Entrepreneur Louie Gong grew up in the Nooksack tribal community just north of Seattle. As a child, he was surrounded by wool blankets in tribal patterns and motifs — but most of them were not designed by Native Americans.
“Wool blankets are cultural items that are used very regularly by tribes all around the country, and the only source for those blankets for the last 160 years has been companies like Pendleton that usually just copy cultural art instead of working with cultural artists,” Gong says. “This kind of cultural appropriation has real economic consequences for Native artists and tribal communities.”
So Gong decided to flip that narrative, from appropriative “Native-inspired” products to truly “inspired Native” artwork. Through his business, Eighth Generation, he created the Inspired Natives Project to connect Native artists with paying outlets for their work.
The idea clearly resonated with his online community: last year, his Indiegogo campaign raised more than $60,000 in fewer than three weeks. This August, after eight years of growing his business online, Gong opened up a 1,300-square-foot storefront at Pike Place Market in the heart of Seattle, making history as the first Native-owned business in this historic landmark.
Before Gong reached these heights, his childhood was far from the urban life of downtown Seattle. Until the age of ten, he grew up in British Columbia, in a house without running water. Then, he moved with his grandparents to the Nooksack tribal community. “It was like moving into a mansion,” Gong remembers.
Throughout his young adult years, Gong continued to grapple with his mixed-race identity of Nooksack, Chinese, French and Scottish. At the age of 20, inside the Ethnic Student Center at Western Washington University, Gong stumbled upon MAVIN, a magazine about the mixed race experience. “It was tremendous validation for me, someone who a lot of times felt isolated because of my mixed heritage, to see that there were so many people who were having the same experience.” He eventually become a volunteer with the nonprofit MAVIN Foundation, then went on to become president of its board.
After college, Gong guided low-income, first-generation college students as a Child and Family Therapist. At the University of Washington’s Educational Opportunity Center, he led a workshop with students to explore and talk about their racial identity. They were stumped. But when he asked them to draw their feelings, they opened up a wellspring of insights. “These kids, who were too scared to address those questions verbally, … had done a really good job of expressing complex ideas through drawings.” At that moment, Gong realized that images have a unique power to reveal layered identities.
Gong’s next job as an administrator at Muckleshoot Tribal College led him further along the pathway to his future business when he helped create “giveaway” items for the Tribal Canoe Journey, a large celebration of 70 different tribes from the Pacific Northwest to New Zealand. During the preparation for the event, Gong’s colleagues noticed he could paint a straight line, so they asked him to decorate drums as gifts. It was his first experience creating art.
“That experience of painting all the hand drums in preparation for the canoe journey unlocked a passion for creating cultural art,” he says.
It was at this time in his life that Gong treated himself to a luxury he had always longed for as a middle schooler: Vans sneakers. “When I got to the store, I noticed there was not one pair that reflected who I was,” he says. So he bought a gray pair. “I just started doodling on them with a Sharpie. What came out of it was a mash-up of Coast Salish art, animal motifs and influences from my urban environment. So I felt like that pair of shoes was a really organic and honest reflection of who I was as person, more so than the hand drum.”
Before he knew it, Gong was getting commissions for custom shoes, and founded Eighth Generation as a way to sell his work. He chose the name to acknowledge the creative collaboration with people who came before, and because “Eight” sounds like “prosperity” in Cantonese. Within four years, he had a social media following of about 40,000 people. But he wanted to aim even higher: to enter the global blanket market and raise awareness about Native art and the tangible impact of appropriated artwork on cultural artists.
“I’m looking to plant that seed among consumers so that next time they stand in front of a shelf forced with the decision to buy a product produced by a non-Native company that has no artist name attached to it, or a product featuring cultural art that includes the artist’s name and made by a Native-owned company, they start thinking about how their dollar either supports or undermines the cultural art forms that they are drawn to,” he says.
Even with Gong’s passion, the global blanket market was a high bar to reach. “I had to save up for years and years.” His initial investment, beyond the crowdfunded resources, was between $80,000 and $100,000. With his savings, he was able to produce the first blanket for the launch of his Indiegogo campaign.
Crowdfunding has helped the company prosper and reach new markets. “The highly visible crowdfunding campaign helped remove, as a barrier, that idea that this market was off-limits,” Gong says. “Because of the legitimacy of the Indiegogo platform, a lot of media outlets were interested in supporting us. We got a lot of exposure from key blogs and newspapers and that kind of thing that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”
After raising $63,190 on Indiegogo from 362 backers, Gong expanded his product offerings and collaborated with new artists. Now, the store sells products in 12 categories, featuring artwork from five different Inspired Natives Project artists.
This summer, he opened his storefront at Pike Place Market — the only place he was willing to manage a brick-and-mortar location. “Having the store at Pike Place Market is not just about business opportunity, it’s about the ability to reach the 10 million people a year that visit Pike Place Market and help control the narrative that they get about contemporary Native people,” he says.
“What people are getting from media and from non-Native companies selling cultural art is this idea that Native people are symbolic of ancient history, that we’re symbolic of the natural environment or that we’re charity projects,” Gong explains. “And when you visit Eighth Generation, you recognize that Native people are alive, and we’re thriving, and we’re real people just like you, and that’s because we carry forward this tradition of putting art on utilitarian things.”
Instead of traditional drums, today, that utilitarian thing might be a phone case. By linking Native art with products that consumers want, Gong breaks stereotypes inside his store. “We want people to recognize Native artists as being kickass professionals who would make great business partners.”
To pay back the community for its stellar growth, Eighth Generation has supported artists-in-residence in the Pike Place Market store, hosting six Native artists a year. They’ve spread the wealth even farther, donating nearly $40,000 to local nonprofits and community events, including over $8000 in wool blankets to the water protectors at Standing Rock.
Gong has turned a national spotlight on the strength and vibrancy of modern-day Native American culture at a crucial time. Appearing in international headlines, the Dakota Access Pipeline would carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, threatening Sioux burial grounds and the environmental safety of the tribe’s lands and water supply. To help protect Native lands, Eighth Generation donated 60 blankets to the community gathered in Standing Rock as the weather turned cold. Gong encourages his community and Indiegogo supporters to continue to follow along and learn more about Standing Rock and the Pipeline.
Part business, part kickass stereotype-smasher, Eighth Generation is shaping Native history in its image. “We are breaking down barriers to economic success that have been in place for hundreds of years,” he says. “Overall, we simply represent what is possible when people work together for a common goal.”
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