From Standing Rock to Seven Stones.

The Nation Wrote Its Own Diagnosis

Long before this corporation existed, the Standing Rock Sioux Nation had already written what our people needed. It is there, in the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy of our Tribe — line by line, chapter by chapter — a document our own government produced by listening to the districts, to the elders, to the trades, to the young people. Read it once and you will not find a mystery. You will find an accounting. And you will find that the accounting reads the same in every district: nowhere to live, no bank to save, no home for the dollar.

These are not three separate problems. They are one pattern. When there is nowhere to live, workers cannot stay. When there is no bank, savings cannot grow and homes cannot be financed. When money cannot stay, businesses cannot start — and the talent our Nation raises leaves to build somewhere else. The Tribe’s own economic strategy names housing as the single largest constraint on workforce recruitment, on retention, on business growth, and on the long-term exercise of tribal sovereignty.

“The need is real. So is everything we have to answer it with.”

What The Land Holds

The same strategy documents what the deficit numbers never show: 2.3 million acres of land. A workforce carrying the trades — construction, heavy equipment, electrical, plumbing. A tribal college coordinating transit across the whole reservation. Young people in every district. And what the CEDS itself lists among our Nation’s greatest strengths: our people, our prayer, and our Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta values and language.

A serious answer to this Nation cannot be improvised. It has to be built. It has to be Indigenous-led. It has to be aligned with what our people themselves have already named. And it has to be built to last long enough to compound.

That is what this corporation was built to be. That is what Seven Stones is.

The Vision Came First

Every institution begins somewhere no résumé can capture. This one begins with a young Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta singer and dancer, crossing oceans with a Native dance theater — performing in the great cities of Europe, Canada, and the United States, and walking their streets afterward with his head tipped back. Those skylines did something to him that never wore off. Not envy. Recognition. Our people could build like this. Smaller, perhaps. Sovereign, certainly. Ours.

He carried that question home and went to work where all real building starts: construction. Foundations first, then structure — footings poured before pro formas read. The trades taught him how a building actually stands up. Business school and the executive years taught him how a building gets financed, contracted, and delivered. By the time he was overseeing foundations instead of pouring them, the question from those city streets had hardened into a plan.

And the plan was older than the corporation. As far back as 2010 — years before Standing Rock Community Development Corporation existed, years before the Housing Authority appointment — some of the same people who would one day sit around the founding board table were already in conversation: what if we built a nonprofit of our own? What could it do that nothing else here can? The founding of this corporation was not an idea that arrived in 2016. It was a promise that finally found its paperwork.

The Federal Foundation

From 2014 through August of 2017, I served as Executive Director of the Standing Rock Housing Authority — the Tribally Designated Housing Entity for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. I supervised more than eighty staff. I oversaw more than nine hundred homes. I managed federal grant programs administered through HUD’s Office of Native American Programs, and I authored the original strategic housing master plan that continues to inform Standing Rock housing strategy more than a decade later. In early 2015 I commissioned HKG Architects, beginning what is now an eleven-year continuous architectural relationship.

Then came August 2 and 3 of 2016 — ten years ago this summer. Out of every housing authority in North Dakota, HUD’s Office of Native American Programs selected ours to host its national gathering — a selection earned through years of working partnership with HUD’s Denver Region VIII administrators and a network built relationship by relationship across Indian Country. The Secretary’s office attended. Denver Region VIII leadership attended. Tribally Designated Housing Entity directors from across the country attended.

And we did not simply host a conference — we brought the federal housing establishment home to Standing Rock. Two charter buses carried more than a hundred housing professionals down to our Nation. We received them at tribal headquarters, where then-Chairman Dave Archambault II, his at-large council members, our housing board, and our commissioners welcomed them. We drove them through our communities and showed them the projects we were building — not slides in a ballroom, the actual work in the actual districts. And that evening at Prairie Knights Casino, with community members alongside the professionals, we gave them what no other host could: prayer, Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta dance theater, and a room where federal administrators and Standing Rock families sat at the same tables. People who were there still bring that gathering up.

When I departed the Housing Authority in August of 2017, I left with a commended clean federal audit on the entity I had led. There are almost no Indigenous community development executives in the country who hold both of those credentials — the federal hosting record and the clean-audit departure — in combination.

What I did not yet know was that those credentials would soon become the operational legitimacy a much larger vision would be built upon.

The Ceremony That Started It

Standing Rock Community Development Corporation was conceived in ceremony, not in committee. On December 19, 2016 — an unofficial gathering held one day before our first official board meeting — we carried the founding vision into ceremony in the way of the Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta peoples. Standing Rock is both Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta, and from the first moments of this work, both dialects, both prayers, and both ceremonial traditions were honored together.

Out of the prayers and protocol of that gathering came the four founding initiatives that continue to organize this work today: Mentorship and Youth Development. Economic and Housing Development. Food Sovereignty. Language and Cultural Preservation.

On December 20 of 2016, the six other founding board members unanimously elected me the inaugural Chairman of the Board. I accepted without hesitation — not because the road was clear, but because I had been walking toward this exact work since the dance-theater years. I already knew what I had come to build. Ten years later, we are still building it — because magnificent change is not assembled in a season. It is grown.

Standing beside me from the first day was Loretta Bad Heart Bull — elder, co-founding board member, and the institutional conscience of this work from that day to this. Loretta is the only other founding board member who has stood with this organization continuously across every transition of the past ten years.

From December 2016 through August 2017 — while I was still serving as Executive Director of the Standing Rock Housing Authority — I personally completed the entire foundational build of the new corporation on volunteered time. I drafted the articles of incorporation and the bylaws. I wrote and filed the IRS Form 1023 application that secured our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt determination on November 17 of 2017. I authored the strategic plan. I registered the corporation with the North Dakota Secretary of State, obtained the DUNS number and SAM.gov federal registry credentials, and opened the bank accounts. And I partnered with HKG Architects on the original 2017 four-pillar master plan for a 500-plus-acre Indigenous community development concept adjacent to Cannon Ball.

The First Risk

In August of 2017 I made the decision to leave the Standing Rock Housing Authority Executive Director position — a fully paid federal role with full benefits — to become the full-time Executive Director of the corporation I had built. There were six months of salary funding committed. There were no other staff. There were four children at home. Our youngest son had been born just months earlier, in April.

I am the father of eight now — my wife, two daughters, and four sons — and the founder of a corporation that has not stopped building since.

We did not walk those first months alone. Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation — the Lakota-led organization that had already proven what Indigenous community development could look like — carried us as our fiscal sponsor in the beginning, and helped us find our earliest funding when we barely had any. That is a debt this organization repays the only way it can be repaid: today we are the fiscal sponsor, and more than ten new nonprofits have started under our wing.

On February 28 of 2018 we secured our first major multi-year grant of $300,000 over three years. By March, the cash on hand was enough to pay only my own salary. I was advised by counsel not to split the money among additional staff. I split it anyway. I told my team: if we run out of money, we all run out of money. The funding came through. Everyone stayed.

“If we run out of money, we all run out of money.”

That single decision — to risk my own salary so the team could grow — set the cultural standard for how this organization treats its people. It is a standard the corporation has maintained, without exception, for ten years.

The Operational Decade

Between 2018 and 2026, we built the operational substance that would become the foundation of the Constellation we operate today. We founded WITĖ Development LLC as the real estate arm of the Constellation. We assembled a debt-free real estate portfolio across the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the Bismarck–Mandan metropolitan area — operating residential rental properties, additional properties in Bismarck–Mandan, and the WITĖ Northwest Building in Fort Yates, the twenty-three-thousand-square-foot mixed-use business incubator that today anchors our headquarters alongside tribal programs and community partners.

None of that land came to us. It was pursued. The twenty-four acres at Cannon Ball that now carry the Dream Hills master plan — found, negotiated, and closed by the founder’s own hand. Every property we hold in Fort Yates — the same. Each acquisition was sourced through relationships, underwritten against real cash flow, and closed without burying this organization in debt. The portfolio was not inherited and it was not granted. It was assembled, parcel by parcel, the way our people have always gathered what matters: patiently, and on purpose.

We built community impact alongside real estate. Six community gardens supplying fresh produce to more than three hundred families per season. The Community Hoop House Garden at 313 Beldon Street, launched Earth Day 2026. More than four hundred Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta language participants and more than three hundred craft participants. A Youth Development Initiative summer mentorship program placing eighty percent of past Rising Leaders into higher education or vocational training. District-level community engagement across the eight districts of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. A Standing Rock Elders’ Language Preservation Council convening regularly at our headquarters, working on a Dakȟóta and Lakȟóta dictionary, and shaping the cultural and ceremonial foundation of every program.

And we went to the people — all of them. Through the close of 2024 and into 2025, I walked every district of this Nation alongside our Board Chairman, Ken Snider — into every high school and middle school, carrying financial literacy to the generation that will inherit everything we are building. Booklets in their hands, real questions on the floor, real guidance in return. The feedback from those students told us we had struck something. And this summer, the circle closed: some of those same students walked into our Youth Development Initiative and became the Cohort of 2026 — the first cohort of the Seven Stones Summer Program, earning wages in the organization that first met them in a school hallway with a booklet about their own money.

Every one of those numbers is independently corroborated. The 2023 Wawókiya Project Evaluation Report, prepared by RMC Research Corporation, documents community-validated outcomes across all four founding initiatives — the four pillars that have organized this work since December 19, 2016.

Why We Build What We Build

Every program and project in this organization is an answer to a line in our Nation’s own strategy. We did not choose our work by preference. We chose it by reading what our Nation wrote about its own needs — and answering.

The documented shortage of more than a thousand homes is why housing development anchors our work — beginning with the 108-home master plan at Dream Hills (Wihaŋbda Sa Hills) in Cannon Ball. Duplexes and mixed-use apartment homes, built in phases, on land our organization owns. And Dream Hills will deliver more than homes: it will deliver jobs — with a workforce drawn from our own communities, trained in the trades, and given something no paycheck alone can match: the chance to help build the very homes their families will live in. This is the proof that our community can plan, finance, and build for itself.

The Tribe’s own analysis that names “no bank” as its first weakness is why our Constellation includes an emerging community lender — Witaya Financial Solutions, a Native Community Development Financial Institution built to originate microloans, mortgages, credit-building products, and small-business capital that the reservation economy has never had access to inside its own borders.

The half of every dollar that leaves this Nation is why we develop community-owned assets that keep value home. The WITĖ Northwest Building. The Fort Yates duplexes. The properties in Bismarck–Mandan. The planned WITĖ Southeast Building — a four-story mixed-use development adjacent to the WITĖ Northwest Building, combining approximately 24 residential units with business-incubator spaces, a restaurant, retail, and community space, and a future home for the Constellation and its tribal program partners. Every building we hold is a decision to end the leakage of Standing Rock capital.

And the vision does not stop at the reservation line. The next decade’s goal is written just as plainly: acquire and develop positive-cash-flowing assets off the reservation, so that outside income works for inside purposes — including a Dream Hills of Bismarck–Mandan, workforce housing built for the Indigenous families of the metro and for relatives of all directions.

“We did not choose our work by preference. We chose it by reading what our Nation wrote about its own needs — and answering.”

Why We Are Now Seven Stones

The original Standing Rock Community Development Corporation legal name, adopted in December 2016, reflected the moment of our founding. For nine years, we have had to explain — over and over, to relatives at home, to relatives from other Indigenous nations, to partners across the country — that Standing Rock Community Development Corporation is not a department of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It is a private, sovereign, Indigenous-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, built in partnership with the Standing Rock Sioux Nation but not under it. And it is built to serve Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike, across the Sioux Nation and well beyond.

On May 6, 2026, the Board of Directors voted to adopt Seven Stones Corp as the public-facing trade name — a DBA — of Standing Rock Community Development Corporation. The legal entity name is preserved. Our federal tax-exempt status, our Employer Identification Number, our 501(c)(3) determination, our board governance, and all existing grant agreements continue under the same legal entity, without amendment.

What changes is the public name on the door. What does not change is anything else.

The name comes from our way of prayer — in our ceremonies, seven stones come first, and everything we do follows the sevens. When we pray, we pray to the West — that is one. To the North — two. To the East — three. To the South — four. Upward to the sky — five. Down to Mother Earth — six. And the seventh is for all the people — all our relations, everyone we carry in prayer. Seven directions. Seven Council Fires of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. Seven stones. When our Board chose this name, we chose what our people already carry.

The Constellation

By 2026, this corporation operates as one integrated, federally aligned, Indigenous-led Constellation of three institutions moving as one system:

The Build Continues

Workforce housing in Cannon Ball. A mixed-use community hub in Fort Yates. Vocational training designed to end the import of off-reservation labor. A vertically integrated construction supply chain. A Community Development Financial Institution that lends to Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike. A real estate portfolio that generates the cash flow to sustain the next decade of expansion — on the reservation and beyond it. Every one of these answers a line the Standing Rock Sioux Nation has already written about itself. All federally aligned. All Indigenous-led. Rooted in the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Oyáte. Built for all relations.

Ten years in. The next ten will deliver more housing, more capital, more jobs, and more Indigenous economic sovereignty than the first ten ever could have promised. What this corporation was built to do, we are now built to do at scale.