The art of doing business

Three Blackfeet Reservation residents are banking on their talents to forge a better way of life

Story by Tracy Whitehair
Photographs by Keegan Rumsey

A dented silver screen door flaps open on its one hinge as the wind whips between the two trailers. Two Medicine Sign Shop owner Gary Gobert pulls the screen shut as he leaves to take his white plywood signs with black vinyl letters to the Nizipuhwahsin school in Browning.

After he loads up his pickup truck Gobert laughs as he starts the truck with a pair of pliers before leaving his shop, which is one of more than 100 new businesses on the Blackfeet Reservation.

Gobert, a native Blackfeet, decided he wanted to start his own business when he returned to Browning in 1994, after living in Kalispell for nine years.

“I just wanted to go home,” Gobert says.

He had worked in the sign business and thought he could transfer his skills to the reservation.

But even though he had the talent and experience, he didn’t have the funding or the business background to get started. Once home, he turned to Zana McDonald.

McDonald, director of the Tribal Business Information Center (TBIC) at Blackfeet Community College, is helping people to start their own businesses and to thrive on a reservation where not many do. She has been advising budding entrepreneurs since 1996, when she wrote the grant to start the TBIC program at the college. Born in Browning, McDonald was raised in Michigan and got degrees from BCC in 1982 and 1983 in general studies, human services and business management, and a business degree from the University of Montana in 1986. She knew she wanted to return to Browning and envisioned TBIC as a way to help tribal members to bank on themselves.

“I really liked helping people start businesses,” McDonald says. “And my kids wanted to come home; they were tired of city life.”

On the 1.5 million-acre Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, where unemploymentranges seasonally between 50 percent and 84 percent, the question of economic development is pressing. From TBIC, the group that assists individuals who want to start their own small businesses, to Siyeh Development Inc., a corporation that wants to bring wind power and gaming to the area, the Blackfeet are pushing hard to bolster the ranks of the employed.

While the tribal council investigates an economic strategy for the reservation, such as increasing tourism, agriculture production and oil and gas exploration, many tribal members are searching for their own ways to survive.

McDonald’s efforts are starting them on their way. TBIC offers entrepreneurship courses at Blackfeet Community College as well as grants to start businesses. From its inception in

April 1996 through the end of 2000, the service has seen 2,326 clients, conducted 54 workshops, helped create 49 new businesses and 8 expansions, and assisted 163 businesses in startup and expansion.

A mother of three and a grandmother of 10, McDonald is a slender woman who wears her dark curls piled atop her head and exudes boundless energy and an enthusiasm toward those who come to her for assistance.

Three of those who came for help are working hard to see their fledgling businesses stay afloat.

Gobert, along with his wife, Janet, was one of the first to attend TBIC’s entrepreneurship course and receive a Four Times Foundation Fellowship grant to start his sign shop. Four

Times Foundation’s mission is to strengthen tribal communities, cultures and sovereignty by investing in people. Its money comes from individuals and philanthropic foundations. Money is only a portion of the investment, however, as fellows receive ongoing, one-on-one technical assistance, invitations to annual training and connections to a larger community of Indian business leaders and mentors.

Prospective applicants must supply a business plan and Gobert’s won him $10,000 to start the

Two Medicine Sign Shop nearly three years ago. He’s made use of every penny.

Rather than try to pay the $15,000 price for a new lettering machine, Gobert bought his machine used from a friend who taught him the sign-making trade in Kalispell. The machine and rolls of vinyl to make the letters cost Gobert $3,500, and he spent $500 on a small trailer that he uses for a workshop. It sits adjacent to the house trailer with a porch and soft-green awning that he and Janet call home.

In the crowded workshop, Gobert’s cutting machine slices the letters from a roll of black vinyl that costs $130 for 50 yards. A roll can last anywhere from a month to a day, depending on the signs he’s making, Gobert says. On this day it is sunny and warm, but the chill in the room overflowing with reams of vinyl, sheets of plywood, tools and paperwork gives a hint at how cold it gets on the frequent freezing days in Browning. According to the National Weather

Service, Browning averages 194 days a year with a minimum temperature below freezing. In a typical year, on 35 days it plunges below zero, most often in December, January and February.

Gobert says winter business is slow anyway, since the cold prevents the signs from drying properly, and it’s too expensive to heat his workshop. Gas heat or propane is too pricey, he says, so next year he wants to get a pellet stove to keep the shop warm enough to do “by-appointment-only” winter business.

“I can pay $139 for a ton of pellets to last six months instead of propane for $100 to fill a tank that won’t last a month,” Gobert says.

Since he opened the sign shop, Gobert has made about 50 signs and stenciled and painted lettering for several buildings and shop windows in town. His signs are made of plywood, primed and painted any color, and covered with vinyl letters. When the weather is nice Gobert gets the signs primed and painted in a day, with another day to do the lettering. Most of his business is from the reservation, by word of mouth, and Gobert gives discounts and low bids based on prices listed in a 1997 Sign Magazine to get and keep his customers buying local.

“If people can save $10 they’ll drive to Great Falls,” Gobert says.

But those who travel 80 miles away to Great Falls or elsewhere may not get the personal attention Gobert can provide. In early March, as ruby red rosary beads swung from the rear-view mirror, Gobert headed his truck to Nizipuhwahsin (Blackfeet for Real Speak), a Blackfeet language immersion school. Once he arrived, he cheerfully mounted a shaky ladder to secure his two latest creations. The cost for his labor and installation of the signs: $144.30.

Gobert says that he is not yet making enough from the sign shop to fully support his home and workshop, and says his work makes him a profit on a case-by case-basis. “Sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t,” he says, because he doesn’t always make customers pay the going rate. Gobert also barters with other businesses in town, like exchanging a load of gravel for a sign. And he sings and plays guitar in a country band to bring in some more dollars. Since he and Janet still meet low-income guidelines, public assistance helps pay the bills.

Gobert knows it will take time to get the business really moving, but his optimism isunwavering—he wants his work to support his family.

“I don’t want to do any loans,” Gobert says. “I hope (business) picks up so good that I’m working 24 hours a day till winter hits again.”

Sculpting a future

Kevin Hope, artist, welder and another of TBIC’s $10,000 Four Times Foundation Fellowship recipients, welds hunks and shards of scrap metal into stunning sculptures of Indian culture and history. He and his wife, Nicole, and their three sons returned to Browning in 1999 from Spokane and want to stay there, if Hope’s new art and welding business can succeed. In addition to local work, Hope foresees an international audience for his sculptures.

“I do know that this is a market,” Hope says. “Germans, Brits, love Native American artwork, especially of this capacity. They have a respect and understanding for Native American people.”

Hope received his G.E.D. and certification in welding from the Anaconda Job Corps Center in 1990. He has been welding across the West for more than10 years. KNJ’s Welding (which stands for Kevin, Nicole and children Jude, Jacob and JayceAnn), is Hope’s contract welding business. He travels to do commercial welding for construction, but the market in Browning is slow and at times he’s forced to take jobs elsewhere that will pay the bills. When he must leave, as he had to in late March, his art career is interrupted.

Spotted Eagle Art is his new artistic welding venture. Already Hope’s artwork is on display throughout Browning and East Glacier.

His first life-sized sculpture, “Traditional Dancer,” which he created in April 2000 from scrap steel salvaged from an old sawmill and smokestack on the reservation, has been displayed in the Plains Indian Museum in Browning and is now in front of Napi Elementary School. Hope says the dancer is his favorite work so far, because after creating it he realized he could take “something that was practically nothing and turn it into a productive piece of art.”

The sculpture depicts a tall, rust-colored Indian dressed in elaborate feathers and a loincloth, holding a staff with feathers in one hand and a feather fan in the other, and with his knee raised in joyous dance.

Blackfeet Tribal Chairman Earl Old Person remembers when the sawmill that Hope used to salvage material from to create his masterpiece was a vibrant economic force in Browning. But after a fire destroyed much of it in the 1970s, the tribe didn’t have the resources to rebuild.

“It served a purpose for awhile,” Old Person says.

Hope took pieces of that economic success from the past and used it for his own future. When he needs scrap metal Hope will still shinny up the side of the towering, rusting smokestack shell that sits decaying at the sawmill. He moves with the excitement and ease of a young boy, even as he warns his own young son to stay away from the rickety structure.

Last August, the Blackfeet tribe commissioned Hope to weld 16 decorative shields – four each of buffalo, eagle, bear and horse – to decorate the streets of Browning. The one-dimensional, rust-colored figures are also made of scrap metal from the smokestack.

Hope also created a life-sized grizzly bear and Blackfeet war chief holding a buffalo skull that are displayed at St. Mary Lodge in East Glacier. And he contracted with the City of Browning to sculpt, in 13 figures, the Blackfeet creation story, soon to be displayed in the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning.

Hope says that even if his business takes off he doesn’t want to mass-produce his sculptures. Nicole Hope, who attended the University of Montana and took two years of business classes at Blackfeet Community College and keeps the books for her husband’s business ventures, says the uniqueness of Hope’s art must not be compromised.

“We want to keep it at a pace that it’s still an individual piece coming from an artist,” she says.

Hope also would like to get a First Peoples Fund art grant through TBIC. In addition to a monthly stipend, First Peoples encourages emerging artists in Native American artwork by providing a mentor, workshops and business training for artists who want to take their wares to art shows. Hope thinks the grant will be all he needs to get through rough financial times.

In early March he said he didn’t want to have to leave Browning and go back on the road to find work as a welder, but would do what he had to.

“There will always be work if I’m willing to travel,” Hope said then. “But I want to create a business that will benefit our community.”

Within weeks of that conversation, Hope’s worries were realized and the need for a steady paycheck made him return to work for K.D. Steel, a Spokane-based company. He’s since been working jobs in Denver, Reno and Huntington Beach, Calif. Nicole Hope says her husband will be away through the summer and probably won’t come back till winter when construction slows. She says he had a shot at the Indian Peoples Fund grant, but couldn’t make the required interview because he was on the road.

“He hates it; he hates leaving,” Nicole Hope says. “He’s a hard worker but there’s nothing here.”

Nicole Hope says she’s at least grateful to be close to her parents, who have been generous helping out her family.

“We’ve had no money since November,” she says. “We’re between a rock and a hard place.”

But she remains hopeful. “We have bid some contracts with the schools,” she says. “If we got one he could come back.”

Creating a modern business from an ancient art

Betty Whitford remembers spending many days in Heart Butte watching her aunt’s quick and nimble beading skills. Her aunt gave Whitford, her three brothers and one sister beads and they’d make as many necklaces as they could for her, staying up till late at night.

“It was neat for us as young people to spend time with her,” Whitford says. “Today kids don’t know how to work or play; they aren’t content and want more and more stuff. We just liked to stop at each others’ houses and visit.”

Whitford has beaded with her grandmothers, her mother and her aunts since she was young. But just lately she thought she might be able to make a living at it by learning how to promote herself and her beadwork at art shows. And Whitford is doing just that – learning the business end of selling her own creations with the help of a mentor in Denver whom she keeps in touch with by e-mail and a $4,800 First Peoples Fund grant for emerging artists she got through TBIC.

Originally from Browning, Whitford and her husband, Ettore, moved back six years ago after living in her father’s homeland of Canada. She has held office jobs since age 15 and was an administrative assistant for the extension program at Blackfeet Community College until funding ran out a year ago. Earlier she was office manager and data coordinator at Pikuni Family Healing Center until money for that job dried up.

Even when working full time she sold beadwork. She sold necklaces, hair clips, rear-view mirror hangings, and mini-teepees with incense burners to local businesses, the hospital, college, and tribal office. Whitford kept in touch with her customers, took orders and created her own designs.

But she says she never thought of keeping records before the TBIC program or the First Peoples artist’s grant and training. “I never thought of beadwork as artwork,” she says. She learned to set a budget and keep household expenses together, and though she thought about bankruptcy, because when her last job ended it put her in a bind, she is breaking even now. With the grant, which ended in April, she received a $400 monthly stipend and free travel to art shows and budgeting workshops. And since the training she has put a business plan together, can estimate costs for going to art shows and feels confident enough to attend shows on her own.

At a recent Sioux Falls, S.D., Northern Plains Art Show, Whitford won an honorable mention for a beaded handbag purse, and a man at the show ordered a beaded vest. She says she hasn’t figured out her profit margin from the show, but says she at least broke even.

Whitford wants to work at beading as her full-time job, so she and Ettore, who does temporary work as a janitor or cook, can be free to travel to art shows all over the country. They could make a living, she believes, citing the example of a custom-made beaded outfit with leg wrappings, a belt and moccasins she sold last year for $5,000. She recently made an intricately detailed cradleboard–a carrier for an infant that supports the baby’s back–that could fetch $1,500 at an art show.

Moccasins sold at art shows net $75 because people buy them as art and put them on the mantle, she says. When she sells the moccasins on the reservation the price is $35 or $40, she explains, because there people wear them rather than put them on display.

The more shows she attends the greater the chance of contacts with people who want to sell her beaded items, she says.

Most of all, Whitford says, she enjoys the work.

“It’s really therapeutic to just sit there and bead,” Whitford says. “I could go day and night.”

In the bigger picture of economic life on the reservation, Dennis Fitzpatrick, general manager of Siyeh Development Corp., is a prominent figure.

Fitzpatrick, a tribal attorney hired about 18 months ago to manage Siyeh, explains that the tribe wants to create business opportunities for the area but realizes the value of a separate entity directing economic initiatives.

“The effort of the tribe was to set up a structure wholly owned by the tribe to manage and generate business enterprises,” Fitzpatrick says, “but to separate businesses from governmental affairs.”

Even though Siyeh—named after a tribal warrior who is known to be good, brave and independent—operates separately from the tribal council, it still consists of a board of six appointed by the tribe. The terms are two years, staggered so that one board member will be replaced or renewed every six months, Fitzpatrick says. Siyeh was started by the Blackfeet Planning Department with $200,000 in Housing and Urban Development grants. The corporation is now self-supporting, operating three profitable businesses and earmarking some earnings to do legwork on new business ideas, Fitzpatrick says.

“The trap is to be totally reliant on grants,” Fitzpatrick says. “If we want to operate like a business we’ll depend on customers, not grants.”

Incorporated in 1999, Siyeh wants to bring large-scale jobs and products to the reservation, says Fitzpatrick, whose business card describes Siyeh as “fearless, independent and true.”

Twenty-five employees now work at Siyeh’s businesses: four at Starlink Cable television, which provides cable service for close to 1,000 subscribers in Browning and East Glacier; 20 at Glacier Pete’s Bingo and one at Kimi (which means real water, big water), a new bottled water company. A wind power installation is also in the works, the “Blackfeet One,” which will be the first utility-scale wind-energy project ever built on tribal lands in the United States. Fitzpatrick says Siyeh will sell the power generated, enough to provide electricity for more than 6,000 homes, to the Bonneville Power Administration and it in turn will offer the power to utility companies in Montana.

Fitzpatrick also says Siyeh is studying building a casino that will offer poker and keno but not slot machines. Reservation residents now go to Cut Bank, 30 miles away, and other nearby towns to gamble, he says, but if a casino was located in Browning, at least the money spent there would circulate within the community. The question of whether gambling is right or wrong is irrelevant, he says, because the fact is people do gamble, and will no matter what.

“Not having a casino in town doesn’t stop people from gambling,” Fitzpatrick says.

Also, a casino could capitalize on the thousands of people who drive through Browning on the way to Glacier National Park, which had 2 million visitors last year, he says. And Siyeh would hire people from the town to work in the casino, offering employment opportunities to the local community.

“Development is wanted here,” Fitzpatrick says. “That’s a part of development.”

A lot of Siyeh time is spent researching the feasibility of new projects, Fitzpatrick says, and another promising possibility he is working on is a grocery store, whether a franchise or a local operation. Additionally, Zana McDonald of TBIC says she is working with Siyeh to research, develop and seek funding for a mini-mall in Browning, as many buildings stand vacant downtown but most of those are condemned.

Fitzpatrick says that with Siyeh’s leadership, the tribe made a profit at Glacier Pete’s bingo for the first time last year, a profit of close to $70,000.

The percentage of profit for Siyeh varies depending on the business, Fitzpatrick says. He says the bottled-water company only recently started so there is not much profit yet, but it is doing well selling five-gallon water coolers and containers to stores, offices and homes.

“Siyeh is a good structural model for doing business as a tribe,” Fitzpatrick says. “We’ll do what we’re doing well, by making a profit for the tribe, and look for opportunities for jobs to be created.”

Construction of the “Blackfeet One” wind-energy project, in conjunction with SeaWest WindPower Inc. and Montana Power Co., should begin next spring, Fitzpatrick says, and 46 workers will be needed. Currently, biological studies are under way on the two sites for the turbines, which are near Duck Lake, approximately 25 miles north of Browning. Fitzpatrick is certain the installation of the 30-megawatt wind turbines will be successful at harnessing Browning’s more than 16 mph average winds. He explains that the aerators on four less powerful 10-kilowatt wind turbines now in use at the Browning wastewater treatment facility, built a year and a half ago as a Department of Energy pilot project, circulate water and save $1,500 a month for the town.

Fitzpatrick stresses that while the firm manages the tribe’s resources, it will remain sensitive to the community’s needs, and will not disrupt Blackfeet culture.

The tribal administration is moving forward with its economic plans. And individual tribal members like Gobert, Hope and Whitford are shaping their own futures. Together they hold fast to the hope of a more prosperous tomorrow.

Blackfeet hope new election rules will lead to greater stability

New rules for electing members of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council may bring a stability to tribal politics that has been lacking and some say has hurt the tribe’s efforts to carry out economic initiatives.

Marilyn Parsons, director of planning for the tribe, has seen the effects of frequent political housecleaning.

“It’s difficult to be stable with leadership changing so often,” Parsons says. “New leadership comes in with new ideas and we start all over again. The stability is not there.”

Elections are held every other year and until last year all nine seats were up for grabs. Now tribal council members will have staggered four-year terms, says Earl Old Person, Blackfeet Tribal Business Council chairman. He agrees that two-year council terms were often not long enough for council members to see plans come to fruition.

“They’d get things together they want to do and it would be time to go,” Old Person says.

Leo Kennerly, chairman of economic development and a tribal council member, says historically seven to nine seats changed after each election. But in the next election in July 2002, only five seats will be on the ballot.

“The general hope is that it will provide stability,” Kennerly says. “But we’ve yet to see how it will work out in the end.”

Kennerly says the tribal council is working toward an overall plan for more employment on the reservation.

“It’s no secret now that we’re one of the poorest Indian nations,” Kennerly says. “We are looking for jobs.”

One idea is to capitalize on tourism, particularly since Glacier Park abuts the reservation. The tribe can take pressure off of campgrounds and motels near Glacier by developing their own, Parsons says.

“We’ve never really tapped into the tourism industry,” she says. “We’re starting to lean that way but being careful not to overdevelop.”

Kennerly says he’d also like more tribal members working for the National Park Service in management, rather than just the laundry, maid and dishwasher jobs common now. Management training is available at Blackfeet Community College, he says. He’d also like to bring tourists into Browning to spend money by creating a summer pasture for the buffalo herd already on the reservation and building a nearby museum and information center with works from Blackfeet artists on display.

The tribe is also debating signing a gaming compact to build a casino, and they are looking at franchising a grocery store, Kennerly says. They also want to expand agriculture to develop farm fields for marketing registered Angus cattle and they plan to make oil and gas deals to create jobs for tribal members, he says.

Joe McKay, contract attorney for the tribe, says that since the late 1930s and early 1940s oil and gas had been good sources of revenue for the Blackfeet until prices fell hard in the early 1980s.

“Now the market is coming back,” McKay says. “We’ll simply spur interest in new development and production of oil and gas reservoirs that have not been previously tapped.”

Kennerly would also like to see a manufacturing plant like the Blackfeet Indian Writing Co. that operated for years on the reservation.

“It would take a burden off the tribal government to provide jobs,” Kennerly says.

McKay says some Bureau of Indian Affairs administrators have suggested tribes don’t want grants for industry on the reservations because they fear disturbing reservation culture. He calls that “bunk,” but cautions that the tribe isn’t willing to accept just any industry.

“We want economic development but we want to control it ourselves,” McKay says.