This Founder's Mission Is to Empower Indigenous Youth

0:00Imagine if this is the one place in the world where you could shop the most native indigenous owned stores. Hey, what's going on? I'm Benjamin Gottlieb, and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Why become an entrepreneur? Amy Dennett Dale came to entrepreneurship to give back to her community. For kinship, it's a vessel. It's a space that just carries us to the places we need to get to. It's become a very much like a community hub that is representative of so many people. Her journey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we are sitting down together today, has been long.

0:38full of both immense pain and difficulty, as well as acute fulfillment. I understand what my life's purpose is, even to learn how to be Diné, to learn my culture, to learn what it means to be Indigenous. We're chatting today as part of our series, Spotlighting Indigenous Entrepreneurs on Shopify, through our Build Native program. And Amy, really thankful to be here with you today. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, you're so welcome. Can't wait to get into this. Yeah. Let's start with that journey I alluded to, because it's really quite a journey. You didn't grow up in Santa Fe.

1:09No. You didn't grow up in many of the indigenous communities here in the Southwest. You were displaced, to put it mildly. What happened? So I actually grew up in the Midwest, in Indiana. My mom was part of Indian relocation in the 60s. So that's when young relatives were kind of pushed out in different areas in kind of a very odd way of promised jobs and a different life. And so she ended up in Ohio and got pregnant with me. And I was adopted out immediately at birth. And at that time, you know, it was before the Indian Child Welfare Act that came part of the 70s, which actually protected Native kids.

1:51So my birth family didn't even know about me. And so that was the beginning of a kind of separation from my culture, a separation from my blood. And I went off to have a really beautiful childhood, you know, with the family that raised me, but never really feeling like it was the place I was supposed to be. It was always that feeling of there was something else, but there was no one there to guide me, to teach me about my culture. And back in the 60s and 70s when I grew up, you know, there was even very little in media. It was just like TV or kind of crazy magazines or National Geographic. Like literally, I would read National Geographic to learn about my Dina culture.

2:32And so, yeah, it was just a very different pathway than how it would have been otherwise. I'm really grateful for that because I feel like Creator put me outside for a reason. I learned different things. I had a beautiful design career, lived all over the world working in fashion. And that allowed me to bring different gifts back home. You know, I learned a different way. And so right after I came back in 20, I guess it was 2019, right before COVID, I actually moved back to New Mexico. My daughter had just graduated high school. So I was finally kind of in my emptiness phase and I was ready. I was ready to come home.

3:12I was just like even to learn how to be Diné, to learn my culture, to learn what it means to be indigenous. And by saying that, it came with responsibility. Like for me to step into those shoes as a matriarch meant I had to find a way to help my community when I came home. So all those gifts and all those years I'd been living in other places, learning how to create wealth for corporations, to create marketing stories, to create visual stories like you do that all came back home with me. And that's what I really used to do what I would call social entrepreneurship with a brand platform. And yeah, it's just been a really interesting journey to kind of rethink what does even entrepreneurship mean for me, right?

4:00Well, we're definitely gonna get into that in this interview. And speaking of the community that you've talked about, we've been here now for just a few days, spending time in your backyard. We're actually right now in the backyard of your store. And there's no question there's a palpable community that you've created here. No doubt. It just bubbles up. It's just so beautiful. It bubbles up. But you said something really interesting just a few moments ago about how you used your experiences living outside of your community and have applied them to your brand here for kinship and also all of the other philanthropic things, which we're going to talk about later.

4:37Tell me, when you were working in corporate fashion, for example, what are some of the things that you learned that have become applicable for you in this environment? My gosh, creating wealth, right? That's why we're all doing that. But, you know, all those years that I worked for companies, like even back then, I didn't know enough about how I think now. It's like, where did all that money go? How is it reinvested? It certainly wasn't reinvested in the people that were part of the production cycle because Because all those places that we produce those clothes for mass production, we're living in poverty.

5:12So I just had that moment, you know, raising a daughter and really trying to be more conscious of how I was teaching her. I realized I had to relearn myself, right? To decolonize the way that I'd been taught about corporate life, right? I was making money without knowing where that reinvestment was happening. But by having my own brand and having my own platform, which came a little bit later, I was able to really rethink for everything that I take, I want to be able to give back, to have a balance, to have, in Dene, it's called hajo. It's like this balance we have between all parts of our lives.

5:50So, you know, in the old world of corporate fashion, that would have been, oh, yeah, I'm going to design this and I'm going to give 1 % back and like, which is nothing, right? But in my mind, I create the wealth to fulfill a problem or a dream. So we had this idea of building a skate park. It required a certain amount of money. So to actually use those tools I had to create that wealth, to create that connectivity for sponsorships, which were like visual marketing programs and all the different things, all those things I learned in corporate became the ways I created wealth to give back. To give back and it's become applicable now.

6:27You keep referring to the name and the language, Jine, which for our audience who are unfamiliar, that's another way of saying Navajo. Navajo. Yeah. That's how we refer to ourselves. How you refer to yourselves is Jine. You know, for kinship, even like the word, it has the word ship in it, right? It's a vessel. It's a space that just carries us to the places we need to get to. So it's become a very much like a community hub that is representative of so many people. So it might be my brand, but I'm just basically here as the auntie or the matriarch that really makes space for our young people because I've already had my career.

7:03I want to find ways to help them thrive, right? And being here based in Santa Fe, for me, it's important that I'm not complicit, right? I don't just create wealth at this shop. I want to create opportunities for all young people here. Imagine Santa Fe, because you've walked around here, right, for the last couple days. Imagine if this is the one place in the world where you could shop the most native indigenous owned stores That's the future I see That's what we need to go to is Imagine if it was completely the space where we could all thrive And to do that, what do we need? We need space and we need economy And so for me, the idea of, you know, the Shopify platform You can have a storefront, but you're always going to need an e-commerce to balance out everything, right?

7:53And reach a more global audience beyond this town. So that's the beauty of, you know, all the work I've done together of creating an e-commerce brand over the last 10 years is that I want to be based here and represent. But I also want to have that access out in the world for people to buy the brand. So all these beautiful artists that you've seen coming in and out today. Yeah, they've been coming in the entire day. The entire day. It's just been so great. It's like a family reunion. But yeah, I just see this as a way that we can really amplify and elevate those artists out in the world because not everybody knows how to do it, right?

8:28And I came from a background where in corporate, this was like second nature to me of creating brands, selling things, selling them in stores, at retail, selling them online, knowing how that whole system works to make e-commerce go out in the world. So that's what I want to do here. It's just like, again, I say it's a ship and it's almost like a spaceship. I feel like it's actually the mothership. You know, it's kind of like the aliens of change are all here. We just need to find ways to get out in the world in a more modern context, which is e-commerce. Well, let's talk about that change and this future state of Santa Fe, which I think is really interesting.

9:06We had a chance to talk before this interview. and you, just like you just mentioned in this sit down here today, have great and deep affection and care for the youth of your community and educating them properly. It seems like education is integral to this future state that you're talking about when it comes to Santa Fe, making sure that young folks, especially young indigenous folks, feel comfortable getting into entrepreneurship because not all of them have the same resources that other types of children have when it comes to taking risks like that. Exactly. I think it's just creating that safe space.

9:41You know, there's just a way that we need to approach this. First of all, I need to be a really good listener because it's not my job to tell them what to do. I need to listen to them and understand how I can help in any way. But it is that mentorship of having that outside brand experience, right? Because I've worked for my past life. It's knowing how to do like collaborations, right? You know, a lot of folks don't know how to enter that space if they haven't been near fashion, right? So the fact that I was working in fashion from the outside and can come back here and be a mentor has been a huge benefit.

10:17So, I mean, that's kind of what I want to do with the rest of my life is just pass on the knowledge that I've gained, build bridges to the future. So those bridges to me are taking all that connectivity, all that tenure and experience I had in corporate fashion, and make a bridge so Native folks, young people, have a clearer, faster path into that venue. Whether that's in the performance art space, the dance space, the fashion space, the sports space. And I should say sports. Like, why is For Kinship doing skateboarding? my tenure though the years because i think i'm on my 40th year in the industry was an active sportswear designer well let's let's let's take a moment there because i don't know if our audience is familiar you have this incredible project where you built a skate park with my community with your community in a place that never had something like that before yeah right um first of all where is this and why a skate park of all things yeah why not you know I say that for everything.

11:21Why not? We should have everything. Those kids out there should have every access that my daughter did, which they don't. So after COVID, I was just thinking they had been through so much because of the lack of infrastructure. Imagine going through COVID without Wi-Fi, without electricity, and sometimes running water. We have infrastructure issues on Navajo Nation. I was going to say, this is in Navajo Nation where you built this? Yeah, 27 ,000 square miles over three states. It's one of the largest reservations. Um, so after COVID, I just thought I wanted to really build something or bring something to the community that would just make them joyful, to make them happy, a place we could gather.

11:59There's not parks. There's not, you know, there's not community centers. It's very remote area. So instead of building it near the cities, I felt that the kids out in the middle of nowhere is where I want to focus because they have the least resources. So we built the first one in 2022, I think is when we opened, with a lot of great partners in the industry and the skate and outdoor community kind of backing us on that. And with that, building it with the community, right? With their input as well. With their input, they were part of everything, right? So I think that's the beautiful thing is for us.

12:35It's a place where I thought I was building it for the kids. And yes, the kids are having a great time and progressing in the sport. but it's an intergenerational community space. I go there and grandma and grandpa are there with the kids or the little ones are there with their older brothers. Watching them skate, hang out. Everybody's bringing like stuff to cook out. And it just makes me realize how much we need this space out there. It's bringing everyone together. It's making, they're building so much confidence because they're getting so good at the sport. So I think that's my job as auntie is to kind of keep up with them, right?

13:08Because we're going to have to have more mentorship. We're going to have to have more equipment. And eventually we're going to have to be able to host Olympic athletes out there because they are going to get that good so fast. Skateboarding is an Olympic sport. Yeah, thinking towards the future. So we actually want to open the first indigenous skate school that will get a little rainbow van and fill it with skateboards. And Sean Shine Harrison, one of our lead mentors, is just going to drive around and teach kids how to absolutely embrace this sport. It's a healing sport. It's something for everyone.

13:40If you ask any skateboarder, like, what's skateboarding mean to you? And it's almost, I'd say, 90 % say the same thing. It saved my life. Skateboarding saved my life. Why is that? It's something that everyone can participate in, whether it's, you know, by themselves, with groups. It brings kids together. They get to know each other. They get to be healthy. They get to aspire to bigger things in life, you know? Because it's just like you're out there and you're bored and you just, you start dreaming bigger. different things because your whole body is activated. And this experience, building this skate park, all the other community work you do for kinship, so where we are right now, it's also been healing for you, I would imagine.

14:24Oh my gosh. Yeah. So like I would be five years old now, right? In my Denae years, I came home five years ago in 2019. So I'm about, you know, kindergarten now. And I still have that joyfulness. Like today, when you saw the relatives in there, in my wildest dreams. I couldn't imagine that when I was little to be in that situation. And so it's so joyful. Yeah. My guest today is Amy Denadel, founder of ForKinship. We'll get back to our conversation in just a moment. But first, a quick word about this series. This is the first episode in our Build Native series. And trust me, you will not want to miss the other entrepreneurs that I get a chance to sit down with and talk to.

15:04So please, if you have not already subscribed to Shopify Masters, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching this on YouTube, go ahead and click that subscribe button as well. And by the way, in the description box on YouTube, if you're interested, there's a link to a free trial for Shopify where you can also take charge of your own financial future. Back with Amy, the four kinship. You really let your past life go when you moved here. Yeah. I think when we talked before, you told me you sold everything. You gave most, pretty much gave everything away. I'm still in my kitty chair though.

15:35I was going to say, we've been admiring the kitty chair. I made it for my daughter. So this is her chair. What was that process like? I can imagine so difficult, but also therapeutic maybe. I mean, really difficult, right? I think a part of allowing new things to enter in, you have to let go of toxic things. So for me, I had to let go. It's part of, I think it would be decolonizing my life, right? I had to let go of the things I'd been taught before. The things that I've always been told that are going to make me happy or going to make me successful. Stuff, money, wealth, houses, cars, all the things we get projected at us that, you know, if you have all those things, you're going to be happy.

16:19I'm sorry to interrupt. You said yourself a few moments ago that you had a nice upbringing relatively just that you felt disconnected, of course. I had a beautiful, loving upbringing, but I never, you know, being raised as well in the Midwest where there was like so few brown BIPOC relatives. It was always like a feeling that I don't really belong here. But yeah, it was a loving upbringing. But I just wanted to know more about my culture. And I didn't know how to find that. And it lingered with me through my young adulthood, becoming a mom. But really when I was ready to step into that was when my daughter was leaving the nest.

16:55And then I was stepping back into my childhood, back to the full circle of where do you come from? Where do you belong? You know, my ancestors' DNA is in the ground that I stand on. So the vibration and the feeling I have from being here, the dreams I have now, they're completely different than any other time in my life when I lived all over the world. And so I just hear a clearer message. I understand what my life's purpose is. I think that's a big thing because we're all searching for that, right? Why are we here on the planet? Why was I put here? What am I supposed to be doing? And we search and we try to find that through different ways.

17:37And we get a lot projected at us in terms of what people tell us is important. But like my journey back home was to let go of all that came before and to step into that space of where I was allowed to be reborn, you know, and to really embrace who I am as a Dine person, to learn what that means to be a matriarch. And I definitely stumbled around the first couple of years because like any baby, you don't really know. And it was like not really understanding the language, the culture, the protocol. And so that really joyful time came with a lot of pain. You know, it came with a lot of harsh realities.

18:14And I realized the inequity between how my daughter was brought up and how all these kids that I was meeting out there, because I worked a lot with the school systems, doing art programs and fashion programs and stuff. I just realized it was so not equal. And so that's really got me motivated in creating some programming and ideas of like how I could use what I've done in the past in a positive way just to pass it on. You've mentioned your daughter now a few times. Yeah. I have a young daughter myself. Aw. much younger than yours. And you started the brand with her, with your daughter. Yeah. Right.

18:51Yeah. And now the brand is here in Santa Fe. I mean, tell me, what does it mean to you to have built something with your daughter, something that you own, a brand that represents your values? And how might that, how might you inspire someone else who's looking at you and, and trying to emulate something like that? Yeah. I think, you know, the first thing is because people think it's such a big brand or they might see some of the media that we do, which is totally needed for the work we do in social impact, that they would think that I somehow had a background in this or that I had some training on it.

19:30But I think it's really important to say is that I am just Lily's mom. That's who I am. I'm Lily's mom. So it comes from that point in your life when you just decide to wake up and live your life differently. So for me, it was stepping into community work. There's just one day that it was the day that I was ready. And so every day it got to be more and more of my time and more of my effort, more of my intentions. And now it's this like larger brand platform that I'm operating with multiple kind of nonprofit community initiatives under that, but I'm just Lily's mom. So anybody can do it. You could do it.

20:10You know, it's just saying like, I'm busy raising this young daughter, but at some point you want to teach your daughter how to live purposely. Right? So that's kind of what it happened with step by step. I let go of what I was being pre-programmed to in terms of, you know, mindlessly creating wealth and not really knowing. And like, I want to just focus this ability I have on changing things for the positive for my people. So it became very clear what my life's purpose was. You're really speaking to my core. You're moving me a little bit. I'm going to get emotional because you're right. I mean, it's sometimes you just go through the motions of your day.

20:47And I got to be honest, I think you're selling yourself maybe a little too short. I mean, it is difficult to put everything down. Or at least it seems that way. But from what you're saying is that you just were, if I can use your word, you were ready. I was ready. Yeah, I was ready. I think part of it too was never really understanding what the displacement was doing to me, right? Because I probably was an alcoholic my entire life as a way to kind of medicate that feeling that I didn't know what I was, you know? So two years ago, I became sober. And then that consciousness even further accelerated the healing.

21:29Because for the first time ever, I understood what it was with the pain, with the suffering, with that feeling that I was always trying to deal with, which is imposter syndrome from my childhood. So it was able to really step into a much stronger position to embrace the community work and know how to manifest that in a different way. Just being fully conscious in it, fully conscious of things going around me. And so I can say like it's healing me as much as I'm putting this time and effort and intention into this part of my life. I can't even tell you what I've gained. It's just it's it's what I always needed to do.

22:10And now I get to do it. Yeah. We're so happy that Shopify has been part of that journey. And as you know, Shopify is incredibly committed to supporting entrepreneurs of all types. of all socioeconomic backgrounds, of all experiences. In this moment, you have choices. You could choose another partner. You could work with someone else. You could have someone else run or operate your e-commerce store. But you're with us. Yeah. Why? Gosh. I'd say for me, it's just, first of all, the fact that there is even a build native with Shopify. it just feels like it's home. The fact that you are actually focusing on Indigenous peoples and see us, like you see us, you've created this space for us.

23:01So that's just like such a huge comfort in this whole world of selling and doing and whatever. You know, the fact that I get to work with Indigenous partners within this brand, that's revolutionary. That's not out there. And so for me, there's just a comfort. There's this community that's being created. And what I see is this is a space for all those young people I'm telling you about. It's a way that we can partner and help train them on how it rolls, how they can use this to thrive and create the economy they need in their life to live in a way that they get invested in their dreams. So that's the beauty of it.

23:41And the fact that, you know, it is a partner brand for us and that you're doing this great work with Native folks. I mean, I just, I never could imagine that was even possible. So. Well, it's really kind of you to say. And Amy, if we could shift gears just a tad to why we're here this particular week. There are a number of Indigenous entrepreneurs, artists, creators. They've all descended like us, like our team here on Santa Fe, because this is the Santa Fe Indian market. Why is this event such a mecca, a nexus for indigenous creators and entrepreneurs? Gosh, it's just like, this is where we all gather.

24:20It's almost like the gathering of nations, right? It's that month that we all complain about, we all stress about. I slept here at my shop last night because we're all trying to pull our stuff together at the last minute. But I don't know, it's just, again, it's a beautiful way that everyone from Turtle Island can come here and actually be together and get like, you know, social media, we all kind of connect over other ways. You're together, but not physically together. Physically. This is a physical thing. This is like getting to give hugs and like shake hands and like rub shoulders with all of the relatives from all tribes.

24:58And this is like probably one of the biggest inner tribal gatherings in the world this week. And to have it here in Santa Fe in August when it's just like this crazy, beautiful weather, it's just, I don't know, it's just like a beautiful thing to even be part of and to know that it exists. Where else are you going to go and see people from up north, people from down south, everyone in the middle, all the crazy Southwest relatives all coming together to celebrate Indigenous creativity? That's why we're all here. So everybody that's brilliant can have their shine. Well, let's talk some more about the creativity.

25:34It's obviously on display in the artwork, the pieces in your store. You're wearing an incredible number right now, which I think I need to get my hands on. I don't know if I could pull it off, but I might try. Tell me about the pieces, the clothing that you're selling, the artwork, and kind of how you procure it. Yeah. It's like so many different ways. Like I am such a hoarder of textiles. So like you don't want to see my storage unit. It's like filled to the brims with everything I've been collecting We have to send our film crew there later. Yeah. 20 years of collecting with my daughter. Like we started when she was born in 2000 and really started our archives.