A Groundswell of Community-Led Work Is Revitalizing Indian Country

Native-led groups are having a transformative impact for the long run, and it’s amazing.

“Smoked whitefish for sale.”

A vendor selling this Native American food staple scrawls these words across a piece of cardboard attached to a pickup truck spilling with what he’s prepped for the customers he hopes will come.

Whenever LeAnn Littlewolf passes by, she re-reads the make-do sales pitch. Then, in her mind’s eye, she sees her younger self shadowing her uncle, door-to-door, peddling jewelry he’s handcrafted out of porcupine needles.

“He never called himself an entrepreneur, but he absolutely was,” says LeAnn (Anishinaabe/Gaa-zagaskwaajimekaag Ojibwe), co-executive director of the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO) in downtown Duluth, MN.

Her uncle, who died years ago, earned pennies on the dollar, given the time and attention he’d devoted to creating adornments rich in beauty and ancestral meaning. Today, however, fine art collectors are paying upwards of $20,000 to snag a work by one of the Indigenous artisans whose careers AICHO has helped launch.

Native-led organizations such as AICHO, Siċaŋġu Co in South Dakota, and Standing Rock Community Development Corporation in both North Dakota and South Dakota are driving development across Indian Country. They’ve made huge strides in a fairly short period of time, says Northwest Area Foundation Program Officer John Fetzer.

Indeed, as funders, we’ve been privileged to see how the work is flourishing in its various authentic ways.

“It’s super important to point out their approach, which is to think about the very long term,” explains John (White Earth Ojibwe) “Literally, they are thinking seven generations ahead. ‘A hundred and fifty years from now, what will be the impact of what we do today?’

“If you consider the history of violence and theft of lands—the scale of that, how concentrated it was—the fact that there still are Native people at all is kind of astonishing. The fact that there are so many people we see rebuilding and overcoming is astonishing.”

AICHO is building an Indigenous economy that supports culture and healing.

Consider AICHO’s holistic approach to economic development, community revitalization, and wellness.

Through AICHO Galleries, 129 established and emerging artists have been featured. They’ve learned valuable business skills through culturally appropriate support from AICHO. AICHO also runs AICHO Indigenous Foods & Art Markets.

In addition to its administrative offices and Indigenous First Art & Gifts Shop, AICHO’s five-story building in downtown Duluth includes trauma-informed supportive housing for families who’ve suffered domestic and other forms of violence. On the rooftop is a garden of Indigenous foods that Native teens seed, weed, and harvest. Ancient foodway rituals also are the centerpiece of a separate teen and pre-teen Indigenous food sovereignty project, Giinawiind Giginitaawigi’gomin (“together we grow”).

“Our work is around building an Indigenous economy,” LeAnn says. “Our communities, until recently, had been living with little to no resources for a very long time. So, we are generating needed revenue, but also needed cultural awareness.”

A holistic notion of culture, values, and economy drives Native-led Siċaŋġu Co, too.

AICHO is just one example of the kind of transformation the Foundation’s John Fetzer cites.

Multifaceted Siċaŋġu Co, a Native-led community development company on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, has returned buffalo to 28,000 acres of prairieland, marking the largest Native-run bison herd in the United States.

Next year, ground is slated to be broken for a 600-acre mixed-use complex whose multiyear blueprint includes an eventual 250 homes; a tribal grocery store; retail spaces; athletic fields and other recreational facilities; and Siċaŋġu Innovation Center, a business incubator. Dubbed Keya Wakpala, a community garden already grows there.

Tatanka Funds, a community development financial institution and Siċaŋġu Co offshoot, teaches financial literacy and homeowner readiness to tribal members and is slated to give financial and business assistance to local entrepreneurs.

From roughly 20 employees on the Siċaŋġu Co payroll five years ago, 80 people make up its current personnel.

“What we are doing is so much more than running a business,” says Clay Colombe (Rosebud Sioux), Siċaŋġu Co’s CEO.

“The work is putting our name on the map. It’s saying, ‘Yes, we did this.’ And, now, how do we replicate for other parts of Indian Country what we’ve accomplished, and will accomplish, through this Indigenous-led movement?”

Affordable housing is central to Standing Rock CDC’s big vision.

Elsewhere in Indian Country Standing Rock Community Development Corporation (CDC) has a Food Sovereignty Initiative. Its ranching, hemp, and clean-energy efforts employ people, while also delivering goods and services.

Its fully owned and operated real estate subsidiary company has purchased 24 acres where it will build desperately needed affordable housing, says Standing Rock CDC’s executive director Brian Thunder Hawk (Cheyenne River Sioux/Standing Rock Sioux). The organization plans to develop even more housing in the future, continuing to drive economic growth overall.

Additionally, Standing Rock CDC is slated to acquire off-reservation investment properties, “so that we can realize our dream of a self-sustainable future,” says Brian, whose background is in public housing management and real estate. “We’ve hit the ground running really hard. We are building out this huge master plan to build a mini-metropolis on grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It’s a big dream. We can make it happen.”

The work of CDCs is a gamechanger on several fronts, says the Foundation’s John Fetzer, and housing development, in particular, is critical. Research shows that housing quality is linked to people’s overall health.

Far too many Native Americans, he says, live in substandard homes that the federal government built back in the 1970s: “Often they’re living in small ramblers with poor insulation. These CDCs are building homes that are sustainable and better meet people’s needs.”

Maintaining the upward momentum demands more investment.

Shelter surely is at the top of the list for many in Indian Country, but tribal members also have detailed other day-to-day needs and priorities to CDC leaders.

Listening to and collaborating with communities has been key to the successes of these CDCs and their leaders. Additionally, and importantly, those accomplishments also result from continuously raising awareness of how Native Americans thrived and sustained themselves before Europeans arrived in this country.

As these communities pave their own path toward thriving again, John says, they need more funders to partner with them.

Without support of nonprofit funders and of commercial banks—which increasingly are investing in Indigenous developers’ vision for the future—the poverty, homelessness, chronic disease, disproportionate violence, and other harm that resulted from colonization will not be healed or repaired.

Self-determination and self-identity are at the core of Indian Country’s rebirth.

Being self-determined is critical to the ongoing revitalization of Indian Country, says Khayman Goodsky (Bois Forte Ojibwe), co-coordinator of AICHO’s Indigenous First Art & Gifts Shop: “In middle school I started learning that, in mainstream society, not everyone likes Indigenous people or takes our ways seriously. It was a culture shock.

“I left my previous job because I wasn’t allowed to smudge every day, even though I worked in a place of high crisis. The act of smudging is an act of healing. That small aspect of culture helps me to work well, to smudge, to pray, to take care of myself . . . and the needs of people who come here.”

The needs are ongoing and varied. Still racked by pandemic-fueled joblessness, death, and other losses, many tribal members continue to rely on ongoing distributions of free food from these nonprofits.

As another example of its breadth and range of services, AICHO’s culturally based youth programs serve many purposes—everyday ones and urgent ones. When the teen son from an AICHO family was tragically killed by another youth, AICHO’s staff, young people, and their kin participated in the Healing Circle Run. It was their way of grappling with trauma and of bringing its solutions to what is a nationwide struggle against gun violence.

“There are spiritual advisors in our community who say that, though many of us were disconnected from so much of our true history and cultural ways, we still have all of it and our ancestors are with us,” says Ivy Vainio (Grand Portage Ojibwe Direct Descendant), AICHO’s culture and arts coordinator. “They say it’s blood memory.”

“Our goal,” says Daryl Olson (Pascua Yaqui), AICHO’s director of programming, “is to help people to keep moving forward.”

“These organizations,” explains the Foundation’s John Fetzer, “are thinking about every single thing holistically, interconnectedly, intergenerationally. Their work is a really big deal. Because they are so deep inside the work, I’m not sure that they fully realize that.”

“Indeed,” says Siċaŋġu Co’s Clay Colombe, “the work is intensive. It is rewarding. It results from Indigenous leaders recognizing, more and more, the resourcefulness and talent among their own.

“What we’re doing in this movement—and we are not the only ones doing it—is taking the lead, saying, ‘This is what we want, this is how we want it,’ rather than having outsiders tell us what we need to do. That has not worked for us . . .

“We are a buffalo people. We are bringing back our food, our culture, our practices, our teachings. We are grateful for our partners and investors. But we are paving our own way.”

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