Indian tours find niche in travel industry

FRIDLEY, Minn. -- Born on a reservation, Sonja Tanner was shocked to learn that Europeans sometimes knew more about American Indian history than she did.

Tourists from places as far away as Germany and Japan would drop historical tidbits on the local Dakota or Ojibwe tribes while trying to book visits to tribal lands through Tanner's travel agency.

Eventually, she began offering a few packages that catered to the tourist interest -- a visit to Mounds Park in St. Paul or to the Mille Lacs Trading Post in northern Minnesota.

As she gained a reputation for handling tribal tours, Tanner, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, began to view Indian lands as an untapped market that could be her niche in a time of Internet competition and falling commissions.

Now, her 2-year-old Native Tours travel agency offers an array of tours on Indian land from burial mounds in Minnesota to the mountains of Montana and pow-wows in New Mexico.

All of the travel guides who work for Native Tours are of Indian descent. The six-employee company reported revenue of roughly $100,000 last year, Tanner says.

'I had a lot of questions'

Cori Maxon was attracted to Native Tours by an intrigue of the unknown. She has been fascinated with Indian history since growing up in the small South Dakota town of Gregory, which has a significant Indian presence.

Her father's colorful tales about ceremonies at the nearby Pine Ridge reservation ignited her interest, which eventually led her to take a summer trip through Native Tours to Pine Ridge, which includes the Wounded Knee battleground site.

"I really wanted to see what it was like," says Maxon, 48. "I had a lot of questions."

Native Tours offers trips to tribal lands in seven states, working closely with tribes like the Navajo, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla in California and the Manshantucket Pequot in Connecticut.

Melanie Benjamin, chief executive of Minnesota's Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, said the tours are an important educational tool.

"People assume we're all the same but we're not," Benjamin said about Indians. "There's misunderstandings as a whole -- that we don't pay taxes and we get monthly payments -- that's not true."

Tanner said Native Tours supports Indian businesses, stopping at hotels, restaurants and even gas stations that are owned by tribes or tribal members.

"We need more support from each other," she said.

One tour package, the Women's Spiritual Wilderness Adventure, takes 10 women to Glacier National Park in Montana, where the group sleeps in a teepee, rides horses and fishes on mountain land that the Blackfeet tribe calls home.

In long-ago America

Some tourists use the trips to ponder a family tale of Indian blood, Tanner said, while others seek a glimpse of what it was like to live in long-ago America.

Tanner researched Indian history for a year before launching Native Tours, spending time at state historical societies and visiting tribes to speak with elders.

The Mankato conflict. The Kathio State burial grounds. The stone carvings in Jeffords National Park. Along the way, Tanner discovered she knew little, if anything, about the relics and artifacts left by her ancestors and others in Minnesota.

"It's kind of like being adopted and finding out who you are and where you came from," Tanner said.

"I heard about the Boston Tea Party but I never heard about the massacre of Sioux people in Mankato," she said, referring to the 1862 Dakota conflict in which hundreds of Indians and white settlers were killed in southern Minnesota.

Even within her own family, Tanner said they rarely spoke of their culture, recalling her grandfather describing signs that read "No dogs. No Indians."

"For a generation or two, it really wasn't popular to be Indian," Tanner says. "I remember my grandma saying it was just safer that way."

Native Tours visits only lands and ceremonies in which the tribes have invited the group. Tanner says there are sacred rituals and sites they have agreed not to view.

"The elders have said what you can and cannot do or say," she says. "It's not open for exhibition."

Responses to tribal tours have been strong in Germany and Japan where the state of Minnesota advertises, says Joan Hummel, spokeswoman for the state Tourism Department.

"I don't think the Europeans have anything similar. It intrigues them," Hummel says.