Indians Are Back in Business, Thanks to a Program at Northern Arizona University
A year-old program at Northern Arizona University is helping Arizona Indians with business ventures, including plans to sell firewood in Los Angeles and to use a high school dormitory for motel-management vocational education.
The NAU Center for American Indian Economic Development, which opened in late 1985, has advisory projects with tribes or individual Indian businesses and has sponsored 12 workshops in reservation communities on business-management skills.
“They have been a major assistance,” said Kyril Colsoyas, director of support services for the Tuba City High School Board, on the Navajo Reservation.
Colsoyas, school principal Andrew Tah and the school board are planning to use the Indian school’s 200-room dormitory as an inn during the summer.
Job Training
Wayne Fox, coordinator of the NAU center, and other members of the NAU business faculty have provided economic forecasting, including assessment of the feasibility of attracting foreign tour groups, Colsoyas said.
The dormitory project would provide job training for high school and Navajo Community College students in motel and restaurant management, he said.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs owns the school facilities. Colsoyas expects to secure the bureau’s OK for the project in time to start on a limited scale this summer.
Fox says the project has good potential: “It’s low capitalization, it’s educational and it’s job creating.”
Specialists Brought In
The center’s mission is to make the expertise of NAU faculty members available to assist Indian business ventures.
The center has assisted about 30 Indian businesses or prospective businesses involving 10 different Arizona tribes. Other projects have included obtaining contracts for electronics assembly work and marketing of vegetables.
Most NAU faculty involvement has come from the College of Business Administration, but other specialists are brought in when appropriate, Fox said.
Robert Larson, a forestry professor, is working with Fox on a project the center has begun with the Hualapai Tribe to begin a fuel-wood marketing business.
‘Potential Is Good’
Several individual members of the Hualapai Tribe cut and sell firewood, but a tribal enterprise to buy the wood from members and sell it in cities could improve the marketing and encourage more cutters, said Marty Watsonome, economic-development manager for the tribal government at Peach Springs.
“The potential is good, and we are working up a plan of operation,” Watsonome said. “We have made contacts in the Los Angeles area.”
He expects the new business to be operating this spring, because the pinon and juniper firewood should dry for several months between cutting and burning.
Most of the projects that the center has assisted are individually owned businesses rather than tribal enterprises.
‘Entrepreneurial Gleam’
“We like to find the person with an entrepreneurial gleam in his eye, even if he does not have much money in his pocket,” said Dr. John Walka, director of the center and acting dean of the College of Business Administration. “Small business is really the source of economic growth and new jobs.”
The United Indian Development Assn., based in Los Angeles, provides some of the same advisory services to small businesses as NAU center does, said Ralph Honhongva of the association’s Flagstaff office.
