Sovereign Entrepreneurs

Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty

Courtney Lewis

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469648606
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

By 2009, reverberations of economic crisis spread from the United States around the globe. As corporations across the United States folded, however, small businesses on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) continued to thrive. In this rich ethnographic study, Courtney Lewis reveals the critical roles small businesses such as these play for Indigenous nations. The EBCI has an especially long history of incorporated, citizen-owned businesses located on their lands. When many people think of Indigenous-owned businesses, they stop with prominent casino gaming operations or natural-resource intensive enterprises. But on the Qualla Boundary today, Indigenous entrepreneurship and economic independence extends to art galleries, restaurants, a bookstore, a funeral parlor, and more. Lewis's fieldwork followed these businesses through the Great Recession and against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding EBCI-owned casino. Lewis's keen observations reveal how Eastern Band small business owners have contributed to an economic sovereignty that empowers and sustains their nation both culturally and politically.

1 Economic Identities

Conceptions and Practices

Cherokee has been well known as a primary tourist destination in western North Carolina for nearly one hundred years. A short drive through the main streets of this town reveals strips of small back-to-back buildings and stores that seem to be dedicated to the tourist market. Behind these dominant facades, however, lies a rich world of small businesses. In fact, as reported by the EBCI’s Office of Budget and Finance’s Revenue Office, less than half of the businesses on the Qualla Boundary are strictly tourist oriented. There are many construction and landscaping businesses (some of which have won small-business awards, such as those given at the yearly National Minority Enterprise Development Week Conference), as well as other community-oriented businesses—including a funeral home, mechanics, craft-supply stores (wood, beads, leather), a cab service, accounting services, hair salons, office supplies, legal services, hardware supplies, website services, pest control, video-production, photography services, day care, a children’s clothing shop, signmaking, local convenience stores, painting services, and DJ services—with more emerging every year. This overall small-business diversity is crucial in serving the local community, tourists, and the EBCI’s national economic sovereignty.

The physical spaces of these businesses vary: some have their own offices or building storefronts, while others are run from a vehicle (the Sound of Music DJ service’s van uses only biodiesel that the owner produces in-house)1—and then there are those that operate out of the owner’s home or out of a building on the owner’s family’s land. Many of the local-oriented businesses would be quite challenging to find if you did not know the area well as they may have little to no web presence for promotion or mapping. In fact, for some homes with small farms tucked into the back roads of the mountains, the practice of leaving produce or cornmeal out in the front yard with the expectation that payment will be left in return is common. As I was told, you “just know” that they will have it, so you drive by to check to see if they have any ready for sale. Getting more coveted produce, such as the delicious and difficult-to-find wishi mushroom (wild-harvested in the fall), requires knowing how to contact the owner to get on a waiting list.

Sorting out this diversity of small businesses and small-business practices begins with two seemingly simple but central questions: Who owns these businesses, and what markets do they serve? To delve into these questions, we must begin by examining the contextual distinctiveness of American Indians’ economic identities and their related experiences. Addressing these constructions helps refine our theoretical understandings of what has been termed indigenous entrepreneurship by following how the external shaping of indigenous economic identity has hindered its representation as well as its expression.

The Absent Indigenous Entrepreneurs

These are the dying breed stories that we try to capture whenever we are on the road with our cameras.

—The Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods on Eastern Band citizen Johnnie Sue Myers’s cooking (emphasis added)

As I sat down in the crowded little diner in the midst of the Great Smoky Mountains, the waitress asked me, “Siyo, doiyusdi tsaditasdi tsaduli?” (ᏏᏲ, Ꮩ ᎢᏳᏍᏗ ᏣᏗᏔᏍᏗ ᏣᏚᎵ? “Hi, what would you like to drink?”). Still skimming the menu, I answered, “Siyo, kowi agwaduli” (ᏏᏲ, ᎧᏫ ᎠᏆᏚᎵᎭ; “Hi, I’d like a coffee”). I had learned from Bo Taylor’s summer language-immersion course (taken at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, well before I started my fieldwork) that this was one of a handful of restaurants you could go to on the Qualla Boundary where, if the wait staff recognized you, you could speak Cherokee. During this language course, we would eat lunch every day at a different restaurant. Some, like the Little Princess restaurant (which features “Indian dinner” nights, including items such as bean bread and grease, as does Paul’s Diner and the Newfound Restaurant), have a few staff members who spoke Cherokee. The servers at other restaurants, such as a local Chinese buffet, now speak remedial Cherokee as a result of Bo’s persistent attempts to teach them a bit of the language each time he goes in (making this, quite possibly, the only place where you can enjoy lo mein while ordering hot green tea in the Cherokee language). For me, these restaurants—ranging from local to tourist oriented, franchise to home cooking, and buffet to diner—reflect the diversity and community of small businesses on the Qualla Boundary.

Considering this diversity, watching the above-mentioned episode of Bizarre Foods reinforced the absurdity of the non-Native world’s continued perception of American Indians as a “dying breed.” This claim was made even as the show creators were watching American Indians writing cookbooks about “Cherokee feasts,” providing guided tours of reservation waterways, serving meals, and promoting local American Indian artists, all in front of a television crew. Even when people like Andrew Zimmern are surrounded by Cherokee people and their many businesses all day, they still see them as “vanishing.” Philip Deloria began to trace this contradiction by examining how indigenous anomalies, as interpreted through the settler-colonial gaze, were necessarily rendered invisible in order to continue settler-colonial agendas (e.g., land procurement).2 One of these anomalies discussed by Daniel Usner is the “Indian work” that settler-colonial society deems inauthentic for American Indians (conveyed in media and pop culture but also given legitimacy through academic and government officials).3 The tactic—and necessity—of applied invisibility by settler-colonial society continues today.

Throughout their histories, American Indians have practiced what has been termed entrepreneurialism.4 Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas had extensive trade routes established well before Europeans arrived. Following European arrival, American Indians were the driving force supporting international business networks and trade, supplying European countries with goods that eventually contributed to the development of (by European standards) a “native elite,”5 in addition to the wealth created for European businesses and individuals. According to Cherokee Nation citizen Gary “Litefoot” Davis, president and CEO of the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development, former rapper, and self-described entrepreneur, “I think that business and being entrepreneurs is probably one of the most traditional things that Native people have ever done. For me, being an entrepreneur is a very traditional activity.”6

However, it has long been argued that as a “pan-” whole, American Indians, historically and contemporarily, are “culturally” unable to accept or practice entrepreneurship due to its supposed inherent focus on the primacy of the individual over community—an argument that is also paralleled internationally in regard to indigenous peoples.7 This cultural mismatch fallacy has, until recently, caused indigenous entrepreneurialism to remain under-acknowledged. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld astutely describes this problem and its impact in his descriptions of Otavolo history:

Given the ancient history of long-distance commerce in the region, its reemergence within the context of a global market for ethnic arts does not signal the corruption of a more “authentic” native Andean way of life. In fact, the absence of merchant Indians, long-distance exchange, and complex deals for “foreign goods” represents a diminishing of indigenous society. [Studies neglecting Andean’s interest in business] reflect not the natural economy, but the repression of rural peoples by hacienda owners and urban business interests. Such simplistic descriptions obscure the histories, careers, and aspirations of commercially minded indigenous peoples.8

Susan Sleeper-Smith also supports these ideas, saying, “U.S. people were, for Indians, another stage in a continuous process of encounter with foreigners. The struggle to maintain or improve their position in relation to others, less or more powerful than themselves, invoked a well-established repertoire of responses.”9 Duane Esarey states this even more succinctly with regard to the Americas: “Interaction, not isolation, defines social groups.”10 Indeed, the individuals who forged and honed early Amerindian trade routes embody many of our conceptions of entrepreneurial practices. These endeavors could be long, arduous journeys easily resulting in multiple failures, with more serious consequences than many contemporary concerns, such as lack of appropriate focus group testing for a new product. Beyond distant markets and trade, there are also records of private property leasing activities between American Indians, such as a Cheyenne practice of renting horses.11

In examining the logic of the cultural mismatch between American Indians and entrepreneurship, two primary faults become apparent. The first is that this is a pan-Indian concept that necessarily undercuts the vast differences among American Indians; the second is that this notion of an entrepreneur as a strictly individualistic, (selfishly) profit-driven person fails to acknowledge the wide spectrum of entrepreneurial activities.12 In practice, as will be shown with Eastern Band citizens, entrepreneurs have been very active members of their larger communities, redistributing wealth and supporting community endeavors and thereby contributing to overall community wellness. This is now generally recognized as social entrepreneurship (and its various incarnations of green entrepreneurship, sustainopreneurship, and so on), which uses private business as one vehicle to mitigate social problems.13

Historical American Indian Entrepreneurship

Focusing on the Menominees and Metlakatlans (1870–1920), Brian Hosmer highlights the idea of socially focused American Indian business practices while arguing that historically American Indians did have a complex understanding of the overall market. They understood the ramifications of the new European-inclusive economic system on their culture, which thereby enabled them to try to minimize the damage it inflicted. Hosmer first foregrounds this indigenous economic agency when he asks, “More ambitiously, can we proceed so far as to suggest that those Menominees and Metlakatlans who embraced these new economic relationships did so in order to maintain a degree of independence through economic modernization? If so, what can that tell us about Menominee and Tshimtsian cultures, or about the complex dance between change and continuity that all peoples undertake, but that is, seemingly, beyond the grasp of historical Indians?”14 In my own work, I do not conceptualize these types of actions as economic modernization as much as economic syncretism and appropriation. Additionally, I, and others, further Hosmer’s argument to include contemporary American Indians, whose identities as American Indians are called into question as their bank-account balances rise.15

Hosmer then addresses indigenous social entrepreneurship directly by saying, “After all, Menominee entrepreneurs still took into consideration the needs of the broader community, cultural values shaped accommodations with the market, and interactions with others, and the overall objective of economic change (so far as one can be discerned) remained not assimilation, but, ultimately, a bolstering of Menominee ethnic identity. Economic modernization does not equal assimilation, nor should scholars confuse the two.”16 Hosmer illustrates this point when describing how white agents viewed logging as a powerful engine for cultural change, but Old OshKosh (the Menominee chief from 1795 to 1858) reversed this idea by viewing the larger American need for lumber as leverage for retaining the Menominees’ land and reducing their dependence on annuities, thereby supporting the community on several fronts. He emphasizes, “To an important degree, both societies found in economic development a way to preserve unity, independence, and indeed survival.”17 Hosmer’s closing statements are applicable today to Native Nations struggling with economic development issues: “The fact that both groups wrestled with changes and attempted to incorporate the market into existing, albeit evolving, structures indicates both the importance of heritage and their real concern that they not abandon their pasts.”18 For indigenous peoples today, I would reimagine this sentiment with less emphasis on “not abandoning their past,” focusing more heavily on their abilities to combat the forced acculturation and assimilation that accompanies this economic violence and economic hegemony. As Cattelino states in regard to her work with the Seminole’s gaming industry, “Casinos are not a ‘new buffalo’ that has descended magically on American Indian tribes. Casinos represent a new stage in the long and complex history of American Indians’ economic, political, and cultural struggles.”19 As a religious leader and local businessperson told Cattelino, “Changes? I don’t see changes. Things basically have stayed the same, just taken new forms.”20

These transformations of economic sovereignty practices as seen through entrepreneurship choices also characterize the history of the EBCI. Successful Eastern Band small-business owners (including artists) have had an established, significant presence on the Qualla Boundary for many generations. As such, an internal stigma of a cultural mismatch is not as pervasive within this space as it is throughout the United States at large. However, the Qualla Boundary sits in a national and international context and cannot entirely escape this influence. According to Finger,21 the EBCI’s historically recorded tourism industry has been active since 1940, with individual entrepreneurship and small-business existence beginning even earlier that century, dating back to 1902. Finger, along with a handful of Eastern Band citizens I spoke with, has claimed that these early businesses were owned by “white Indian” Eastern Band citizens.22 The underlying subtext of this rac...