RAPID CITY, S.D. — Clay Colombe learned throughout his career in banking and finance that success can unlock new opportunities, sometimes in unexpected ways.
The Rosebud Sioux tribal member who also has Nez Perce ancestry clearly was a success story. Having been born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux’s reservation in south-central South Dakota, Colombe earned an undergraduate degree and an MBA from the University of South Dakota and worked as a commercial lender at Wells Fargo. Later, he went on to become chief lending officer for Denver-based Native American Bank.
His success drew the attention of Wizipan Little Elk, the CEO of the Rosebud Economic Development Corp., who tried to convince Colombe to come home and put his financial acumen to work for the tribe’s benefit.
“He was always reaching out to me and saying, ‘Hey, when can we hire you?’” Colombe recalls. “I said, ‘It probably won’t happen.’ But we kept going, and we always kept a good rapport talking with each other.”
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Through the experience at Native American Bank, Colombe was exposed to best practices tribes around the country were successfully developing to support their economies, and that got him thinking.
“I found myself wondering why our tribe wasn’t doing that,” Colombe said. “Then, obviously, the next question is: Well, what are you doing to help? I didn’t want to be complaining about it if I’m not going to do anything about it.”
After a brief stint working in Dallas, Texas for a private equity firm, Colombe found the calling to work with his tribe to be too great to pass up. In 2017, he joined REDCO as its CFO and director of financial services, where he oversaw budgeting and accounting for more than a dozen subsidiaries.
When Little Elk left REDCO to join the Biden administration as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Indian Affairs last year, REDCO’s board encouraged Colombe to apply for the CEO position, to which he was appointed on Jan. 3.
REDCO was formed to create jobs on the reservation, one of the poorest regions in the country, and to establish new revenue streams for the tribe. Today, it operates a host of business enterprises on and off the reservation, including Sicangu Propane, Rosebud Office Solutions and Rosebud Construction Inc., as well as entities focused on financial services and real estate development.
However, unlike many tribal economic development organizations, REDCO also focuses on tribal cultural efforts via its Lakolya Waoniya language revitalization program and the 28,000-acre Wolakota Regenerative Buffalo Range it operates on land leased from the tribe.
The reason: The wealth of the Rosebud Sioux as a self-sustaining sovereign nation is inherently measured by the strength of its culture, Colombe said. If the culture goes away, then the true value of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate cannot be realized.
Colombe spoke with Tribal Business News about his vision for REDCO, where the organization sees opportunity for growth and how the tribe looks at wealth through a cultural lens.
At one point, REDCO was a financially struggling organization that Wizi Little Elk transformed into the stable, thriving organization that it is today. What was the secret to that transformation?
REDCO was created in 1999. All through the first decade of the 2000s, there really wasn’t a whole lot going on with it. There were probably a couple different changes in management and not really a good strategy on what we were going after. I think Wizi really changed both of those factors. When he started in 2012 it was him and one other employee, who is now our chief operating officer. He didn’t have a whole lot to work with and started going after what we could and developing our local markets, from propane delivery to office supplies. Then he focused on trying to get money from off reservation through financial services and government contracting.
He has to be really commended for doing that without a whole lot of resources. It was just hard work and dedicated employees and a good vision to do it.
Why was REDCO established?
We are the economic development arm of the tribe. We’re supposed to be creating jobs, creating revenue. A lot of the problems they saw in creating the jobs was having a good talent pool on the reservation. So then it started getting into, ‘Well, how do we fix that?’ We got some grants for workforce development and there’s other tribal programs that we worked with trying to help with that.
Then it’s like, ‘OK, how do we develop basically a self-sustaining economy?’ That’s where a lot of the work that’s under our Sicangu CDC is now at the Food Sovereignty Initiative, the homeowners initiative, the Lakota language initiative.
A lot of this stuff is not typical for a for-profit business to be undertaking, but we started getting into it just out of necessity, seeing this need. In 2019 we officially spun that off into a nonprofit, Sicangu CDC. That’s seen a lot of growth in that.
What was the strategy behind developing the portfolio of businesses REDCO operates today?
With propane delivery, most tribal members heat their homes off propane. So it was, ‘How do we keep this local rather than all the other providers coming from off the reservation?’ Let’s keep that money here if we can. Office solutions was born when we asked: How many office supplies does the tribe itself buy? Why aren’t we selling it to ourselves? We also have a construction company. There was so much work being done at the Rosebud Hospital, why aren’t we doing that? It’s a great way to start. You’re taking advantage of opportunities that we saw.
You also mentioned a focus on bringing money in from off the reservation. Is that where the government contracting came into play?
Yeah. We’re on our second 8(a) company. The first one graduated and we’re kind of winding that one down. But now our office products company has an 8(a) (certification), and we’re going through about year four of that now. Once it’ll graduate, then we’ll look to do another one. It’s a great advantage to being owned by a tribal government. You can keep doing (8(a) companies) rather than just doing it once.
Are there other sectors that you expect REDCO might get into over the next few years?
Financial services is a big one that we’re looking at. We did start an emerging CDFI, Tatanka Funds, so we’re looking to build that out to bring financial literacy and help people start their own businesses. Once we become a full CDFI, we can start doing more loans, potentially home loans and traditional banking products, which we want to get to.
That seems to align really well with your experience in the banking and private equity industries.
Yeah. Commercial banking’s a big chunk of my career, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of these different industries, seeing how it’s done. With what we do in financial services, I’m bringing that knowledge to help us grow.
Another thing Wizi did really well was going out and raising money for these things, be it through grants or social impact investments, which is another big part of what I’m doing. I’ve been able to step into that area without missing a step. The big success we’ve had on that is our Wolakota Buffalo Range. We’ve got 28,000 acres that we’re leasing from the tribe and we have close to 800 buffalo on the property now.
Do you look at that as an economic opportunity or is it purely a cultural initiative?
Both, actually. We were very fortunate to get some grants and some low-interest, long-term debt — some of it forgivable — from organizations like World Wildlife Fund and other socially conscious investors. It was about $5 million to get us through the first five years of operations.
If we do it in a good way where we’re not just, ‘Hey, we’ve got to make money, we’ve got to start harvesting animals and selling it,’ rather than growing our herd and being respectful to the buffalo, it doesn’t really turn profitable until about year five or six. We have that runway now because of these relationships we made.
Obviously, Lakota are buffalo people. It’s a huge part of our people throughout all of our history. We wanted to bring that back. How do we do it in the 21st century? We need to be able to make sure that the buffalo are never going to go extinct, that they’re growing. But also as a part of our food sovereignty initiative, we’re raising our own buffalo meat. We know where that’s coming from — it’s done here. We’re just kind of taking the first step of establishing that industry and then hoping that tribal members can start becoming sole proprietors.
Part of what we’re hoping to get to is having a meat processing facility that could potentially be mobile, so it could go to other tribal members’ production ranches and not just ours. But, again, it’s about helping create that economy and jobs for people.
With an unemployment rate on the reservation at a staggering 83 percent, what’s REDCO’s strategy around job creation?
We’re a sovereign nation and we want to be able to do whatever we can for our people to create these jobs. We look at how much money is leaving the reservation every year, basically, every month. We don’t have a lot of services there, so people have to go to Valentine, Nebraska, Rapid City, Sioux Falls, or Pierre. We’re looking at creating more of that local economy.
With the Keya Wakpala development [a 600-acre site near Mission, S.D.], we’ve got a master plan community that we’ve been doing the planning for the last couple years, but we’re really in a position now to start breaking ground and building homes.
How did you design it with that local economy in mind?
We have a grocery store there. We want to look at where the money is being made when it goes off the reservation. What is it being spent on? It’s on restaurants, on movie theaters, on other services like that. We’re looking to bring that there. Our primary role, REDCO’s not looking to own and operate every single one of these businesses. For the economy to grow, for our people, we need to set up these opportunities for entrepreneurs to create these businesses and continue hiring more people. If we get this built out, what we plan on doing over the next five to 10 years should bring an additional 670 jobs.
In your letter to the tribe when you got selected for the CEO position, you wrote: ‘The journey that we’re on to create a better world for our relatives seven generations from now requires bold action and bravery.’ To me, that sounded like a plea for more members to take the risk and become entrepreneurs.
Yes, exactly. Part of that, becoming an entrepreneur, you need your education, obviously, but also experience. Somebody can’t just say, ‘I want to start up whatever business’ and know nothing about it. That’s probably not going to work too well. Exposing our people to these new industries like government contracting, that’s something that a tribal member can go and run with. Get the experience with us, do good by us, and eventually you can go and do that. Whatever you want to open, people can come in and start getting experience in our finance office. When you open up a business, how many people say, ‘I didn’t realize you have to do all this accounting. That’s not what I started the business for.’ But it’s part of it. We can just help them get that experience and knowledge to be able to create something on their own.
In your letter, you also mentioned how the tribe views the connection between wealth and culture. How does that thinking frame the work that you’re doing at REDCO?
There’s not just the western definition of wealth, the accumulation of money and assets. But how are we preserving our culture, our language, our way of life — being sovereign, controlling our own destiny? We look at that as an indication of wealth, of growing. It’s basically strengthening our culture and trying to put a value on that, which is kind of hard with a monetary value. It’s preserving the language, preserving our way of life, the buffalo, bringing back our traditional food, being able to ensure that that doesn’t disappear in the next couple generations, which it potentially could. But seven generations down the road, we want it to be stronger than ever.
What you just said really gives me a new perspective on why you’re so invested in the food sovereignty initiative and the Wolakota Buffalo Range.
When you take a really deep dive into that, especially on Rosebud, the poor quality of food that generations of us grew up on, what has that led to? Poor health, diabetes, just all these issues. You take a big step away and look: The buffalo people were eating a very healthy diet, and then just thrown into basically crap. What’d you expect to happen? How do we get back to that? It’s not only creating jobs and adding to the economy, but the health benefits can move our people forward. Once you’re in much better health, your parents are in better health, you’re not having to care for family members in poor health, it allows you to go out and do more things.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was edited for clarity and length.
