How do you start a small business when you can’t mortgage your home: DreamSpring

Native Americans face unique developmental challenges with communal property.

Rosemary “Apple Blossom” Lonewolf, 70, grew up amid a family of potters from Santa Clara Pueblo but when she wanted to dream bigger and become a mural artist, she found that as an Indigenous person she couldn’t mortgage her property to get a small business loan to buy the needed tools and equipment.

“I had gotten a million no’s from various banks,” Lonewolf said.

Banks expect collateral for loans, typically leveraging the borrower’s home. Indigenous people living on reservations do not own their homes in the classic sense and are often denied loans. That is where microlenders such as DreamSpring step in to give opportunities to people like Lonewolf.

DreamSpring’s work is unusual in that much of modern development economics has focused on cataloging and granting land titles to people in the developing world so they can join the modern economy in renting, mortgaging and selling their property. Such work was pioneered by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who is often on the Nobel Economics Prize shortlist. However, Native Americans cannot join in this movement given their belief in communal property. DreamSpring helps natives like Lonewolf overcome this disadvantage.

The loan helped a 50-year career and work that can be seen in King Galleries, museums such as the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe’s Adobe Gallery and even on bridges like the Ed Pastor Pedestrian Bridge in Phoenix and the Tohono O’odham Hua Puindi or Basket Bridge in Tucson, Ariz. Lonewolf is even bringing her bridge-designing skills home to New Mexico. She’s working with the New Mexico Department of Transportation on an art project at Interstate 25 and Gibson Boulevard in Albuquerque.

A family tradition

Lonewolf learned pottery at 19 from her father, Joseph, at their home in Santa Clara Pueblo, one of the six Tewa-speaking pueblos in northern New Mexico. The tribe extends from the top of the eastern Jemez Mountains to the floodplains of the Rio Grande. Joseph would make highly polished, delicately chiseled seed pots and take them to large conventions that showed Indian and cowboy art.

In 1973, her father was offered a free booth at one of the conventions if he made some of the pots live. Lonewolf said her dad wasn’t comfortable doing that and he asked her to step in. “Honestly, at the time, I really didn’t know the whole process,” Lonewolf said, laughing.

The seed pots can be the size of a quarter and are covered in intricate etches. Lonewolf said she etched her seed pots with traditional stories from her pueblo, an art form that can be dated back to the cliff dwelling times, some 2,000 years ago. “I’m really proud of that, knowing that my foundation in clay is solid,” Lonewolf said.

Slowly, she started branching out to other forms of artwork, in part to support her young son. “It was hard to live on the reservation,” Lonewolf said. Pottery for Lonewolf wasn’t a passion, it was a necessity.

A bigger dream

Her second husband took her to New York in 1990. “That was where I got the dream to do murals and something bigger,” Lonewolf said. However, to do that, she would need tools and equipment she didn’t have access to on the reservation.

She started going to banks for loans — and getting rejected. She saw an advertisement for DreamSpring, a microlender based in Albuquerque.

“I was expecting a rejection,” Lonewolf said.

Her first proposal was accepted in 2005 and she said that the loan was used to buy an extruder, slab roller and other tools she needed to make larger pottery.

Lonewolf over the years has received three loans from DreamSpring. On Wednesday, she attended a luncheon to celebrate the organization’s 30th anniversary in Albuquerque.

“We know that small businesses are the economic backbone here in America.” Anthony Sharett, DreamSprings’ chairman of the board of directors, said at the event, following a video showcasing Lonewolf, amongst many others that they’ve helped.

The highlight of her 50-year career was when she saw one of her tiny seed pots in the Smithsonian alongside one of her grandmother’s water jugs. “It’s been a long career of moments like that,” Lonewolf said, “giving me the motivation to hang in there and do it again.” Moments and an organization willing to take a risk with no collateral that has now yielded untold dividends for anyone appreciating Lonewolf’s art.