American Indian Entrepreneurs

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.

This article addresses the problems and the potential that American Indian businesspeople face in starting and operating businesses. American Indians are the poorest racial or ethnic group in the United States and the vast majority of the 300 Indian reservations do not have functioning economies. This is a disaster for creating economic activity in Indian Country and for addressing the extreme poverty present on almost all reservations. This article examines why that is true from legal, historic, and economic perspectives, and it sets out the potential for improving the number and success of Indian privately owned businesses. The article also addresses the common fallacy that Indian cultures did not understand private property rights and private entrepreneurial economic activity. In fact, American Indian people have supported themselves and their families for thousands of years through what we call today private business, private initiative, entrepreneurship, and free market trade.

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.

This book captures the entrepreneurial stories and mindsets of contemporary Native Americans. Native American entrepreneurs are important contributors to the American economy and social landscape. Faced with numerous challenges, many Native American entrepreneurs have learned to transcend tough obstacles, leverage resources, and strategically pursue opportunities to achieve business success. This book captures the entrepreneurial stories and mindsets of contemporary Native Americans.

In a globalized world, it is essential for business courses to adapt to the current economic climate by integrating cross-cultural and transnational approaches while remaining focused on the mission of the curriculum. Mission-Driven Approaches in Modern Business Education provides innovative insights into the ways that mission values can be seamlessly, efficiently, and effectively integrated into the core of any business course to inspire and influence quality business education. The content within this publication represents the work of educators in finance, management, marketing, international business, and other fields. It is designed for business managers, academicians, upper-level students, researchers, administrators, and organizational developers, and covers topics centered on mission as it relates to teaching, leadership, experiential learning, mission statements, sustainability, cultural engagement, and several other topics.

This study explores factors that motivate American Indians to become entrepreneurs and analyzes the results strategies they utilize to build sustainable ventures. Unexpectedly, the factor most cited by the study participants as having the strongest influence on their entrepreneurial career was spirituality. Also, the motivating aspect most frequently referred to by the participants was personal drive. Additionally, the results of this study indicated that American Indian entrepreneurs define success differently than the mainstream corporate world. The findings also indicated that American Indian entrepreneurs utilize the results strategies of knowledge, innovation, communication, and persistence. The findings of this study can be used for better understand the motivating factors and success strategies utilized by American Indian entrepreneurs to build sustainable ventures. Stimulation of American Indian entrepreneurship has the potential to create an enterprise culture, which fully respects tradition but empowers those indigenous people as economic agents in a globally competitive modern world.

Almost none of the 300 Indian reservations located in the lower forty-eight states possess functioning economies in which reservation residents and visitors can purchase the goods and services commonly available in the U.S. economy. A private, free market economy obviously requires private business owners, i.e., entrepreneurs. The percentage of private business ownership among American Indians, however, is by far the lowest for any identifiable group in the U.S. and this fact alone contributes greatly to the poverty and lack of economic activity on reservations. Consequently, to assist Indian nations and communities to unlock their wealth and to improve their economic and social conditions, tribal governments and others need to focus on increasing the number of on-reservation Indian entrepreneurs and creating more privately owned businesses and private-sector economies on reservations.

Looks at the underdevelopment of the private sector on American Indian reservations, with the goal of sustaining and growing Native nation communities.