seattle-based Eighth Generation in 2008 as a retail brand for Native-made art and lifestyle products. He had discovered Howes’ Ojibwe-rooted designs. Could his company incorporate them in wool blankets that Eighth Generation would weave?

Howes was interested. She also wasn’t sure how she’d make it work. “I’d always struggled with how I would do business while keeping with my own cultural values, ideas, and stories,” she says. “And I wondered how that could happen in a way that would actually fill up the propane tank. Because doing beadwork and sewing and trying to make a living off of it is really, really difficult.” What’s more, “I hadn’t seen models of successful Native entrepreneurship.” 

She’s now one of those models. Operating out of her own building at Fond du Lac, Howes designs and sells woolen goods, jewelry, apparel, and housewares through her company, Heart Berry. “Heart berry” is the direct English translation of ode’imin, the Ojibwe word for strawberry. The ode’imin “tells a great story about leading with your heart, working with your heart,” Howes says. It’s an image and a meaning, she adds, that’s “relatable [for] Native and non-Native people.” 

Native entrepreneurship is by no means a new phenomenon. To name just one long-established example: Loretto-based Shingobee Builders, founded in 1980 by Gae Veit, a member of South Dakota’s Crow Creek Band of Lakota. Another is Bemidji-based machining company Wells Technology, launched in 1985 by Andy Wells, a tribal citizen of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. 

But in the past few years, Native entrepreneurs have been raising their profile, and not just within their own communities. In the Twin Cities, chef Sean Sherman is showcasing his inventive takes on Indigenous cuisine at Owamni, his Minneapolis riverside restaurant, and visitors to the Dayton’s Project on Nicollet Mall can stop by the Native Roots Trading Post in the former J.B. Hudson space to browse and buy the work of artisans from all over Turtle Island (a traditional name for North America often used by Indigenous people). 

It’s easy to think of Native entrepreneurs in terms of creative endeavors. But they’re also launching and running businesses (often with little startup funding) in solar energy, construction, food production, and digital technology. Many talk about building self-sufficient economic sovereignty for their communities. At the same time, of course, their businesses are attracting the attention (and dollars) of non-Native people. 

“Getting my website operational and getting a product on [it] is my main focus right now. I’m in business, and I need to keep up with the times. Just like the Ojibwe people, I don’t want to get stuck in the past.” —Herb Fineday, round lake traditions

A new day in Native entrepreneurism 

In October, Minneapolis-based moccasin maker Minnetonka made a remarkable admission: CEO David Miller publicly apologized for appropriating Native culture and designs in the 75-year-old company’s products. He also announced that Minnetonka was working with artist and activist Adrienne Benjamin, a tribal citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, to market hats featuring her beadwork designs. 

Indigenous designers welcomed Miller’s acknowledgement. “People love Native art,” Howes says. “But for so long, there were only non-Native companies making this pan-Indian art that really wasn’t connected to any community.” She thinks that’s changing, however. “What we’ve been able to do is use our own stories and create work that reflects that.” 

For Pamela Standing, a Cherokee Nation citizen and executive director of the Minnesota Indigenous Business Alliance (MNIBA), helping Native artists and entrepreneurs succeed on their own terms includes encouraging them “to think a little bit bigger about their business strategy.” MNIBA connects entrepreneurs with Native experts in business and financial planning, as well as with lending resources such as Native community development financial institutions (CDFIs). It also conducts “boot camps” led by Native professionals on topics such as social media, branding, and website design. 

“We also connect entrepreneurs to other entrepreneurs to cross-promote and work together,” Standing says. “Native people believe they have something of great value that can help not only their own community but the greater community as well. There’s a movement that’s very exciting.”

Four years ago, Standing says, MNIBA responded to that shift by starting the Buy Native campaign, which encourages businesses across Native communities to buy from each other. This year, MNIBA will go live with a nationwide online directory listing Native nonprofits and professionals, as well as businesses, artists, and tribal governments.

“We’re challenging the capitalistic model that is very competitive, very extractive,” Standing says. “We’re looking at a restorative, values-based economy that focuses on the well-being of the community and the environment, above the preservation and accumulation of capital.” For instance, “we still practice the giveaway, which is a way we share our good fortune with others. It’s a part of being a Native person.” Native-owned companies express that giveaway ethos, for example, by “hiring Natives first. We will train people, we will make opportunities in our communities to offer a living wage when we get our businesses going.” Standing cites Andy Wells, whose nonprofit Wells Academy provides education in life skills, along with certification in CNC machining, for disadvantaged Native young people. 

In a sense, Louie Gong has practiced the giveaway in his work with Native designers. “He helped me walk through so many steps,” Howes recalls, including building a website and learning Adobe Illustrator. “He pushed me to think about the future, to think bigger. And really, by shining a light on what’s possible.” 

Personal and community sovereignty 

Though she’s an enrolled member of the Fond du Lac Band, “I did not grow up as a traditional Indian at all,” Susan Roper says. Still, she and her family are rooted in Ojibwe culture. “Winter is the time you tell stories,” she says. 

Here’s the story Roper tells about her business: Before starting Duluth-based Mission Trucking in 2011, she was a bus driver for vulnerable adults at a day care facility, “working my heart out.” Her husband, Ray, had been working in the trucking industry, and she saw an opportunity to enter the field herself. By striking out on her own, she says, “I wouldn’t have to take care of a single human being but myself.”

Sarah Agaton Howes

Roper’s trucks are used mostly in road construction in the Duluth-Superior market, where demand has been strong. Mission Trucking also has worked on demolition and soil remediation projects in the off-season, after its highway projects are completed. The company now employs eight people. Loans from the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund helped her purchase additional vehicles. Mission Trucking’s fleet now comprises three quad-axle dump trucks and two larger quint-axle dump trucks, along with a semitrailer. 

“I would like to add new capabilities and not necessarily add new trucks,” Roper says. “Every time you add a truck, you have to add an employee, and insurance costs, fuel costs, etc.” To find those new paths, she’s tapping the expertise of her son, Phil, who has worked on wetland delineation and oil-water separation projects, as well as soil remediation. Another possibility she’s considering is installing temporary fencing, which “can be quite profitable,” Roper says. Where the business has been and where it might be going are among the stories she and her family have been sharing this winter. 

Meanwhile, Heart Berry’s story is taking a new turn. The company will soon be moving to a larger headquarters building at Fond du Lac, “which I think we’ll probably outgrow, too,” Sarah Agaton Howes says. Her vision for what might come next extends beyond herself and her company. “I really want to create a model for how we can be economically sovereign,” she says. Part of that vision includes “being a role model,” she says, “and to share that with my community.”

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