Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty

Abstract

Focusing on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and their homeland, the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina, Courtney Lewis’s Sovereign Entrepreneurs addresses a striking lack of ethnographic research on Native American small-business owners. More importantly, this monograph responds to prior scholarship that has overwhelmingly associated economic sovereignty and self-determination with large operations overseen by tribal governments, especially casino gaming. Lewis persuasively argues that small businesses play a crucial role in mitigating Indigenous economic precarity by lessening tribal governments’ administrative burdens and fostering economic diversification that has combatted the effects of a single-industry (tourism) market and allowed the EBCI to brave the economic downturn of the Great Recession.Lewis’s in-depth coverage of issues relating to Eastern Band entrepreneurs is the product of months of participant observation research among business owners, government officials, and classmates in an “Indianpreneurship” course; personal experience as a Cherokee small-business owner; and familiarity with comparative cases of Indigenous entrepreneurship. Her analysis at times surpasses the promises of her introduction. For example, though she contrasts her understanding of economic sovereignty with Kevin Bruyneel’s idea of a “third space” of sovereignty (13), much of her evidence speaks brilliantly to this concept. She highlights how land trusteeship and blood-quantum reckoning of citizenship devised to facilitate Native assimilation ultimately serve Eastern Band economic and cultural sovereignty by protecting national assets from outsiders and underwriting the cultural capital of Native space, even as the former forces some Cherokees off the Boundary in search of property, and the latter prevents children of exogamous marriages from inheriting businesses.Despite such nuanced analysis, Lewis could have engaged more deeply with the implications of the capitalist nature of entrepreneurship. In her first chapter, while acknowledging that Eastern Band entrepreneurs have often worked to redistribute wealth and support their community, she echoes Philip Deloria, Daniel Usner, and Alexandra Harmon in noting how Native small-business owners defy settler colonial myths that cast Indians as inauthentic for engaging with capitalism, accumulating wealth, or failing to conform to business models of “social entrepreneurship” (24). For the remainder of the study, though, she implicitly equates Native entrepreneurship with social entrepreneurship, as though all small-business owners have contributed equally to the politics of sovereignty regardless of their relative prioritization of profit.Ultimately, though unquestionably valuable for students of history, anthropology, and Native studies for demonstrating that tribal governments and casinos are not the be-all and end-all of modern sovereignty struggles, this book’s interpretive contribution is additive rather than transformative. Lewis provocatively calls into question the celebration of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act by such scholars as W. Dale Mason and Laurie Arnold by pointing out how the 1988 law leaves Native nations beholden to state governments and restricts the spending of gaming profits, and she points out many unique advantages of small businesses: economic diversification, support for casinos and the tourism sector, multiplier effects, community wealth creation, augmentation of the tribal tax base, retention of Indigenous expertise, and the psychological effects of Native success in business. Many of these benefits, though, are dependent on tribal government support, including loans (significant because trust lands cannot serve as collateral), casino-dividend payments that provide capital and off-season support, tax breaks to citizen business owners, training programs, and Chamber of Commerce publicity. Furthermore, the EBCI government itself plays important roles in economic diversification, as Lewis herself acknowledges in noting existing and proposed tribal investment in an indoor water park, a bank, and medicinal marijuana production, among many other tribally controlled avenues of revenue generation, particularly through casinos, to which she devotes perhaps more space than would be expected in a book on small businesses. Nevertheless, Lewis has done important work to balance the equation of economic sovereignty.