This overview was drafted by staff of Nourishn and Tolani Lake Enterprises, a member of the Nourishment Economies Coalition.
Native youths in Arizona, USA, are launching a new pop-up café enterprise, where they will sell food they prepare, from crops they grow with regenerative and indigenous-inspired farming practices, to people driving between the remote reservation and the non-Native “border towns” (like Flagstaff, Arizona). This includes plans for pop-up food stands at minor and major roads, at stopping points for travelers, and at special events.
Building on the economic, cultural, scientific and programmatic work of Tolani Lake Enterprises, and their participation in “nourishment entrepreneurship” exercises organized with Nourishn and social entrepreneurs from around the region and the world, this new enterprise aligns practical action with deeper objectives and social forces. It also builds on recognition already received by the presitigious MIT SOLVE business ideas marketplace.
The objectives are, with the utmost respect, to simultaneously steward the future while helping provide healing of collective historical trauma in local Native communities.
The enterprise will do this by fostering a foundation for productive Native youth action that is aligned with three strong indigenous values: (1) taking care of community; (2) stewarding regenerative food-land-water-medicine-wellness cycles; and (3) a modern vision of the traditional core value of youth warriorship for the community, which can now be expressed as entrepreneurship. These values will provide a foundation for safely confronting and resolving historical, political, economic, and educational challenges.
From this foundation, the entrepreneurial pop-up café enterprise will also tackle a broader cultural and economic challenge in the community: learning how to develop a local economy. This is important because the Native community in this region has not previously experienced a well-developed local economy. The new enterprise will demonstrate how to create indigenous and culturally-consistent products and businesses, aiming to inspire and promote local producers in the area. The community has previously experienced local economy based on flea markets, convenience stores, and sometimes a barter and trade system. However, there have been few economic pursuits to build sustainable jobs and services; there is little to no economic infrastructure for local businesses; and a range of historical policies and laws were implemented specifically to prevent local economic development (and thus to keep the Native community dependent on outside resources).
In the words of the young leaders of this initiative, “The new enterprise will help us demonstrate local economic development to ourselves.”
Importantly, all this will be realized through direct actions and experiences for Native youth:practicing regenerative/agroecological farming, with positive impact on nutrition, food security, water, biodiversity, and climate; collective farming and value-added processing for the community, rather than each farmer trying to sell their individual produce to anonymous markets; promotion and cooking of fresh, local, and Native foods (implying physiologically and psychologically healthier diets for locals as well as the traveling public); connecting local markets for farmed produce with grazed meats, helping reintegrate that divide in Native land and resource management; and more.