Louie Gong is one of the most successful Native American visual artists in the country. At the beginning of his artistic career, he wanted to find a way to sell and license his work without having to go through a gallery or museum. So he founded his own company, Eighth Generation.
Louie Gong is one of the most successful Native American visual artists in the country. At the beginning of his artistic career, he wanted to find a way to sell and license his work without having to go through a gallery or museum. So he founded his own company, Eighth Generation. The brand started in 2008 in Louie’s 200 square foot living room, and now inhabits a 30,000 square foot space in the heart of Seattle. Eighth Generation partners with over 40 Native American artists around the U.S. to design, manufacture and market beautiful wool blankets, art prints, home goods, and more.
Louie recently collaborated with Brooks to create the new Brooks Running Sasquatch Collection, designed by Louie, which features his art, inspired by his interpretation of Sasquatch. The limited edition collection includes running apparel and the Cascadia 16 trail running shoe. Learn more about Louie and the Sasquatch collection here.
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Louie Gong:
Can I show you my latest piece?
Shelby Stanger:
Yes, I would love to see it.
Louie Gong:
Okay, hang on a sec.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay.
Louie Gong:
All right. So my most recent piece is called Black Sheep, and it's the main piece that I did during the pandemic, and it was my attempt to sort of capture the malaise that was washing over everybody during isolation. The image that you see here behind me features a black sheep. So the sheep's face is executed in really contemporary Coast Salish art. But the sheep's body is composed of these wolf mouths.
Louie Gong:
The tongues are going in different directions. For me, I often use a jumble of wolf mouths to represent stress or anxiety. But what I wanted to capture here is that our past experiences aren't something that we can set down like a piece of baggage and then walk away from them. They're living, breathing parts of ourselves that we have to learn to live in symbiosis with. So the real pathway to happiness is not to try to set things down and walk away from them. They'll always be part of you.
Shelby Stanger:
That's beautiful. Louie Gong is known as one of the most successful Native American visual artists in the country, but he didn't start making art professionally until he was in his 30's. At the beginning of Louie's artistic career, he wanted to find a way to sell and license his work without having to go through a gallery or a museum.
Shelby Stanger:
So he founded his own company, Eighth Generation. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI co-op studios production. Louie started Eighth Generation in 2008 in his 200 square foot living room. Today, the brand is in a 30,000 square foot space in the heart of Seattle. The company partners with more than 40 Native American artists around the US to design, to manufacture and to market beautiful wall blankets, art, prints, home goods, and more. Louie's own art is unique. It features bold graphic depictions of animals and geometric patterns. He draws inspiration from the traditional symbols of Coast Salish art, as well as his natural environment, life experiences, and his upbringing.
Shelby Stanger:
Louie Gong, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Louie Gong:
I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
You're this badass businessman who started your own brand, Eighth Generation. Can you just tell me a little bit about where you grew up and of what it's like?
Louie Gong:
Yeah, I grew up in Nooksack, which is in the foothills of Mount Baker, which is in the North Cascades. And it's a beautiful, lush, natural environment. Was surrounded by cedar trees, maple trees, ferns, huckleberries, the Nooksack River.
Shelby Stanger:
What area is that?
Louie Gong:
Nooksack is about 15 minutes north of Bellingham, Washington, right up near the Canadian border.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, amazing. High up there. Okay.
Louie Gong:
So I'll say something that will challenge listener's conception of what it means to be an Indigenous person, because I'm standing here in front of you, a Nooksack tribal member, who's indigenous to the United States, but I'm actually a Canadian citizen. So I was born about six or seven miles north of the US, Canada border and moved to the Nooksack tribal community on the US side of the border when I was about 10.
Louie Gong:
So it just demonstrates that Indigenous communities were here, and those political boundaries between countries were drawn and often separated our communities, like they did for Nooksack. So to take it one step further, when I was in my teen years and my resident alien or a green card paperwork lapsed, I was both indigenous to the United States and undocumented. Those kind of experiences really launched me into a purposeful exploration around identity. I'm Chinese, Native and white. My last name is Gong, but I grew up in a tribal community.
Louie Gong:
And when I tell people that I'm Asian, Native and white, a lot of times they react as if it's really unique. And in terms of storytelling, it is really rare, because people don't talk about it. But in the Pacific Northwest where I'm from, there are lots of spaces where Asian and Native people, this is mostly at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, found themselves together. I'm talking about in the canneries, in the berry fields, Indigenous people in this area were the first sort of migrant workers. And that's how my grandma and grandpa met. So it's not as uncommon as a lot of people think, to be Asian and Native in the area that I'm from.
Shelby Stanger:
So tell me more about your upbringing. I know you're raised by your grandparents, but they passed away when you're really young?
Louie Gong:
From the age of 14 on, I was largely on my own in the Nooksack tribal community. So all through high school, I was solving problems that I was very resentful of at the time. Like, "Oh, I need to get garbage bags. I need to get money for dish soap." These are the kind of things that I had, in addition to the typical stuff that teenagers have to deal with at a very early age.
Louie Gong:
And I didn't know it at the time, but solving those problems in my teen years really set me up for being able to solve business problems in my 30s and 40s. I don't see barriers as being barriers the same way that other people see them. And when there's an element of chaos, as there always is in a small but rapidly growing company, I was not as nervous as most people tend to be in those situations.
Shelby Stanger:
Before Louie became a business owner, he studied psychology and became a child and family therapist. He worked primarily in schools addressing racial and cultural identity. From there, he went on to work as an administrator at a tribal college. For Louie, social justice and equity has been at the heart of his work since his early career. Those values carried over when he decided to pursue art full time. His work has always been about empowering Native people. How did you decide to pursue art at 30 though? What were you doing before?
Louie Gong:
Oh, yeah. So growing up in the rural community that I grew up in, sports were really popular and the arts less so. And so for me, being focused on just finding a way to fit in, because I always felt like I was on the outskirts. I pursued sports in my effort to fit in. And these natural instincts that I had shown over the years towards the arts, really got minimized.
Louie Gong:
All the way through middle school, I had this keyboard that I would carry with me everywhere I went. I had no idea how to play it, but I was interested. I also had a video camera that I would carry around with me all the time while I was in high school. Even though I showed a lot of interest in the arts, there wasn't one time where an adult came to me and said, "Hey Louie, you seem really interested in the arts. Why don't you come have this experience with this group of people?"
Louie Gong:
Those kinds of opportunities just didn't really exist in the sports-focused rural community that I was in, in high school. So fast forward to me going through college and going through graduate school. I found myself in higher ed administration at a tribal college. And I've always been a little scattered in the way that I think.
Louie Gong:
And I started to recognize that doodling during staff meetings was one way that I could help maintain focus. And in 2004, 2005, I started to develop some competency in drawing. And I knew that, because my colleagues would see what I drew during the staff meeting and ask for it. And by 2006, when I started drawing on shoes for the first time, all my colleagues had offices that were just laden with my office meeting doodles.
Shelby Stanger:
So when did you realize that you could make art outside of doodling at work?
Louie Gong:
Yeah, so in the Pacific Northwest, we have this huge cultural event called Tribal Journeys, and it's when all the tribes who are along the northwest coast take an ocean-going canoe and travel from their community and go to a host community. It can be hundreds of miles. And in order for them to come ashore, they have to do protocol to ask permission from the host community to come ashore.
Louie Gong:
And the community takes the time to do that with every single canoe. And sometimes this takes multiple days. In 2006, when I was working at the Muckleshoot Tribal College, Muckleshoot was hosting Tribal Journeys that year. And in tribal communities, a lot of times when you host a party, you do not get gifts, you give gifts. So as someone who was on the periphery of the Muckleshoot community, I was invited to help make hand drums as giveaway items for Tribal Journeys.
Louie Gong:
And at this point, I had dabbled in art a little bit, but not much. But when the people that I was making these giveaway items with recognized that I could paint a straight line, they said, "Hey Louie, why don't we all make the drums and you can paint all of them?" So over the course of about six months, I painted about 30 or 40 designs on hand drums. And it was that experience that awakened this love of the cultural art form, that is sort of my birthright to practice as a Coast Salish person.
Louie Gong:
So the real genesis of Eighth Generation happened when I saw a friend wearing a pair of Vans, and it sparked this memory of when I was a kid and always wanted a pair of Vans, but we just weren't able to afford them. And so I decided in my early 30s to go out and get my first pair of Vans. And I stood in front of a huge wall, full of a selection of Van shoes, and I realized that not one design on the shelf reflected my experience.
Louie Gong:
And I decided to take a plain gray pair of Vans home. And a couple weeks later, I customized them in a way that I thought reflected my identity. I wore them to work the next day, and my colleagues saw the shoes that I was wearing and they were like, "Oh my God, those are sick. Where'd you get those? And how can I get a pair?"
Louie Gong:
And in that moment, I started to recognize that I was capturing this merger of something that's pop culture, which were the shoes and the traditional art form, which was my Coast Salish art. And even though there was that much of a demand for the work that I was creating, I looked at all the pathways available to me, trying to make a sustainable living from my artwork. And I realized that all those pathways were laden with middlemen. And to me that represented a problem.
Louie Gong:
I wanted to control the narrative over my work, and I wanted to make sure that I was getting the money. And I also wanted to acquire the knowledge about how to bring my art to market. And in all the pathways that existed, I'm talking about galleries, museums, working with a third party company that might just license your art, there was not the opportunity to acquire that knowledge. So I started off with no business experience and no money, but step by step over the course of the next 10 years, I set out to solve those problems and had a great deal of success doing that.
Shelby Stanger:
So let me ask you, when you drew on those Vans, what was the image?
Louie Gong:
The very first pair of Vans that I drew on had a paw. And I was thinking, "I'm drawing on something that goes on my feet. My art skills are not that developed. What's something simple that would represent my feet?" And so I drew what I was thinking of as a bear paw.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you describe how you combine traditional Native art with more urban contemporary design?
Louie Gong:
Yeah. As Native people, we grow up with a lot of expectations around what our cultural art should look like. As individual Native artists, we have to do the work to decide how much of what we're hearing should get incorporated into our own personal aesthetic. But then there's also this idea of the themes that get incorporated into Coast Salish cultural art. A lot of times they're animal figures that are important to us culturally.
Louie Gong:
And at some point I realized, "Man, I keep drawing orcas and wolves. And they're super cool and people love them, but when was the last time I actually seen orca in real life or a wolf?" And it was an authenticity check on myself, right?
Louie Gong:
And it was around this time that I started drawing my cat, because as a legitimate Nooksack tribal member, a Coast Salish artist, I am constantly surrounded by my cat. It's a part of my life, and my art is a representation of my lived experience and my cat is an authentic theme for my Coast Salish art. There are a lot of purists that are more traditional, that may not like the idea that I will draw my cat, but I personally feel more authentic around my art when it's a reflection of my lived experience.
Shelby Stanger:
Pictures of Louie's shoes made their way online in 2007. His distinctive designs celebrate his multicultural background and they clearly struck a chord. Within year, Louie had 50,000 followers on social media. As Louie dove deeper into his art, he began to apply his social justice values to a larger vision.
Shelby Stanger:
It wasn't just about selling his art, he wanted to help other Native artists find the same kind of success. When we come back, Louie talks about the early days of Eighth Generation, and he explains their tagline, "Inspired Natives, not Native Inspired."
Shelby Stanger:
Artist, activist and entrepreneur, Louie Gong is one of the most well known native artists in the United States. He's brought contemporary Coast Salish art to the public eye. When Louie became an artist, he had no idea that he would soon be a business owner as well. What started as a side gig became the nationally known brand, Eighth Generation. So what year did you start Eighth Generation?
Louie Gong:
I took a little bit of a slow role with Eighth Generation. So I started drawing on shoes and posting them to social media in 2007 or 2008. The business entity, Eighth Generation was created in 2008, but I didn't quit my day job at Muckleshoot Tribal College until 2013. So there were five years there that I was doing my day job, developing the business one little step at a time.
Louie Gong:
Again, I don't have any business training, so I had to learn everything from scratch, from how to vectorize my art, how to make a product, how to manage a website. And simultaneously, I was also working with a national nonprofit, doing work around race and identity. And so by the time 2012 came around, I was very practiced at recognizing the tools that I was bringing and the energy that I was bringing to the table and my authentic story and valuing it. And it was with that energy that I quit my day job in 2013 and launched full speed ahead with Eighth Generation.
Shelby Stanger:
I think it's really refreshing that you didn't just quit your day job.
Louie Gong:
My number one advice to people is to keep your day job until outside of your day job, you're generating enough income to pay your bills.
Shelby Stanger:
And it's really smart advice. Okay. So tell us about Eighth Generation. What is it and how you came up with it and how it's evolved?
Louie Gong:
Yeah. So Eighth Generation is the business entity that I created to sell the shoes. Once I started bringing my art to market, I recognized that I needed to get my art directly to consumers. So in 2007 and '08, there really wasn't Native businesses selling directly to consumers. It was all done through third parties, whether it was a gallery or a third party company or some non-Native broker in between.
Louie Gong:
So it was really revolutionary at that point. So Eighth Generation's focus was not on selling original art, but on selling products that we were creating with Indigenous artists. Of course, we started with my art on phone cases and jewelry that we were making right in the Eighth Generation studios here in Seattle. I started off in a 300 square foot studio. By the way, now Eighth Generation has a 30,000 square foot space right in Seattle.
Louie Gong:
The focus was on creating products that we were selling directly to consumers. Once I started having some success with my art, I started reaching out to other Indigenous artists, who were in the same position as me and needed help to bring their art to market. I started with Michelle Lowden, who's Acoma Pueblo and her art was very different from mine, but also very product friendly.
Louie Gong:
Eventually we just kept adding artists region by region. So Eighth Generation very quickly went from a local brand to a national brand, because we had representations from all regions around the country. And now Eight Generation currently works with over 40 different artists.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you talk to me a little bit about the difference between inspired Natives versus Native-inspired and importance of buying art from Native artists?
Louie Gong:
One of the problems for aspiring Native artists and entrepreneurs is that the market for products with Native art on them is totally saturated by corporations producing fake Native art. So how do you get a spot on the shelf when for centuries, the market for what you do has been dominated by businesses that do not want to give up their space?
Louie Gong:
One tool that we have is the American Indian Arts and Crafts Act. This act has been around for a while and it was invigorated in the early '90s. And what it says is that you can't call something Native if it had nothing to do with Native people. Revolutionary, right? You can't lie about your product is what it says.
Shelby Stanger:
But everybody lies about their products.
Louie Gong:
Yes. So even though it is a law, it's only so good as our ability to enforce it. And the reality is that the American Arts and Crafts Board does not have the capacity to address all instances of cultural appropriation in business. This is how Eighth Generation gets to its tagline, which is, "Inspired Natives, not Native Inspired."
Louie Gong:
Inspired natives are the Indigenous people who are creating the aesthetic that consumers want to align with, and the have lived the stories that consumers want to connect to. And Native inspired is the confusing term that companies have used to describe their fake Native art for decades.
Shelby Stanger:
Traditional Native designs are frequently co-opted by non-native companies. Appropriation of Indigenous art has been happening for a long time, and Louie saw a solution. He created a brand that sells and licenses Native art across the country, in a way that empowers Indigenous artists. In 2022, after leading Eighth Generation for almost 15 years, Louie decided to make a big decision.
Shelby Stanger:
He wanted to hand off the reigns to someone who could continue to help the brand grow. He decided to step down as CEO and the company hired former Seattle mayoral candidate, Colleen Echohawk, to take his place. But before he left, Louie finalized a project that brought his time with Eighth Generation full circle. The brand was born when Louie drew his Coast Salish art on shoes. Now he's launching a collaboration with Brooks Running to create a custom shoe design. How does Eighth Generation collaborate with other brands? I think you recently did a collaboration with Brooks Running?
Louie Gong:
So when larger companies have tried to reach out to Eighth Generation, it's exciting. Don't get me wrong. It's super exciting when we hear from a big company that wants to work with us. But in our conversations, we never compromise about what it is that we're looking for in these collaborations. We know, because we work with about 40 artists and provide them with a breadth of opportunity, not just a small royalty for their art, that it's possible to do so and still be profitable.
Louie Gong:
So when a large company wants to work with us as the smaller partner, we expect the same thing. That we're able to give our artist partners. I was very excited, because I started off drawing on shoes, that towards the end of my tenure as the leader at Eighth Generation, I heard from the Brooks Running Shoe company and that they wanted to collaborate with me to develop not just a shoe, but a whole collection.
Louie Gong:
I got really excited about that, first, because it brought my journey full circle and was a great tool for me to remind people that, "Hey, I didn't start off in business school or with a trust fund. I started off with a Sharpie and a pair of Vans." But also through our conversations with Brooks, we realized that they're in the proper mental space to listen to Eighth Generation and meet us where our expectations were at for a business partnership.
Shelby Stanger:
So what are you guys making? Obviously shoes, I'm guessing?
Louie Gong:
We're making a beautiful pair of trail shoes. My medium for this project was the Cascadia Running Shoe, which is one of the most popular trail running shoes. A lot of people run in it, and we're also doing shoes, socks, a hat, maybe some other products that really help round out a full collection.
Louie Gong:
The theme for the collection, which is super fun and engaging, is Sasquatch. So in this collaboration with Brooks, we wanted to have a fun take on Sasquatch, but for me personally, I wanted to make sure that our interpretation of Sasquatch was not some kitchy, hairy ape living in the woods. Wanted to make it a more sophisticated and nuanced interpretation of Sasquatch, which meant leaning on the stories that I heard growing up as a kid in my own tribal community.
Shelby Stanger:
Which were what? I want to hear them really quickly.
Louie Gong:
So there's many different ones, and all communities have different versions of Sasquatch, but my interpretation of Sasquatch is that Sasquatch is a shape shifter that turns into plants.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, interesting.
Louie Gong:
Yeah. So on the artwork you'll see Sasquatch mid transition from its conventional shape that most people are familiar with to that of a big leaf maple. And the other elements in the design include the big leaf maple leaf, huckleberries, and the huckleberry leafs and licorice ferns.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So let's talk about it. What are you up to now that you're retired? Like are you going to go out into nature more? Are you going to have ... or do you have any trips planned? Are you still doing some art projects?
Louie Gong:
As a kid growing up in my community, my favorite toys were sticks and rocks, and my grandma and grandpa let me run freely around in the woods for hours and hours on end. And so for the last 10 years, I've sort of been envisioning what I might do if I had a little more free time. And in 2022, I finally have that free time and I hightailed it for the woods.
Louie Gong:
I'm very lucky in Seattle that only 20 minutes away is the Snoqualmie traditional lands. Shout out to Snoqualmie, who actually purchased Eighth Generation from me. So I go to their traditional territory, which looks a lot like the area that I grew up in, and I frolic. And I've spent a lot of time just being a student, getting in touch with my inner child, because the ferns that I see, the huckleberries that I see, all carry memories of when I was a kid. I'm trying to anchor myself in those memories, but take my knowledge a little bit further.
Louie Gong:
So actually learning about the plants, their traditional uses is a focus for me now. And also, I'm really trying to shift my mindset from what has made me successful in business, which is sort of around achievement, thinking about timelines and that, to really collaborating with the natural environment during my time in those spaces. So I have an agenda to try to get things done, but I'm mostly trying to sort of frolic without a timeline and just enjoy the healing that happens naturally in nature.
Louie Gong:
I think a lot of people know how the water is cleansing and being where you're at in California, you probably recognize how when the wave washes over you, it can feel really, really cleansing. And the same is true walking through the lush foliage here in the Cascade Mountains. If I'm walking along a trail that has ferns growing on the side, I often put my hands out and sort of let the ferns sort of brush past my hands. And in the same way that water can sort of take away the things that are worrying you, so can those plants.
Shelby Stanger:
Louie Gong, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living. I love what you do. I love your art. I love your thoughtfulness, your drive, and your commitment to art and justice. If you want to learn more about Louie Gong and the projects that he's up to now, check out his Instagram at Louie Gong, that's L-O-U-I-E G-O-N-G. To learn more about Eighth Generation and to stay in the loop on their latest designs, check out their website at eighthgeneration.com.
Shelby Stanger:
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Chelsea Davis and our associate producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Shout out to Joe. Joe recently went salmon fishing, but he only caught sharks.
Shelby Stanger:
As always, we love it when you follow the show, when you rate it, and when you write a review wherever you listen, because I read every single one of your reviews. And they mean a lot. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.