For Indian tribe, diversifying pays

The future of the Winnebago Indian tribe is emerging on a 40-acre site carved from a former cornfield.

Modular houses are lined up to be installed. Workers are hanging drywall in apartments above a full block of new retail space. Employees are filling catalog and online orders of Native American crafts in a new two-story stone building.

This development, called Ho-Chunk Village, will include 110 housing units, a retail district and an arts center when completed in about four years.

Ho-Chunk Village is the most visible sign of an economic transformation underway on this reservation of 1,500 Winnebago Indians in northeast Nebraska. The change began a decade ago, when Lance Morgan, 36, a tribal member educated at Harvard Law School, returned and established a corporation that now employs 400 people and generated $94 million in revenue last year.

This type of economic progress is becoming more common among the 562 federally recognized Indian tribes as they invest in businesses as diverse as wind energy and luxury golf resorts and rely less on income from gambling.

"Tribes are starting to make it on their own," says Jonathan Taylor, an economist who co-wrote a Harvard University study this year that tracked economic gains in Indian country during the 1990s.

By Tom Kenworthy, USA TODAY

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