American Indian Business

Principles and Practices

Deanna M. Kennedy, Charles F. Harrington, Amy Klemm Verbos, Daniel Stewart, Joseph Scott Gladstone, Gavin Clarkson, Deanna M. Kennedy, Charles F. Harrington, Amy Klemm Verbos, Daniel Stewart, Joseph Scott Gladstone, Gavin Clarkson

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295742106
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

American Indian business is booming. The number of American Indian– and Alaska Native–owned businesses increased by 15.3 percent from 2007 to 2012—a time when the total number of US businesses increased by just 2 percent—and receipts grew from $34.4 million in 2002 to $8.8 billion in 2012. Despite this impressive growth, there is an absence of small businesses on reservations, and Native Americans own private businesses at the lowest rate per capita for any ethnic or racial group in the United States. Many Indigenous entrepreneurs face unique cultural and practical challenges in starting, locating, and operating a business, from a perceived lack of a culture of entrepreneurship and a suspicion of capitalism to the difficulty of borrowing start-up funds when real estate is held in trust and cannot be used as collateral. This book provides an accessible introduction to American Indian businesses, business practices, and business education. Its chapters cover the history of American Indian business from early trading posts to today’s casino boom; economic sustainability, self-determination, and sovereignty; organization and management; marketing; leadership; human resource management; tribal finance; business strategy and positioning; American Indian business law; tribal gaming operations; the importance of economic development and the challenges of economic leakage; entrepreneurship; technology and data management; business ethics; service management; taxation; accounting; and health-care management. American Indian Business also furthers the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in the study of American business practices in general and demonstrates the significant impact that American Indians have had on business, as well as their cultural contributions to management, leadership, marketing, economic development, and entrepreneurship.

1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN INDIAN BUSINESS

Charles F. Harrington, University of South Carolina–Upstate

ABSTRACT

American Indians have a long and proud history of productive trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship. Existing long before European colonialism, Native people created and sustained numerous and complex trade and barter alliances that provided for their various needs. Despite horrendous injustices inflicted upon American Indians at the hands of white settlers and colonial and federal governments, Native business and entrepreneurship have thrived.

KEYWORDS: business and management, history, American Indians

INTRODUCTION

American Indians have a long and proud history of productive trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship. Existing long before European colonialism, Native people created and sustained numerous and complex trade and barter alliances that provided for their various needs. Because Native economies are intimately linked with tribal governments and tribal cultures, business development in Indian Country in the United States has often been dependent on the creation of new tribal government institutions, ranging from regulatory commissions to tribal economic development corporations. American Indian and Alaska Native business development, up until the past three decades, can be reduced to a generic scenario: the overriding focus was on what the federal government could do to “help” Native nations, most of whom were in poverty.

As is necessary for survival and social order, early Native Americans (individually and collectively) were required to provide daily for the needs of their families and their tribes. This responsibility manifest itself in constant effort in areas of agriculture, tool production, assemblage of clothing, creation of appropriate shelter, and other domestic activities. Native people also routinely engaged in trade with other individuals and groups, from both near and far, in order to survive and to make life more comfortable (Weinberg 2002). Most, if not all, of this trade activity was undertaken in free-market situations where individuals came together voluntarily to buy, sell, and trade items that they had manufactured for such purpose.

Anthropological evidence suggests that Native people inhabited and civilized the Western Hemisphere long before the arrival of European “settlers” and perhaps could be considered the first to traverse and inhabit North America. The welfare and survival of early Native Americans depended entirely on their own resourcefulness, ingenuity, and persistence. They created and sustained their own culture and societies, technologies and means of production, habitats, and both land- and water-based transportation routes. R. J. Miller (2001) reports that Indian cultures have always fostered, encouraged, and supported their tribal people in private economic endeavors, argued for and protected their property rights, and allowed individuals to pursue their own ways.

From their first contact, Europeans experienced significant difficulties in productive interaction with the indigenous population. Europeans began with the racist assumption that Native people were “savage” and “uncivilized,” yet these early settlers found themselves with little option but to attempt to engage these indigenous people. Short on supplies and grossly outnumbered, the Pilgrims opted to embrace the opportunity to establish beneficial and productive contact and eventually were able to gain substantially from trading and bartering with the Native Americans (Driver 1961). New trade goods represented another big change that European explorers and colonists brought to American Indians (Weinberg 2002). Soon after meeting their European visitors, Indians became very interested in things that the colonists could provide. In a short time the Indians began using these new materials and products in their everyday lives. Native hunters were eager to trade prepared deer hides and other pelts for lengths of colored cloth. Metal tools (such as axes, hoes, and knives) became valuable new resources. The desire to get European goods changed ancient trading patterns. The tradition of simple hunting for food began to become less important than getting animal hides to trade. According to Weinberg (2002), it appeared that American Indians depended on European items for daily needs.

Weinberg’s (2002) view, however, is an oversimplification. Consider the Nez Perce, who for many years after contact could more than hold their own against the US Cavalry with their own traditional technologies, their special bows, and their much faster horses—not to mention their alternative military strategies. It was not really until after tribes had their economic base and cultural integrity weakened that dependency on Western trade arose.

THE HISTORY OF TRADE

American Indian trade has historically been characterized as the web of economic relationships between Europeans and their successors (Euro-Americans and Euro-Canadians) with Native people. The purposes of such activities included exchange of goods with material and cultural significance between American Indians and whites as part of diplomatic and economic interactions in order to secure goods, to establish and maintain political treaties, and to ensure mutual and peaceful cohabitation of lands. By this same convention, Indian trade has been portrayed as a Euro-American or Euro-Canadian male engaged in supplying Native Americans (male and female) with goods and services in exchange for Indian-made or Indian-processed commodities such as furs, pelts, hides, and foodstuffs; geographic information; and, at times, political and social alliances (Sturtevant 1988).

A more accurate view of American Indian trade, however, would be to describe an existing and well-established trade practice that was firmly in place long before European contact and colonization. Connecting tribes and regions, precolonial Indian trade involved individual traders as well as trader cultures that served as conduits between tribes separated by considerable distances. Indian traders—female as well as male—met at trading centers located strategically along major river systems and at locales where several tribes seasonally passed en route to hunting, gathering, or fishing grounds. Examples include Cahokia in present-day Illinois, the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara villages (often called Middle Missouri Indian towns) in the present-day states of North Dakota and South Dakota, Zuni Pueblo in contemporary New Mexico, and confluences intersecting important waterways such as Sault Sainte Marie and Niagara Falls in the Great Lakes region and the Dalles on the Columbia River. In addition to foodstuffs, fiberware and clayware, hides, and exotics ranging from obsidian and flint to seashells and pearls to precious gems and minerals passed hands in Indian lodges and at Native trade fairs before CE 1500 (Chittenden 1902).

EARLY EUROPEAN-INDIAN TRADE

After 1600 these same trails, watercourses, and meeting grounds became routes of European traffic and footprints for forts, factories, and towns placed at such strategic points as Albany, Augusta, Chicago, Detroit, Kodiak, Michilimackinac, Mobile, Natchitoches, Portland (Oregon), Saint Louis, and San Antonio. Colonists introduced European mercantile ideas of inventories and profits based on dynamics of supply and demand, often compromising Native systems, which operated on principles of barter exchange, gift-giving, and reciprocity. Whites who adhered to norms of Native trade did better than those who ignored or bypassed Indian protocol. The French succeeded best in the Indian trade business, becoming social as well as economic partners across North America. Up to the fall of New France in 1760 and beyond, French-Indian relations along the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers and in the Great Lakes region remained cordial, tied by kinship as well as economic partnerships (Sturtevant 1988).

Spanish, Dutch, English, Russian, and Swedish traders were less successful because of their more rigid expectations: they insisted that Indians conform to European trading standards. All colonists sought furs and hides, including deerskins, for a lucrative European and Cantonese fur market, making the occupation of the white or mixed-blood (Métis or French-Indian and mestizo or Spanish-Indian) trader a common occupational type on all national and ethnic frontiers in North America. Each had government-licensed trading companies with wide powers to expand the respective nation’s interests in addition to authority to trade, trap, hunt, and settle. Also, each country had independents, known in French parlance as coureur de bois (“runners of the woods”). From the Saint Lawrence to the Rio Grande and on to the Pacific Ocean, these “free” trappers and traders trekked and traded, earning reputations for adventure and exploration, and often compromising national interests for personal gain.

Many major cities benefitted from this burgeoning Indian trade, including Albany and New York City (Dutch); Detroit, Mobile, Natchez, and Montreal (French); Charleston, Philadelphia, and Savannah (English); Pensacola, Santa Fe, and Saint Louis (Spanish); Wilmington, Delaware (Swedish); and Kodiak, Alaska, and Fort Ross, California (Russian). Native economic dependency did not rest solely upon trade of guns, blankets, kettles, knives, and other utilitarian items with whites. Nearly all Native tribes engaged in European-based trade to a certain degree with some tribes prospering and others suffering hardship and economic loss. Throughout the eighteenth century, most tribes of eastern and southeastern North America were locked into the Indian trade as a way of life and expected French, British, and Spanish traders to protect their respective trade spheres from outside aggressors and internal rebellion (Ewers 1997).

TRADE AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the Indian trade continued under different flags and more restrictive rules. Congress regulated Indian trade under a series of Trade and Intercourse Acts beginning in 1790, establishing government “factories” in the heart of Indian territories in 1796 with the intent of keeping settlers and alcohol out of Indian Country. This segregationist approach was abandoned in 1822, allowing large and small companies to compete for Indian furs and favors in the Western territories. In both Canada and the United States, independent traders and smaller firms were historically leveraged out of business by oligarchies such as the Montreal-based North West Company; the Philadelphia firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan; and Spanish, Indian, and English traders working for the British firm Panton, Leslie, and Company, based in Florida (Washburn 1988).

As smaller, fur-bearing habitats were trapped out or settled, a new economic Indian trade prevailed from 1840 to 1890 on the Western plains and prairies. This buffalo-hide trade supplied water- and steam-powered factories’ demand for leather belts as well as military overcoats, rugs, and blankets. Once the buffalo were gone, economic dependency on reservations in Canada and the United States gripped Indian communities, now reliant on annuities and the need to become herders and farmers. Still, the Indian trade and the Indian trader, part of an international fur industry, continued in Alaska and in Canada’s remote Yukon and Northwest Territories, where it remains important, as well as in the eastern Arctic. Across North America, Indians themselves have continued to function as Indian traders, many dealing in arts and crafts, others in horse breeding and trading; others in restoring buffalo, trading calves for other livestock and goods from one reserve to another; and still others in mitigating violations of treaties by swapping further litigation for restoration of tribal lands or monetary compensation (Hanner 1981).

Deprived of their historic homelands, sacred places, and hunting and fishing grounds, American Indians also lost control of their traditional livelihood. Agriculture, hunting, and gathering all required the places to which Native peoples had a deep and spiritual connection. They could continue to fashion various productive implements such as spades for digging, but these could not be employed without access to land. The same held true for animal traps and other technology. Thus, if they were to remain in their traditional areas of the country, their only alternative was to work for the new owners of the land.

After the Revolutionary War the new national government developed its own Indian policy. Chief Justice John Marshall set the stage for present Indian policy by asserting that tribes were sovereign nations. In 1831 he wrote in his famous Cherokee Nation v. Georgia opinion that Indian tribes were “nations within a nation,” but he went on to call them “domestic dependent nations,” implying that they had alienated their power to negotiate with foreign nations by virtue of treaties with the federal government (Anderson and Parker 2004). While implying that the tribes had retained their internal powers to govern themselves, Marshall described the relationship between tribes and the United States as “that of a ward to his guardian.” Under this interpretation the federal government attempted to monopolize treaty negotiations with tribes in order to reduce conflicts over land and forced the tribes into a subservient position by declaring them “wards” (M. Miller 1988).

The federal government eventually took control of tribal assets by holding them in trust, a relationship fraught with mismanagement and depletion of resources over time. Tribal sovereignty might have allowed Indians to devise their own property rights and governance structures had the federal government not established the trust relationship with American Indians and had it truthfully been willing to grant broad autonomy to Indians over providence and control of their property. The Dawes Act enacted in 1887 implied the potential to release Indians from trusteeship by allotting reservation lands to individual Indians in fee simple ownership (Carlson 1992). However, the act’s true intent was to assimilate American Indians into mainstream society. The act offered 160 acre tracts of reservation land to individual Indians and families that they could use to settle and become farmers. US citizenship was also offered to allotment holders. A condition of accepting the allotment and citize...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. A Brief History of American Indian Business
• 2. Embracing Cultural Tradition: Historic Business Activity by Native People in the Western United States
• 3. American Indian Entrepreneurship
• 4. Business Strategy: Building Competitive Advantage in American Indian Firms
• 5. The Business Law of the Third Sovereign: Legal Aspects of Doing Business in Indian Country
• 6. Legal Forms of Organization
• 7. Tribal Finance and Economic Development: The Fight against Economic Leakage
• 8. High-Stakes Negotiation: Indian Gaming and Tribal-State Compacts
• 9. American Indian Leadership Practices
• 10. Business Ethics and Native American Values
• 11. Coyote Learns to Manage a Health Program
• 12. A Native American Values–Infused Approach to Human Resources
• 13. Service Management for Native American Customers
• 14. Native Americans and Marketing: A Paradoxical Relationship
• List of Contributors
• Index