Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — Indigenous students and young professionals hoping to build capacity and economic resilience for their home communities gathered for the Indigenous Student Seminar at the Hoover Institution on Aug. 3-7, 2026.
The sixth annual weeklong gathering brought together approximately 30 students and recent graduates from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to reinvigorate the entrepreneurial spirit that was once pervasive among Indigenous peoples, pre-contact; bring about regulatory changes to help Indigenous groups chart their own economic path; and discuss the barriers to private enterprise encountered by tribal members.
Seminar participants discussed the effect of colonial-era laws on Indigenous peoples, how reworking these policies can improve economic resilience on tribal land, and how doing so can catalyze the natural entrepreneurial spirit demonstrated by Indigenous peoples for millennia, contrary to modern stereotypes.
The group also recognized the growing network of scholars focused on Indigenous economic renewal and on the increase in scholastic opportunities tailored to Indigenous students wanting to learn about building better governing institutions for their communities.
The seminar is part of the Renewing Indigenous Economies Project at the Hoover Institution, directed by Hoover senior fellows Terry Anderson and Dominic Parker, and administered and moderated by Gonzaga University professor Daniel Stewart.
“Many students come to the seminar with a feeling of despair about their tribal economies, but they leave inspired by the prospect of incorporating traditional tribal cultures into modern economies,” Anderson said of the program’s impact. “Their visions will return dignity and self-determination to the continent’s first, proud inhabitants.”
“The participants leave with new ideas for rebuilding their nations and the confidence to do it,” Parker said. “It's inspiring."
Robert Miller, professor of law at Arizona State University and author of the book Reservation Capitalism, stressed what many speakers during the week would tell attendees: that the native peoples of North America engaged in trade, took economic risk, respected and recognized property rights, and even utilized intellectual property principles, often hundreds or thousands of years before contact with European settlers.
“We ourselves have almost forgotten this, and swallowed the European propaganda,” he said.
Miller also laid out some stark statistics about average conditions across Indian Country within the United States.
Unemployment is between ten and twenty times higher than off reservations, and four of the ten poorest counties are found in Indian Country. Up to 60 percent of residents of Indian nations have no reliable phone or internet connection and a stunning 14 percent of households do not have access to electricity.
Even those that overcome all of those barriers face a major barrier when they consider pursuing entrepreneurship: 86 percent of tribes have no established, regulated bank in or near their territory.
To reverse these trends, Miller said tribes need help to encourage the entrepreneurs they do have to formalize their operations—by setting up shops, hiring employees, and fully participating in the legal, banking, and taxation systems.
Only this will allow the dollars earned in native tribes to circulate and stay within the community.
How did tribes get to the dire situation faced by many of their inhabitants today?
Adam Crepelle of Loyola University Chicago spoke to attendees about the many examples that demonstrate the pre-contact economic success of Indigenous peoples in North America, contrasting that with the unfair rules imposed on them after contact, which made them poorer.
The pre-contact settlement of Cahokia, in what is now Collinsville, Illinois, was more populous than London or Paris between ad 1000 and 1300. Tribes engaged in controlled burns of forests, developed their own currencies and measures such as wampum, and developed legal systems of their own prior to contact.
But today, Crepelle pointed out, legal precedent in the United States dictates that tribes do not own the land they reside on. They only have a “legal right of occupancy” on that land, as “a domestic dependent nation” of the United States.
Echoing points made by Miller, he said this inability to control or manage their lands without federal interference puts tribes at a disadvantage when seeking outside investment or developing natural resources found on what they believe is their own sovereign territory.
Donn Feir of the University of Victoria spoke to attendees about the rising number of self-governance agreements now in place for Canadian First Nations.
The self-governance agreements now cover the equivalent of more than a third of Canada’s total land area, with most of them enabling the signing First Nation to levy the equivalent of a provincial (equivalent to US state) income tax on all businesses and residents within its territory.
Feir’s demonstration showed how self-determined economic policy that considers a people’s history and their differences, tailored to suit their present-day economic realities, can reduce the number of tradeoffs or hard choices they must make.
She also illuminated the backwardness of many colonial-era policies towards Indigenous peoples. For instance, colonial administrators in the 1800s in what is now Canada often spent more time documenting and tracking how many First Nations people “wore ‘civilized’ (European) dress” than they did following up on the health, welfare, or economic output of those people.
Participants in the program expressed appreciation for the examples brought up but said that there appear to be significant barriers in many areas to achieving the buildout of a formalized, legally sound, local economy in many tribal communities.
Seminar administrator Dan Stewart and Deanna Kennedy, dean of the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University, spoke to attendees about the value of business education specifically designed for Indigenous students.
They showed that the number of Indigenous business school faculty is slowly growing, as is the number of business programs that directly appeal to Indigenous students.
Building upon discussions held in prior years of the program, several speakers were able to proudly point out new Indian-focused business and entrepreneurship certificate, undergraduate, and graduate-level programs launched at major US educational institutions, such as several new programs on tribal sovereignty and economic leadership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
Kennedy and Stewart said tribes can accelerate this movement toward Native study of business and entrepreneurship by offering business training at tribal colleges and setting up entrepreneurship clubs such as the popular DECA competitions for high school students.
Bringing forth a message of positivity was Richard Luarkie, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna Tribe and Director of the Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty (NAMES) Program at the Colorado School of Mines.
Luarkie argued that Native economic thinking has been distorted over time. He said the most damaging extraction on tribal lands was not uranium or gold. It was the idea that Native people are recipients of an economy rather than its architects.
“Colonization didn’t just extract minerals and take our land—it installed a ‘scarcity mindset’ where an ‘abundance architecture’ used to run in its place,” Luarkie said.
He criticized the current state and federal grant system, saying grants reward failure instead of chasing success.
He also pointed to a key resource opportunity, noting that 85 percent of known US rare-earth minerals are found on or near tribal lands.
Derrick Watchman, a former Navajo official and banker for tribes, spoke to attendees about how even when they achieve scale, such as his home Navajo Nation claiming 400,000 members and a $1.2 billion budget, barriers to development persist.
He said that the 2008 financial crisis pushed many large US banks to stop offering customized services to tribes, with only smaller banks emerging to fill the void.
He urged those in attendance to focus on developing more complex tribal courts, capable of navigating and adjudicating contractual disputes.
He described trying to buy a chain of five gas stations on Navajo land. He could not get credit for contractual reasons. He was then told to raise $2.5 million of the $4 million price and could not do it. White buyers from New Mexico purchased the stations instead.
When tribes bolster their internal legal systems, establish frameworks to encourage private business, and gain independence from colonial-era federal control, what do they do then?
Answering that question was André Le Dressay from the Tulo Centre of Indigenous Economics in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.
In the Canadian experience, First Nations have spent the past fifty to sixty years slowly but surely securing new economic rights in a series of court challenges.
But once those rights have been won in court, the real work begins.
Le Dressay illustrated how First Nations use the rights to begin to exert their own control over their local finances, infrastructure, and basic government services.
The Tulo Centre teaches First Nations how to master this.
Under his organization’s guidance, the number of First Nations levying property taxes in Canada has grown from ten to fifteen in 1988 to 175 today.
The way he sees it, tax revenue grows infrastructure, which grows the economy, which strengthens tribal government’s capacity and sovereignty.
He then led attendees in an interactive online game.
The game directed participants to choose targeted economic measures for their tribe to implement and then ran those choices against common scenarios, such as the sudden resignation of the tribe’s chief or, even more topical, the rapid onset of a global pandemic.
The game assigned scores according to how well the economic measures they chose held up against different adverse scenarios.
