Working in two worlds
A Native American businessman blazes a path for tribal business
that reaches beyond the reservation.
By Christina
Williams
Lynn "Bear" Robertson is a Grand Ronde tribal member and
co-owner of Spirit of the Bear, a McMinville-based wildfire and
general forestry contracting business. He didn't come by his
nickname in the way one might guess.
"I was one of those kids who didn't much like to wear
clothes," says Robertson with a sly smile. "I changed the
spelling of the name when I got older."
Robertson's build, however, suggests the animal, so the tag
suits him just fine. It also suits the business he runs with
the help of his wife and brother. Like a bear, Robertson isn't
afraid of going his own way.
Spirit of the Bear is a small business with a broad reach. It
was started in 2003, depleting the retirement accounts of
Robertson and his wife, Jennifer Orlowski-Robertson (the pair
met on a fire crew in 2000). With $250,000 they launched a
sustainable forestry com-pany with a focus on forest management
and firefighting. The business is based on expertise Robertson
honed while working in the forestry department for his tribe,
where managing the forestland through planting, maintenance and
pruning, helped keep the land productive — before
sustainability was a buzzword.
"People say 'sustainability' in their cheek, trying to be
popular," Robertson says. "I knew it growing up."
The Robertsons' intention is to build a business that brings a
Native American timber management approach to jobs both on and
off the reservation. It's a small operation — just 28
employees during last summer's busy season and revenue last
year of about $200,000 — and it's just one of
dozens of forestry-related contractors out there. But Spirit of
the Bear is a much larger statement about the future direction
for tribal businesses.
"The Roberstons' business is a metaphor for our mission, for
what we mean when we talk about private enterprise in Indian
Country," says Tom Hampson, executive director of ONABEN (see
THE TRIBAL APPROACH, above), a Native American entrepreneurial
support and education group.
Hampson sees ONABEN's role as a bridge that provides a way for
tribal businesses to grow beyond the reservation by serving a
greater constituency and building a stronger economy for both
the tribe and the region. The idea, Hampson says, is to bring
tribal values — in Robertson's case sustainable forestry
— along with them on the journey and to build up the
confidence necessary to thrive in both worlds.
"It's fascinating to see the tribes wrestling with local and
global economic issues," Hampson says. "They have to ask both
what's profitable and what's consistent with the cultural
values that they espouse."
The 41-year-old entrepreneur Robertson has worked it out
pretty well for himself, helped along by the fact that
sustainable forest practices are now in vogue well beyond
tribal lands. "I walk in both worlds and we cater to both of
them," says Robertson.
ROBERTSON GREW UP IN THE WOODS. His mother, a full-blooded
Grand Ronde (Robertson is half), took the toddler with her to
gather sword fern and moss that she picked with lightning speed
and sold to florists. Later he worked with his father's logging
company, learning how to take down trees with precision and
grace.
As a child he grew up around plenty of tribal members, his
mother's family, but without a formal tribe — the Grand
Ronde was one of 62 Oregon tribes terminated by the federal
government in the 1950s. He was a young man when friends and
members of his extended family raised money through bake sales
to send advocates to Washington to win tribal re-establishment
in 1983. At the time he wrote a letter to then-Gov. Vic Atiyeh
extolling the virtues of careful forest management as a way to
preserve timber jobs.
In the mid-'90s, Robertson took a job at the tribe. He trained
in firefighting and spent days on the forest crew and some
nights and weekends dealing blackjack and waiting tables at the
Grand Ronde's Spirit Mountain Casino. In his day job he worked
his way up to contract officer representative, managing the
tribe's forest contractors, but he knew his days working at the
tribe were numbered. "My ambition was elsewhere," is how
Robertson puts it.
His personality also wasn't suited to playing tribal politics.
It may be easy to elicit a grin from Robertson, but don't
mistake him for the kind of easygoing guy who will bite his
tongue and go with the flow. Robertson says he was quick to
call out the people he called "tribal brats," children of
prominent tribal leaders, for not doing their share of the
work. "That's just the way I am," he says. "I won't work with
anybody who won't work."
When he left his job with the tribe to go out on his own, he
knew enough about the forestry contracting business to know he
could probably carve out a comfortable enough niche for himself
just working with the tribe, but he quickly rejected that
business model. "Do that and you're just getting by," he says.
"For me, that's not exciting."
Instead, Spirit of the Bear works for all kinds of clients
including the U.S. Forest Service, private landowners and
Native American tribes in Washington and Oregon. When he does
reservation work he usually cuts a deal with reservation
leadership to put members of their tribe to work alongside his
own crew.
And his crew? It's practically a Native American United
Nations with employees representing the Grand Ronde, Colville,
Warm Springs, Shoshone, Siletz and Quin-ault tribes. "We hire
nontribal people," Robertson says mischievously, "if they can
keep up."
Reverting to seriousness, Robertson explains his penchant for
working with the region's tribes. "It's not a race issue for
me. We can benefit each other so much more if we work with each
other." Robertson says the tribes are eager to work with him
when he's giving jobs to their members and not just showing up
as a contractor to take money and move on. And for him, hiring
local workers is just less overhead for his business.
ONABEN's Hampson likes to use Spirit of the Bear —
Robertson took training classes through ONABEN — as an
example of a successful business with ties to several tribes.
He says intertribal trade, while it doesn't always make
financial sense, harkens back to the days when tribes met at
places like Celilo Falls and the huckleberry fields on Mt.
Adams to trade with each other. "We've come to understand that
these traditions and stories have importance and we see
ourselves as a catalyst to re-establish some of those business
contacts," Hampson says.
Jeff Nepstad, protection resources coordinator for the Grand
Ronde tribe's natural resources department, attests to Spirit
of the Bear's advantage. All things being equal, the tribe
would rather work with an Indian-owned company. And Robertson's
business apparently has somewhat of a corner on that
description. "We haven't had any other Native American
companies bid on our jobs," Nepstad says.
Robertson's tribal ties and sustainable forestry practices are
also attractive to Portland-based Ecotrust, which is
considering Spirit of the Bear as a contractor to manage some
forestland in Washington acquired by Ecotrust Forests, a new
investment fund. (See INVESTING IN TREES, p. 14.)
"We want to work with him because we're building on our
relationship with the tribes and how that relates to the land
and good forestry," says Kent Goodyear, director of market
connections for Ecotrust's forestry program.
THE WINTER AND EARLY SPRING MONTHS used to be quiet times at
Spirit of the Bear, but on a recent brisk morning, Robertson
was on the job with his brother Ken Robertson and son Brandon
Robertson, logging trees on a patch of private land destined
for development at the edge of Wilsonville.
Spirit of the Bear takes down the trees and hauls them to the
mill, which then sends the land owner a check for the value of
the timber and another check to the company for its cut, about
40% of the total.
Robertson knows which mills to send which kinds of trees to
and can size up their value in a blink of an eye. "See that one
over there with the nice column base? That will get $725 per
thousand board feet," he says. "That smaller one over there
will only get $650."
Robertson is wearing street clothes — jeans, a patterned
polo shirt and hiking boots — but when his brother,
suited up in cork boots, protective rubber pants and a hard
hat, calls him over for some help in taking down a tricky,
towering Douglas fir pitched back at a funny angle, Bear trots
over. Ken has his chainsaw halfway through the tree's trunk.
Bear picks up an axe and with the blunt end, drives an orange
plastic wedge into the cut: womp, womp, womp, womp, womp. The
axe flies, the chainsaw drones, the tree sways into a
thundering crash and Bear walks away with a grin.
Robertson may be the operations and marketing face of his
company — he plans to swing by another new development
under way across town and pass out cards in case the developer
needs help with the timber on a nearby plot of land — but
he still loves the physical work.
"We do things in a little different way," says Robertson,
describing how he walks among the trees on a site and then
tells the client what he thinks should be done. "It's not
something that's written down on paper anywhere. But you know
people who know the woods when you meet them."
The tribal approach
Support for would-be entrepreneurs is available under numerous
umbrellas around the state. From the small-business development
centers run by the federal government, to startup support from
groups like the Oregon Entrepreneurs Forum to business
education resources at colleges and universities, the
entrepreneur is covered.
But what about the Native American entrepreneur? That was the
question asked by ONABEN, a Tigard-based Native American
business network, which launched its own entrepreneur’s
training curriculum late last year called
Indianpreneurship.
Tom Hampson, executive director of ONABEN, says the training
program has given new energy to the organization —
“We’re more than a business plan with feathers on
it,” he says.
Indianpreneurship is built around classes and workshops and a
story-based curriculum that builds on the shared heritage of
the thriving, trade-based economies that used to exist between
tribes.
Hampson says ONABEN, which received an award in November from
Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government
for its enterprise development work, is getting a lot of
inquiries about Indianpreneurship from tribes around the
country and will sell the curriculum as a product and
service.
ONABEN (originally an acronym for Oregon Native American
Business and Entrepreneurial Network) was formed in 1993 by
four of Oregon’s Native American tribes with a focus on
encouraging private-sector growth. Its formation was prior to
the establishment of the reservation casinos that have become
cash cows — and sources of employment — for Pacific
Northwest tribes.
“We predicted that as a result of gaming,
entrepreneurship would increase, that with steady jobs and
steady incomes, latent entrepreneurial ideas would start
surfacing,” says Hampson. He reports anecdotal evidence
from the ONABEN entrepreneurial training classes, populated
with casino workers who bring a desire to branch out into a new
kind of business. “Because something Native Americans
haven’t had prior to the ’80s was the promise of a
good job,” he says.
But beyond the casinos, Hampson would like to see more of a
private sector emerging from Northwest reservations. “Our
role is to bring the marketplace to them and bring them to the
marketplace.”
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