The Act of Dreaming: Indigenous Arts & Building Values-Based Economy

We all dream. Even when we are taught repeatedly in daily, small, subtle – and also numbingly large – ways to forget about dreaming. We all dream.

It is our right as human beings to dream, to create dreams, follow dreams, and be instructed by dreams. 

I am an Anishinaabe woman, fortunate enough to have been given a daily instruction by my father to find power in my dreams. Anishinaabe people are a dreaming people. It’s what we know best. We receive our life instructions, spiritual knowledge and guidance, and insights into life and the meaning of this experience in this world and this place in time. 

As a child, my Dad asked me each day, “Did you dream?” and would listen to me. He would ask me questions like: what did I learn, how did I feel, and what messages or meanings were sent specifically to me. These critical daily conversations were at once personal and immediate–a map backward and forward, connecting me to my very real ancestors and descendants. His direct instruction continued a practice that my people have been carrying for thousands and thousands of years. 

I’m LeAnn Littlewolf (she/her), the Executive Director for the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO), a community group that focuses on Indigenous approaches to long-standing social justice issues, situated on Indigenous homelands in an urban landscape in Northern Minnesota. I work with a team of committed community members who want to make generational impact. Our strategies are community-generated and directed by cultural knowledge. 

It sounds easy and natural, but we face daily challenges living and working within our cultural values, long-held knowledge base, and cultural ethics. Built into our culture is a belief that we were put here on earth in this human experience to meet challenges and come through to fulfill our purposes. In my leadership, I work with people who love to dream and understand the high value of the pursuit of dreams – whether as visionary goals or desires, or as fields of metaphysical thought to explore and bring to some kind of material representation. 

Dreaming, for us, is also a form of redistribution–of imagination, possibility, and power to envision an economy that serves community, not capital.

At AICHO, we dream of an equitable economy based on our community strengths and values. 

We started in 1993 as a small grassroots organization of Indigenous community members who wanted to see greater safety and security in Duluth, Minnesota, at the western tip of Lake Superior—a small urban area in a largely rural region, with a significant Indigenous community population. 

Our first large endeavor was to create a domestic violence emergency shelter that breathed cultural practices. The Dabinoo’igan Shelter is open to community members fleeing violence and offers space where residents can participate in traditional practices like full moon ceremonies, daily smudging, and talking circles. That first shelter led to transitional and permanent supportive housing programs—creating pathways to safety, stability, and home. As a nonprofit, AICHO has built community-owned assets, purchasing property and putting the space to community design and community use. 

In 2007, AICHO purchased a former YWCA building, with ample space for a 29-unit housing program, a gym, office spaces, meeting rooms, a cultural center, rooftop garden space, and retail space. The building became the central location named Gimaajii Mino Bimaadizimin, meaning in Ojibwe/Anishinaabe language “we are, all together, beginning a good life.’’ Today, the community uses the space to host their own events like ribbon skirt making sessions, poetry slams, screenings of DIY films, family celebrations, and cedar ceremonies. 

I was recently clicking through my Facebook, watching video after video of Native artists showcasing their art forms. I stopped on a short video of a Lakota artist wrapping porcupine quills around thin strips of raw hide, and I started laughing, thinking that at some time in history, a Native person looked at the barbed quills and thought, “I wonder what beautiful thing I can make with this.” But that’s how I see our people create. They look at what might look like unusable or even seemingly hostile objects and turn them into works of creativity and function. Everything becomes art. On social media, a highly utilized tool used to create and share Indigenous creativity, I see artists thriving in an abundance of creativity and cultural continuity. 

In 2012, Indigenous artists attended community events in AICHO’s Dr. Robert Powless Cultural Center and saw the bare brick walls. They thought, “Hey, we could use these walls for art shows,” and this evolved into regular art shows, which started bringing in daily visitors seeking the experience of Indigenous art. In 2018, AICHO opened a small retail space on-site, featuring Indigenous art, craft, and traditional foods. Initially, around thirty artists and vendors were featured in the retail shop in the first year. Today, over 170 artists and vendors now have retail access to showcase their talents through the AICHO social enterprise, Indigenous First LLC. The social enterprise added high-quality fine art print production in 2023. In the first five years of operating, Indigenous First LLC experienced a surge of community excitement, new emerging entrepreneurs, and unexpected levels of sales. 

AICHO has seen the impact of offering retail access with food producers. Their food products were essential during the pandemic, and sales soared. AICHO is now developing a former corner grocery store into an Indigenous food market. The food market will increase retail space access and create a dedicated space to highlight and broadcast the ingenuity of Indigenous food production, the original food of the region, and cultural sustainability practices cultivated over centuries. Minnesota recently hosted the first Native Food Truck festival in our state (with wait lines over two hours long to place orders, demonstrating customer commitment to eat Native foods), and we now see more Native restaurants being established and recognized. In building a new type of economic movement, every successful opportunity builds a stronger future for the larger collective. 

Through Indigenous First LLC and our food market, we are building an Indigenous solidarity economy—rooted in collective ownership, cultural production, and reciprocity.

At AICHO, we have a lot of young community members who are sustaining the daily work by hosting and organizing entrepreneur trainings, vending at powwows and outdoor fairs, creating art, and believing in the dream that we can all have a different economic reality if we work together. The young community members work closely with older adults and elders in true partnership built on respect. We all have a place and a purpose in this. 

The dreaming will continue, now more than ever. 

It’s how movements of change are sustained through times of high challenges. Because dreaming is a human right, that means everyone has access to shape our collective vision for the future. 

Community organizations and nonprofit organizations are points of connection and vehicles to move large dreams to remedy social issues. Cultural solutions are based in values that carry deep meaning of community togetherness, looking out for collective well-being, and thinking and dreaming far into the future. We are rooted in this knowledge that our past generations did the same for us, back beyond memory. 

As an Indigenous woman, I have this strange life experience of being profusely erased from the larger contemporary public discourse and historical narrative while simultaneously having benefited directly from over 30,000 years of traditional Indigenous knowledge and history that survives intact and thriving. From that bedrock of knowledge, direct, effective strategies have been crafted to create sustaining, thriving economies and communities. We dream backward to capture that wisdom, and we dream forward to further embed it into a future where all community members are a part of the living vision. 

When I think of our future, I see we are actively building it now. We are being resourceful with our cultural values and knowledge to continue the economic threads we have always had: looking out for each other, building with the collective well-being in mind, making it alive with community connections, bringing spontaneous creativity into active play, and bringing that joyful but serious hustle into our every economic move. There is no sound economy unless all of us are involved and included in all aspects of creation and implementation. 

A sound economy requires everyone’s participation and creativity. True equity means all of us are creators, not just consumers, of economic life.

For philanthropic partners who care deeply about economic equity, investing in community-led economic change is a direct way to make strides toward a just and living economy. Communities like mine that have experienced significant and nuanced challenges have solutions to remedy those specific challenges because we are keenly aware of the impacts. When cultural strategies are added, the change becomes dynamically infused with generational knowledge that has built-in capabilities to sustain and repair. Certainly, philanthropic investments are needed. 

More than that, philanthropic partners committed to seeing monumental change are needed more than ever. We need partners who are ready to stand in the thick messiness of dreaming large. We need partners who share in the exciting results, can see the little wins that add up to community victories, and hold steady through mistakes and missteps as opportunities to move forward smarter, more focused, or more creative. We need philanthropic partners ready to dream forward with this living generation and the next, who already knows the challenges are getting deeper and must, at all costs, keep going. 

This is the dream of my people, the Anishinaabe, and I believe we share that dream with many others: dream forward and keep moving the collective dream that includes everyone in a place of prosperity, health, safety, and opportunity.

Dreaming is not only a metaphor—it’s an Indigenous economic strategy. Our dreams are blueprints for redistribution, collective well-being, and a future where everyone thrives.