Indigenous Business
boy are we going to have fun join me for a marathon of paris mexican table because any celebration calls for incredible food what a setting isn't it i mean you cannot see another neighbor's house i like the house i think you got a real diamond in the rough and we're happy to be involved well thank you if i wanted to change the world i could do it through dance oh my gosh yes [Music] who is the dark lady of shakespeare's sonnets let me tell you about black lucy negro based on the book by caroline randall williams a modern twist on a secret tryst the nashville ballet performs black lucy and the bard on great performances friday evening at 8 [Music] clapton is one of the most talented and influential guitarists of our time and when he shares the stage with friends the result is a celebration of music for the ages eric clapton's crossroads guitar festival 2019 saturday night on montana pbs programming on montana pbs is made possible in part by viewers like you the friends of montana pbs thank you and by first security bank serving montanan since 1919 find us online at www.ourbank.com [Music] [Music] i pray when i'm cutting i pray when i'm sowing i pray when i'm just talking down the ribbon i've always had an entrepreneurial spirit you know and meeting lisa you know she was the same way that is our goal is to reduce the lake trout so that we can increase habitat 4 and area 4 our bull trout and west slope cutthroat the number of baskets in my lifetime i'm going to say hundreds i'm in my baskets have gone all over the u.s i just like to show the community that style of cooking there's nowhere else in town that i know of that does that style of cooking this university of montana school of journalism production was made possible with production support from the greater montana foundation encouraging communication on issues trends and values of importance to montanans and by the university of montana [Music] i love being outside i mean that's where all my inspiration comes from i love listening to the water and listening to the trees and the birds and oh no i love it i love it i like the process of being outdoors and cutting that willow that fresh willow because i can bundle it and then bring it home and store it and i use it i mean i don't waste it my name is valerie vise i've been weaving baskets for approximately 30 years my story of how i first started weaving for the first time begins with i'm wanting to take a class so i put myself in the car and drove to great falls and began a six-week basket weaving class and i just fell in love with it [Music] the process of beginning a basket for me would uh the first thing is to determine do i want an antler basket do i want to put a a birch bark handle on it do i want to incorporate some of that willow that i've cut with anything it has to have a solid foundation [Music] protection i guess for lack of a better word [Music] so then i cut the reed and i work with the rattan plant the first thing is to make the base so i have to have a strong base and then i put in the side spokes and the number of side spokes will determine the design i want to put in my basket they range anywhere from probably from start to finish product anywhere from three to 15 20 hours it just depends on the size of the basket those bigger baskets are harder because the reed is thicker so i mean there's a lot of pulling and tugging so it's just repetitive over two under one over two i started going to craft shows and people found interest in my baskets i needed a name right and i wanted to not just have valerie beast i mean i'm from montana and i make baskets so that's how montana baskets was born i grew up in a generation where parents didn't talk about anything i mean you just left the past in the past my brother was in a horrible accident brad and i and my new baby ended up down in a billings hospital and i walked into a room and saw a man that i knew was my father with two native ladies that i had no idea who they were and from that began my research here lo and behold you know some months later this paper came back that said yes you're eligible for enrollment in the wilshire tribe of montana and that i think happened in 91 or 92. i know that it was deeply meaningful for her to find that piece of her missing heritage it was challenging at times there were times when you found out things that you say why didn't anybody tell me about that finding out about my native heritage really answered a lot of questions for me why i was attracted to like certain sounds music art because there was all this native art that i was attracted to and then from that i learned the baskets that um uh the lorax the little shell people they were basket weavers part of the native american program through the made in montana program is it's tremendous opportunity because people see my name on on their website my daughter natalie is a bead artist a tremendous bead artist she and i do shows together she sets up for beadwork and we'll work there do beating during the show i mean we love talking about our art and you know them sharing their experiences uh sharing our experiences so i'm looking very forward to the show in march i did not grow up in a native culture i mean everything i've learned you know has been through speaking to elders within the little shell tribe within the community itself so it's really really important for me for my kids and my grandchildren to know their celtic identity their norwegian identity their german identity and their native identity through art i think i will continue weaving and painting the rest of my life my art experience for me is therapy it is it just it just calms my soul it's just in my soul it's who i am [Music] i want to be the restaurant where kids say hey dad that's where i want to go for my birthday or that's where i want to go for my anniversary my name is mario mccullough the name of this restaurant is big chief chinese llc when i get here i usually get here around nine o'clock in the morning a lot of times i don't get out of here until 9 30 at night so when i do work it is 12 and a half hours straight barely take a break to use the bathroom i do everything fresh every day i do all my sauces from scratch and do all my batters from scratch and cut down my own chickens and beef and it's just fabricate the food from scratch a lot of people just don't do that anymore they order it in prefabricated and then just warm it up to serve it it's a real high intensive labor position but i've been working long hours my whole life i originally came to browning because i was an enrolled member grandmother's full-blooded black feet and when i came up to visit that's when i met my wife so we would come up and visit for the holidays and i kind of got a feel for the community i was just getting sick of cooking for other businesses and i just wanted to have my own place so i could get full credit for my accomplishments and my food i was looking for a commercial location up here and the lady said that she would sell me the business she gave me about 30 days to come up with the money i sold my boat i sold my four-wheeler i sold my food truck i sold anything i could to come up with the money i talked to a bank and i got a loan for 50 000 to remodel the property i got a native american grant they bought my 7 000 walk they bought a 5 000 freezer and a 1200 fryer for me i think god definitely had my back on this deal [Music] i did chinese food because that's what this town wanted and when i purchased the building i was like well i need to get some chinese background and then i was kept looking and looking and i found pf chang's downtown spokane so i applied there and they gave me a shot for a cook so that's when i cooked on the wok for six months and learned how the wok was ran and got a good filling for how to make the sauces and the soups and everything but i've got a lot of education and experience behind me in a bigger food setting so if you go to another restaurant and see him as busy as i am there's nine cooks back there cooking and i usually do it by myself with my son's help [Music] i do prep work so that's just like if i just get all the vegetables and stuff prepped up and i make sure everything's you know good to go before we open and then um i'm also a sous chef as well so i know how to cook everything that's on our menu i think it's just a good sit-down place you know to come eat or whatever or if you want like um just take out or you just grab it and then go back to whatever you were doing i think it's just um it's a good environment you know just uh good food good everything [Music] yeah moving forward i'd like to keep this restaurant this restaurant really is successful know it really generates a lot of money i mean it's good for the community personally i kind of get burned out just cooking one type of food it's almost like that movie groundhog's day i come in i make the same sauces the same soups at the same order every day well what i want to do is italian food italian food you know what's in my blood i was raised on that food and i've cooked a lot of italian food professionally so i want to be able to offer the community a taste of my italian food because if they really like my chinese food then they're going to really drop over dead you know when they eat this italian food that i cook [Music] what we're doing is what's important for the tribe and trying to help sustain a bull trout population and a west slope cutthroat population the name of the the business that is uh native fish keepers i started the program in 98 and basically i've been here since then the main fish that we are trying to suppress in flathead lake is the uh lake trout when we started our suppression program we wanted to use the resource but not waste the resource and so we came up with the plan to do the processing and put our fish on the market nifky is a non-profit most of the money we make from our fish sales helps with our operating costs and creates jobs for people to come out and work in the fish industry the crew was small in the beginning and now our crew is up to eight people at certain times we have a large boat that we take out just about every day and we set suppression nets our nets sometimes we set a half a mile a net sometimes we set two miles a net and the next day we go out and we pull our nets and we pick our fish on the boat out of the net and put them in totes we have another boat comes out and they'll pick up what fish have been picked the first couple hours of the morning and bring them back to the blue bay the processing plant there's a history of manipulating the system that we're trying to reverse today to maintain our native trout so we're working on a landscape level conservation project in which we're trying to maintain and restore native cutthroat and bull trout in flathead lake doing this is very expensive so in 2017 we decided we need to do this perpetually and we realized we needed to get make these fish pay for themselves so we began native fish keepers a corporation incorporated by the tribal government and it is native fish keepers that then independently oversees the marketing and sale of the fish that we catch we'll have an employee will take and count the fish so once they've been counted they'll take and they'll uh remove the heads from the fish and once the head's been removed and we'll start feeding them through our fillet machine which has four blades on the filet machine first blade cuts the belly open second blade removes the intros third blade takes out the backbone fourth blade takes off the rib bones and then two perfect fillets come out at the end of the machine once we have a tote of lake trout fillets those fillets will be put on a table and there will be four people on the table pin boning which is the fine bone that's in the center of the fillet and trim off the tail trim the belly fat off once that is put into another bin another little tote it gets moved over to our packaging machine and each filet will get individually packaged put on the machine vacuum packed sealed put on a tray and moved right into the freezer portion of our process so this has been a long journey it hasn't been easy and not everybody has supported it so i guess trying to achieve this goal has kept me going and having been committed to this for so long and seeing some light at the end of the tunnel we see significant reduction in the lake trout population and we see the early signs of the native fish rebound so that's all very rewarding and it's it's a strong commitment that i'd like to see through bull trout cutthroat uh whitefish uh suckers northern pike minnow those were all uh food sources for uh native people in the area so its significance to the tribe is very very high i mean there are cultural sites on the lake that signify that our ancestors have been here and will always be here lisa was doing candles and cute little cups and i was into making uh art with uh beer cans and uh one day uh we were she was sitting there doing candles and it was just you know we started trying it in beer cans and it was just you know just kind of like almost met in the middle hi my name is nolan michelle and our business is sunshine candles so our inspiration behind starting our business we left the midwest and suburbia had to come out to montana to be able to kind of just get back to you know get back to basics and be able to enjoy family years ago shopping for made montana products i had a hard time finding things that were made here and not in china that represented montana so when we moved out here i wanted to be an artist and work with my hands so we started working with big sky brewing company and putting candles into their craft brewery beer cans so they were pretty instrumental in helping us get our business off the ground and then we branched out to other breweries and wineries and now we're making our own labels on our own bottles and cans as well the the can itself is you know it's been used once and then you just you know you discard it but you know it could be reused again my connections to uh i guess the earth and the environment you know i see you know ways that we have to you know reduce what we're using and also you know find ways to reuse the things that we're using and the resources that we're using when you think about native americans and their you know their constant struggle to survive i guess you know you just have to uh constantly you know take every opportunity that you have and you know make the best of it because you know there's all these things that we don't have control of and we just have to learn how to uh you know continue to exist in this ever-changing world we use high-end ingredients like soy wax and fragrance and essential oils and we've done extensive testing with all of our products to make sure it's a good product that people want to buy and the production takes place here in our workshop at our home and i like to have the whole family involved and it's grown so much that i can't do it by myself anyways so nolan helps with the shows and logistics and marketing and we've got the kids involved with everything from creating labels to tagging and going to the shows as well hi my name is kyle michelle and my role in the business is packaging and putting labels on the candles one of my favorite parts of helping with the business is being able to travel and being able to help my mom it's nice to be able to spend time with her we've been doing the made montana trade shows for about 10 years now the made in montana program supports us pretty well they allow us to come and do the trade shows every year and so we gain quite a bit of wholesale business through that program and doing that trade show every year we could use some more support as far as expanding our workshop people that have just discovered us they sit there and just smell every candle basically it takes him a while to make a final product decision the family aspect of our business is awesome it goes you know way above our above and beyond our business you know the the skills that um our kids learn i mean they could take anywhere with them throughout their whole entire life so um and you know outside of that you know we we get to bond together you know we get to work together we have a lot of crazy adventures on the road going to shows and setting up and talking to people and i'll put our efforts towards you know making a great product for people and it's a lot of hard work but we have fun doing it so you know it's a great experience for our family [Music] what makes my art special the fact that it comes from the heart it comes from prayers and it comes from giving to others given to my community my name is lola whitebeard i'm an enrolled blackfeet member from the blackfield tribe and i live in browning montana my black feet name is iniska maki which means buffalo stone woman and my ribbon skirt shop if you call it that is called iniskamaki designs i come from a family of sewers my mom sewed my grandma sewed and i have an aunt who sewed and ran a sewing shop and i worked for her a couple summers in that sewing shop and she taught me a lot back in 19 about the mid 1990s i kind of quit sewing for a while and one day i was out cleaning my shed and and i had three bins of fabric and i was looking at it and i thought i need to do something with this i got to get back into sewing and i lifted up some native fabric and i thought ribbit skirts i'll make ribbon skirts you know and i and i never intended to have it as a business i just thought i'd use up my fabric to make ribbon skirts and i can make oh gosh 20 30 dresses a month um you take and you just measure out your ribbons on your fabric the length that you want match them up i always try to match my ribbons with my fabric and then sew sew the strips first the ribbons first and then i sew up the sides of the fabric and fold over for your elastic and your hem and put the elastic in it was a learning process for me to to really get it down because when you're selling or making skirts for other people there's so many shapes and sizes and heights and widths and so you you kind of learn along the way i make skirts and i've made they call them tea dresses they're for ceremony ceremony dresses i've made the tops and then a skirt with it i make onesie sets for babies from three to 24 months probably a year and a half into my ribbon skirts and one of my friends mentioned it to me they said you should sign up for the native american made in montana so i did i looked it up on the internet and then i applied for it and i put those little round they give you around those little round native signs that i put those on all my uh my skirts and it's just that that recognition that i am the that my product is made by native american is when i cut out a skirt i put this tag on my mental size i never i didn't apply for credit when even when i started i just used my own money because it's always so hard to apply for a loan it could be intimidating um as a woman and being as native american you know because they say they keep people just tell you you're just going to fail you're not gonna you only last a couple years if even that and but i'm determined i know i can do this to me my business means that i'm giving the opportunity for all native from babies all the way up native women empowerment through ribbon skirts our ancestors wore ribbon skirts along with their back skin skirts their dresses i meant not skirts and when you wear a ribbon skirt it is empowering it makes you feel so so good about yourself it's a whole different experience than putting on a pair of jeans at pbs we know that even though kids might be out of school their education is still a top priority pbs learning media is a free platform that helps educators deliver and families access distance learning with pbs resources that are aligned to standards and created by the country's top educators it helps keep students engaged in learning so wherever education takes place pbs learning media
2022-09-18 17:28
