Spokane is home to over 20,000 urban Native members, all with diverse affiliations from over 300 far and near tribes. Whether local or distant to their homelands and tribal ways, having a sense of community is essential for Indigenous members.
In 2020, founders Jeff Ferguson and his wife, Margo Lee Hill-Ferguson, recognized the need for community and created the nonprofit organization Elk Soup.
“ We founded Elk Soup to empower Native American families both on and off the reservation,” Ferguson said. “The surrounding tribes here, the Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Colville, Kalispell, and Kootenai, all tend to provide services for their own tribal members. That left roughly 300 other tribes and tribal people that didn’t have any type of services to help them grow in ways that we found were needed.”
Elk Soup aims to empower Native members in every way possible, categorizing their goals into four foundational program areas.
“When we established Elk Soup, we founded it with four pillars in mind: health and wellness, arts and culture, education and entrepreneurship,” Ferguson said. “All of our projects fall into at least one of those four pillars.”
While every pillar plays a role, arts and culture is the motivator to each sector and event in Elk Soup. Ferguson and Hill-Ferguson recently established a Native arts market, Battlegrounds, designed to showcase local Indigenous art. All profits from this Native arts market go into funding programs and events for the Elk Soup organization.
“There are plenty of Plains artists,” Ferguson said. “There are plenty of Southwest artists. There’s plenty of coastal artists. But to find authentic, interior Salish Columbia Plateau artists, and represent the people of this area, that is really huge.
“ One of the things that’s at the top of our list, as far as trying to fulfill the need, is giving the people in this area a place to sell all year long.”
This sense of community care extends through all pillars. For members like Aleacia Grant, Elk Soup provides the space and funding necessary for Grant to hold weekly yoga classes.
“Having that mindfulness and being in the present order is beneficial to everything,” Grant said. “The program has a team effort to be free, so it’s accessible. There’s so many people in our community that deal with all sorts of traumas, or bad emotions, or they don’t know how to deal with their addictions. Yoga can be very healing.”
Beyond health and wellness classes, events are held for the Native community to have access to empowerment through Elk Soup’s Native Networking events.
This event, which is open to all Indigenous allies, artists, students and entrepreneurs, highlights the Native experience in the business world. It’s a space where Indigenous entrepreneurs can share knowledge and resources to one another while forming valuable connections.
Gail Lesperance is one of the many Native Networking participants who has shared the story of her own nonprofit called Beautiful Skys. The organization brings resources over 900 miles, from Spokane to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. With a lack of experience in the nonprofit sector, Lesperance shared how Elk Soup has provided substantial support that has helped Beautiful Skys thrive.
“Elk Soup has really opened all of these doors,” Lesperance said. “It’s just amazing how fast it’s growing. It’s growing faster than my dreams, you know, it’s hard to dream big when you never had those examples. I’ve been coming here for 3 years, and I’m excited every single time that this comes up. It’s opened opportunities, it’s networking, meeting new people, and going to new places.”
