Native small business owner: Main Street needs someone in the room

Megan Bull Bear poses for a photo in her Mankato store, Lakota Made. (Photo courtesy of Megan Bull Bear)I started Lakota Made in 2018 at my kitchen table with six salves, made from plant medicines I learned from Lakota elders. Today, we have a storefront on Riverfront Drive, a small production team, more than 100,000 online orders and customers in 213 countries and territories around the world. Our social media community has 179,000 followers and reaches an average of 2 to 4 million views a day. Along the way I learned where a small business s power starts and where it ends. It starts with community. Our storefront sits blocks from where the Dakota 38 were hanged, and we chose that on purpose. It s a place where Indigenous artists sell their work, where people come to learn about plant medicine and where history gets told by the people it happened to. It also brings people to Mankato. Customers have told us they changed their vacation plans just to come see our store. People plan trips