For Se-ah-dom Edmo (Shoshone-Bannock, Nez Perce and Yakama) her startup is more than a business, it’s the foundation for a movement.
She is taking her background in community organizing and movement building and applying it to Indigenize, the business she started last year with her husband, James Parker, an enrolled citizen of the Chippewa Cree. The company is a curated gift box of items from tribal and Native-owned businesses with the goal of not only supporting those producers but also introducing consumers to adding indigenous products to their grocery shopping.
Indigenize is her response to the lack of Native produced products she saw on store shelves while shopping for her family during the pandemic.
“I would challenge readers to try to find some (Native products in stores). Our settler colonial economy has been effective,” she said. “It was on purpose. By design, the economy of the U.S. was predicated on extraction of wealth and resources of tribal people. I would love to see that reversed. Business has to run on our systems and needs to run in ways that uphold tribal sovereignty.”
Indigenize was incorporated in January 2021 and the two spent the first six months building relationships with producers. The first box went out in May and sales from May 2021 to May 2022 have been about $70,000, said Edmo.
The company is profitable. It has relationships with 25 producers that Edmo orders from regularly. She is working with the Intertribal Agriculture Council nationally to connect to even more producers.
Many of her customers are corporations and foundations that send boxes to clients. Volume each week varies, but on a recent week Edmo had 250 boxes to send for four different customers.
“I think about business development like a nautilus shell. Start with our own community who see the mission and want to be a part of it. Then develop out from there,” she said.
The mission-driven company has been bootstrapped and Edmo isn’t interested in taking investment or loans from organizations that have been set up to profit from her labor. This has garnered her some criticism and accusations she isn’t a serious business.
“I’m not trying to be an Indian capitalist. This is not a company with a Native logo out to make a dollar,” she said. “I’m not taking money from institutions or groups who have had generations of access to wealth or influence. We are growing through folks drawn to us. The customers who really see the beauty and power in the product (and) in the mission.”
Edmo and her family have incorporated Native products into their regular shopping and daily diets. And she has seen customers do the same. One friend she sent a box to has now fully switched her pantry to the Native-produced wild rice brand that was in the box, Edmo said.
And that is the goal. To indigenize people’s pantries and eating habits. But it does take time.
“We’re from cultures that work on very different time scales than white Western culture and I am willing to invest that time,” she said of the business.
The ultimate vision for Indigenize is still being formed. At this point, Edmo is toying with potentially becoming a distributor of Native products to get them on the store shelves.
“You don’t always know the end goal,” she said. “I’m trying not to get prescriptive and defining it. I’ll follow the needs of producers and the gaps I see in the market. It's lessons learned from movement building.”
