- [Woman Voiceover] This entire region
is my ancestral homelands.
I live with the land, I live from it.
I have great respect for it.
(soft guitar music)
- [Woman Voiceover] The laws on the reservation
were not made for us to create our own economy.
They were made for companies to come
and extract resources from our lands.
This power plant is shutting down.
There's this big controversy whether it's gonna stay open,
whether the Navajo Nation is gonna keep it open.
- It's no secret that the salary levels for those jobs
are much higher than anywhere else on the Navajo Nation.
And then there's also revenue to the tribal coffers.
They're losing quite a bit of revenue
through royalties that go to tribal services.
So it's gonna be rough time for a lot of folks
but it's a time of change.
(bells clinking)
(door creaking)
I come from a family of silversmiths.
So I grew up with people working every day
but not actually going to work.
Just with them making jewelry
and then going on selling trips.
We'd often go to Sedona or Phoenix or Santa Fe.
I was always told when I went to college
that I would be going for business.
So I did, that's what I studied at ASU.
When I was in college then it was really about
how to work for corporations, you know.
How to climb that corporate ladder but I always knew
that I'd want to start my own business.
People think that business is a white man in a suit
coming to your community that wants something
and that has found something on the reservation
that they need and wants access to.
That's the perception of what business is.
So we wanted to change that view
of what a Navajo entrepreneur was.
(crowd murmuring)
(laughing)
- Yeah, I was with two of my brothers.
- In listening to the entrepreneurs
who come to our events year after year,
people tell us the same
entrepreneurial challenges over and over again.
I don't have internet at my house,
or I couldn't get an employment identification number
because my roads aren't labeled.
Or I don't know how to--
- So we are in Tuba City today, we are announcing
the opening of Change Labs which is a incubator
co-working space specifically for supporting
entrepreneurship within the community.
We threw around the idea that if we created something
that was for the reservation that we might be able to
help people and the response from a lot of people
was that there really aren't
any businesses on the reservation.
(crowd murmuring)
- And the ironic thing is that
if you drive across the reservation,
our flea markets are flourishing.
There's all sorts of people set up on the sides of the roads
chopping wood, recycling batteries, selling frybread.
We have an extremely hyper-entrepreneurial culture
but it doesn't necessarily translate into local
and sustainable small businesses set up in our communities.
So we've started a campaign
called I Am the Navajo Economy.
And really that was to boost these entrepreneurs
as being part of the economy as well.
(happy music)
(whistling)
(thuds)
- Boom!
I own a small food stand and also
a small catering company called AlterNativeEats
and we focus on Japanese-inspired food.
- It's kind of awkward, like people think sushi
in Tuba City, I don't know about that.
He started with just a smaller menu but it's taken off.
(funky music)
- I always wanted to learn how to cook
but in my family I guess stereotypically,
the guys, you know the guys,
you have to become a welder or a pipe sitter.
(thuds)
When I went to culinary school,
there was so many foods that just really
opened up my mind and my taste
and my curiosity for different cultures.
(funky music)
I always wanted to come back.
I always wanted to come back to Tuba City and,
bring back what I've learned.
(rattling)
- Shash Dine Echo-Retreat is a glamping bed and breakfast.
About 12 miles south of Page.
(calm guitar music)
Our guests come from all over the world.
This is an immersion into nature, you're surrounded by it.
You go and take a walk up the hill and you can come across
any manner of creature that lives here in the desert.
And it's surprising how many people crave that.
We've been in business for about four years now.
One of the main challenges of setting up a business here
on the Navajo Nation is just wading through
the paperwork that you have to go through,
all of these regulations that you have to meet.
As well as introducing the idea
that you wanna run a business here on the reservation.
(calm guitar music)
- When leadership thinks about economic development,
they think of large-scale development projects.
They don't think about small entrepreneurs.
(crowd murmuring)
- For those of you who are currently running a business,
where are you running it from?
So there's a few options up here.
- They don't think that entrepreneurship is a force,
when really it's the force
that's kept communities alive and able to survive.
Our incubator has been around officially
for about five years and we've had several businesses
go through the incubator, we have 14 businesses
that are currently in the incubator.
- Okay so those of you who have your hands raised,
keep them up.
How many of you have actually worked
in a co-working space before?
- So we do this through an application process.
Once you get into the incubator,
we have a series of get togethers, just listening
to each other's stories, their experiences.
We bring graphic designers and branding experts.
They do workshops on what a brand is, how to create a brand.
Another event that we do is a financial deep dive.
Where we bring in accountants
and this is the part that's difficult.
(crowd murmuring)
We have to do this in a setting
where we trap them there and say,
okay we have to talk about your profitability,
your margins, your expenses.
They don't wanna do it at first
but once they actually see the numbers
and they see, okay I know what I need to do
to reach that, it really helps them to move forward.
- They really legitimized us.
We had these professionals who were pushing us,
who were excited about our idea,
who wanted to see us succeed.
Change doesn't come easily for anybody.
And this represents a change for people.
- Here in Tuba City on the reservation,
if we were to get rid of Taco Bell,
Bashas', Sonics, Kentucky Fried Chicken.
If we were to get rid of all of those overnight,
whoever made the best hamburger in town
is gonna be rich overnight.
Whoever makes the best fried chicken in town,
they're gonna be banking it.
Like why not let a native,
what's wrong with a native getting rich,
what's wrong with a native having a little bit,
what's wrong with a native being successful?
- [Jessica Voiceover] I see the drives that they have
and a lot of times it has nothing to do with money.
It's because they wanna live in their community,
they wanna raise their family here.
I see that, I see the sacrifices they make.
But I also see the potential.
Growing up, what we as Navajo people
were taught to believe was what was out here for us
wasn't what was good for us, what was good for us was
off the reservation or outside of what
the Navajo Nation was.
And our culture doesn't limit us, it actually
is what we need to survive and to do more
than survive, to be successful.
(guitar music)
- Sources have confirmed
the Navajo Generating Station coal-fired power plant
near Page, Arizona will close.
Navajo lawmakers voted not to pursue
acquisition of the plant.
Construction of Change Labs co-working offices
in Tuba City should be completed later this year.
Aspiring native entrepreneurs are encouraged to participate.