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Long before colonization, commerce was common among tribal nations in North America.   

Pottery and other items were traded along the Mississippi River Valley more than 1,000 years ago in what’s now Wisconsin. In the Dakotas, the Missouri River served as a transportation route for crops, meats and cultural items.  

Major trade corridors once cut through Minnesota. Two crossed in what’s now the city of Pipestone in southwestern Minnesota, home to the sacred red stone by the same name that Native people quarried and spread across the continent.  

The reservation system imposed on tribes in the 1800s crushed those connections, effectively shutting off vital trade routes and severing cultural ties that had connected people for generations.  

But the entrepreneurial spirit of Native people never died. Two centuries later, a new era of Native American business innovation is quietly taking hold. From coffee shops to broadband companies, renewable resource organizations and Indigenous farms, Native-owned companies are helping reclaim a culture and build an economy beyond tribal casinos. 

“If you want to get back to traditional culture, understanding entrepreneurship and economics is a critical element of that,” said Dan Stewart, a professor of entrepreneurship at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash.  

“It’s just one form of us healing and getting back to where we were precolonization,” said Stewart, a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians who teaches in the American Indian Entrepreneurship graduate program, which prepares students to build sustainable businesses on tribal reservations.  

“There were trade routes, and there were intertribal barter and exchange. So that suggests there was a robust economic system between and within tribes,” Stewart said.  

“When colonization happened, and the reservation system happened, that part of us also died off. Because we weren't allowed to exercise it,” he added. With tribes forced to rely on the federal government for funds, “we reached a point where we really weren't creating our own monies.” 

In 1988, Congress enacted the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, opening new business opportunities and establishing the framework for gambling on tribal lands. That’s helped bring in needed capital. In Minnesota, each of the 11 tribes has at least one casino.  

The gambling industry generated more than $46 billion in gross revenue in fiscal year 2025, with more than 500 operations across 29 states, according to a recent report from the National Indian Gaming Commission.   

In 2025, the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association found that all tribal casinos in the state combined would rank as the second-largest tourism attraction. Only the Mall of America draws more people.   

Despite that financial muscle, Native American small business entrepreneurs still struggle to get the resources they need to start and grow in the traditional finance system. 

In the United States, people typically fund business startups using accumulated family wealth, home equity or securing a loan with a good job and credit score.    

“These three options are not available to most Native peoples. Indian peoples are the poorest people as a group in the United States,” said Robert Miller, a professor at Arizona State University College of Law and a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma 

Without those assets, people from tribal communities often face strong headwinds to starting businesses. The home equity option is particularly complicated when houses are built on reservation trust land: The United States holds the title to such land on behalf of the tribe.  

“The typical small business loan is going to use somebody's dwelling as collateral,” said Stewart. “But if you don't actually own the house that you're on because it's held in trust, or if people know that the land is held in trust, they're not as likely to give you a loan.”  

Despite these barriers, momentum for economic self-sufficiency is building in Native communities.  

Stewart and Miller see potential business opportunities in supporting tribal enterprises, including food vendors, cleaning companies and legal services.    

“I hope that if reservations would do more in the private sector, it would keep money circulating on the rez,” Miller said. “That creates more jobs, that creates more economic activity, creates more tribal taxation.” 

The increased economic activity, they said, will reduce brain drain on reservations. When there isn’t opportunity in rural areas or tribal lands, people leave. Not just workers, but also those who would carry on Native ways of life and tradition.   

Entrepreneurial success won’t look the same for every tribal nation, but control of resources will mean more control over their futures and stronger tribal sovereignty, Stewart said.   

It's cultural revitalization, Stewart said. “It's cultural reclamation, but it's also insurance for the future.”    

This story comes from the Upper Midwest Newsroom, a public media collaboration between Wisconsin Public Radio, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Prairie Public in North Dakota and Minnesota Public Radio News made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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For centuries, tribal trade fueled culture and commerce. The reservation system severed those ties, but they never died. A new generation is reclaiming that entrepreneurial spirit as tribes work to diversify their economies beyond casinos.

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