Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos:Debbie Black Hawk

Lauren Good Day got her introduction to Native art at 6 years old, when her mom taught her how to bead her first bracelet. As a Arikara, Hidatsa, Blackfeet, and Plains Cree teen in North Dakota, she became a sought-after designer of tribal regalia, including jingle dresses, shawls, and intricately beaded moccasins, for powwow dancers. “I made a decent amount of money too!” she says. After college, Good Day spent a decade showing her traditional Native drawings at galleries and selling her work; then, in 2019, she launched her first ready-to-wear collection based on her art. She’s since collaborated with brands like Sephora, Prados Beauty, and Sackcloth & Ashes. 

Her latest fall line — sold exclusively on laurengoodday.com — mimics traditional buffalo-robe paintings and features her original ledger art. (After the Civil War, Native artists and historians who drew on animal hides adopted ledger pages as a new medium.) Natives on horseback parade across one black satin maxi dress with puffed sleeves; a moss-green frill-neck top stands out for its elegant motif of elk teeth. “I’m always updating our traditional dress with digital prints and new textiles,” Good Day says, “but the root of my aesthetic is who we are as a people and a culture.” She lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, with her husband and three children, who are between 2 and 10 years old. Here’s how she gets it done.

On her morning routine: 
First things first: I get the kids up and get them ready. I always joke that I’m a mom all day and an artist by night. We usually start the morning this way: We pray and we smudge. Basically, that means we smoke ourselves off with our traditional plant medicines, which would be sage, cedar, and sweetgrass. We also pray that we’re kind and that kindness, luck, and good fortune come to us. We ask that we’re protected as we go about our day.

On what gets her through the day:
I’m a coffee lover and maybe even an addict. I was using artificial creamer until I realized how bad it is for you. So now, I make black coffee and add my protein shake for the cream. I have to be careful about sweeteners because Native people are more prone to diabetes — my mom and grandmother had it.

On her evening routine: 
The majority of my creative work happens after we have dinner as a family and put the kids to bed around 8:30. Many times, I’ll work on original art at night. I might dive into a beadwork project, which will later be turned into a print and pattern for my clothing. Or sometimes, I’ll get online and answer customer-service emails or update the website. On a good night, I go to bed at midnight. But sometimes, I’m up until 3 a.m.

On powwow dancing and staying fit: 
I love the stair-stepper because it has really helped prepare me as a powwow dancer. Powwow is our cultural celebration of life. I know dancers who train all year just to keep themselves in shape. Most days, I do anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes on the stair-stepper, and then I do some light weight lifting. As a mother, I have to make sure that I’m keeping my body healthy.

I call my husband a “powwow dad” because he helps me get our three kids ready to dance. I’m braiding hair, while he’s putting them into leggings and dresses. My husband once asked me, “Do you ever get nervous going out there and dancing in front of all those people?” I was like, “I never thought about it that way.” I guess it’s just natural to me. My mom took me to powwow before I could even walk. I’ve seen the celebrations get larger since then, too. Native families who were put in metropolitan areas to assimilate into white culture because of the Indian Relocation Act are finding powwow as a way to connect to their people. It’s one way our aesthetic culture is alive and thriving. If it wasn’t for powwow, I wouldn’t be where I am today as an artist.

On launching her first collection: 
For start-up funding, I put in $5,000 of my savings from selling my art, and my mother contributed the other half. It was a fairly small collection, eight pieces, and I launched on social media. I had a base audience of connections and friends from the Native powwow community. But still, I had no idea how it would hit with people or in the market. The pieces sold out and I restocked twice. I reinvested the money into my business, and after the launch of my second collection, my mom and I went out to dinner to celebrate.

On being flexible: 
My timeline is very fluid. I’m not a super-hard planner. I’ll be like, “I’m going to get my fall collection out sometime in September or October — around then.” This is something that I could improve on, I guess. It’s the nature of Native culture. There are certain times to do ceremonies, and those times are strict, but what we do as a people in our daily lives is more like, “It will get done when it’s meant to get done.” I love having the freedom to work on my terms as an artist. Maybe I don’t want to deal with the website right now, so I will go and work on a drawing. I can decide when I want to be creative or when I just want to spend time with my family.

On doing business with her community: 
I always try to work with other Native people to contribute to the Native economy. I have two employees: One of them is my husband, Bryce DeCory, and the other is my cousin Debbie Black Hawk, who is my assistant and photographer. When I do a shoot, I always try to work with Native models. And whenever I do really well with a new collection, I give back to other individual Native artists by purchasing some of their work.

On embracing her inner Auntie: 
I’m 36. One of my younger models called me an “Auntie” recently, and I was like, “What? Auntie?” But I have come to terms with getting into the middle range of life. This is my time. I’m finding a lot of success. I’m shining. In Native culture, you become an Auntie to a lot of people, whether you’re directly related to them or not. In my role as a Native woman designer and artist, I also need to remember to encourage our youth.

On the moment she felt like she made it:
Seeing my artwork at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., was a highlight. My piece was ledger artwork and called Independence Day Celebration. I actually come from a historical ledger artist named Bloody Knife, and his art is in the museum too.

On banishing self-doubt: 
Whenever I start doubting myself, I quickly change my thought pattern into positive thinking. And I’m a firm believer that what you put out there — whatever you think or say — will happen. If I start to think people aren’t going like this design or it won’t sell, I’m like, “No! People are going to feel empowered wearing it. They will be proud of who they are when they put this on. Or they will appreciate it if they’re not Natives.”

On cultural appropriation versus appreciation: 
People ask me about this on the daily. When you purchase directly from a Native artist or a designer, that’s cultural appreciation. When someone asks me, “But can I wear this dress? I’m not Native,” I tell them what I sell is always appropriate ready-to-wear. I would never create anything out of sacred pieces. It’s appreciation when you contribute directly to the Native community.

On the people who help her get it done: 
I have one part-time person who comes in and does maintenance for our studio space and the fulfillment area in the basement. My children model for me, and they’re also fit models for clothing. I did a campaign called “Indigenous Barbie,” and my two daughters are featured in it. My kids are such a driving force with my artwork because I create to keep our culture alive and available for the next generations.

Lauren Good Day Is Making Wearable Native Art

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The Puerto Rican artist has expertly harnessed the power of music streaming and social media to become one of the most famous musicians on the planet. After partnering with companies like Gucci, Adidas and WWE, he’s wielding his fame to become a global brand.

It’s 11:30 p.m. on October 12, and the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is packed. More than 16,000 Bad Bunny superfans have gathered to become the first people on the planet to hear their hometown hero’s new album. Nobody knows what to expect.

Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is a boundary-defying artist whose previous four studio albums have spanned hip-hop, reggaeton, Latin pop, Puerto Rican trap and Mexican country music. Tonight’s crowd embodies that vast spectrum: Hundreds are dressed in the white T-shirts and flat-brimmed blue caps from his recent song “Un Preview.” Others sport the cowboy hats from “Where She Goes.” Many simply wear bunny ears.

“I listened to a lot of salsa on my dad’s side, lots of ballads and merengue on my mom’s side. But being a ’90s kid, reggaeton and rap too,” says Bad Bunny in an interview in his native Spanish. “There’s lots of artists from different genres, countries and times that I feel are within me.”

If there’s one constant about Bad Bunny, who is 29, it’s that whatever he creates becomes a world- wide hit. Over the last three years, the alumnus of the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist, with 35.9 billion plays. His YouTube channel has attracted more than 32 billion views—more than those of Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and, yes, Taylor Swift. He has won three Grammys and 11 Latin Grammys. In April, he made history as the first Latin artist to headline the Coachella music festival.

And he’s done it all while singing solely in Spanish. “Spanish is part of me, it’s in my DNA,” he says. “I like speaking it wherever I go—not to force it on people, but because it’s who I am.”

It has made him extremely wealthy. Last year, Bad Bunny earned an estimated $88 million (pretax) from world tours, billions of streams and high-profile brand deals with the likes of Adidas and Corona. That performance was good enough for a debut in the No. 10 spot on Forbes’ Highest- Paid Entertainers list.

“It’s not about the money all the time,” he says about how he picks partners. “It’s about how much I love the brand and how much they’re going to respect my creativity.”

Back in the arena, the audience explodes as Bad Bunny descends from the ceiling, perched atop a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.

Tonight, the musician is wearing a fitted burgundy suit with a white button-down shirt open halfway. His face is covered in a mask reminiscent of Spider- man’s, but black with glowing red eyes. “I’m very shy about playing new songs that haven’t been released yet,” he says. He hits play on his iPhone and the listening party for his album Nadie Sabe lo que va a Pasar Mañana (No One Knows What Will Happen Tomorrow) Berupts.

Despite not knowing any of the lyrics, the crowd screams and dances to the new tracks. Bad Bunny doesn’t sing, save for the two songs from the album that he released earlier in the year. His face remains shrouded until after the clock hits midnight, whereupon he pulls off his mask to re- veal his new buzz cut, which, like the new album, pays homage to the early trap-style music that first shot him to global fame.

Bad Bunny is the archetype of a modern pop idol—a truly global artist who harnesses the vast reach of streaming services and social media to deliver what was once regional music to billions of listeners. “He has a finger on the pulse of culture like no one else,” says Jeremy Erlich, Spotify’s head of music. “He’s dictating what culture becomes.”

Streaming is making the world smaller. Over the last five years, Spotify has seen a 170% surge in streams of Latin music, a genre that—along with other styles including West African Afro- beats and K-pop—has hooked hundreds of mil- lions of new listeners thanks to viral memes on Instagram and TikTok and streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music. Says Spotify’s Erlich: “The historic Anglo dominance of music is getting broken down at a crazy pace.”

Bad Bunny hasn’t limited himself to music. Earlier this year, he appeared in the Amazon Prime film Cassandro. In October, he did double duty as the host and musical guest of Saturday Night Live. A digital version of Bad Bunny is body-slamming opponents in the blockbuster wrestling video game WWE 2k23. All this in a year that he had declared a time of rest.

His broad appeal allows him to move effortlessly from WWE cage matches to Italian couture. This fall, he appeared in Gucci ads, promoting its high-end Savoy luggage alongside supermodel Kendall Jenner. In the past he has partnered with Crocs, the cult rubber clog company, dropping a line of glow-in-the-dark shoes in 2020. They quickly sold out. Also sold out was his latest shoe with Adidas, the $160 “Paso Fino” trainer.

That was Bad Bunny’s 14th sneaker with the German athleticwear firm. Other shoe brands approached him, but only Adidas offered artistic control. “He inspires so many not just locally, but around the world,” says Torben Schumacher, global general manager of Adidas Originals.

Before he was a worldwide superstar, Bad Bunny was simply Benito, an audiovisual communications student at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. When he wasn’t in class, he bagged groceries at Econo stores and created Latin trap songs he’d upload to SoundCloud.

Everything changed in 2016, when his trap single “Soy Peor” (“I’m Worse”) transformed Bad Bunny into a household name. Full-force fame came with the release of “Diles Remix” the same year. By 2018 he was collaborating with some of the biggest names in music, including Drake, Cardi B and J Balvin. Just weeks before the Covid-19 lockdowns, he joined Shakira and Jennifer Lopez for the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. During quarantine, he livestreamed on Instagram, where he has 46.8 million followers, and put out his collaboration-filled album Las que no Iban a Salir (The Unreleased).

“[I] can live off music,” he says. But he won’t settle for just that. There will be more surprising brand partnerships, acting gigs—and, down the road, his own fashion brand. All while never forgetting Puerto Rico.

His native island is central to his image—and his business. In 2021, he became co-owner of the Santurce Cangrejeros, a local pro basketball team. To support homegrown talent, he has started a sports management agency called Rimas Sports.

He’s building a charity arm, too. In 2018 he created the Good Bunny Foundation, a San Juan nonprofit that supports artistic and sports opportunities to children in Puerto Rico. It has given away roughly $2 million over the last two years. “In the absence of the government, it is artists that end up fulfilling those roles,” he says.

Whether Bad Bunny has the multidecade staying power of Madonna or Prince remains to be seen. But don’t expect him to spend too much time chilling out poolside at one of his mansions. He feels his obligation to those millions of fans, online and off. “Fame,” he says, “pushes me to keep working.”

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Of the millions of businesses in the U.S., just 1 percent are owned by Native Americans. A nonprofit of the Navajo Nation has started a unique business incubator to foster economic development without losing Indigenous ways of thinking. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports, Change Labs works not through a mindset of growth, but one of kinship.

On a cattle ranch owned by the Navajo Nation, Leander Guy Thomas hammers horseshoes into shape on an anvil for two horses named Spitz and Thumper. They need fresh shoes every six weeks: “Just like going to the barber, getting your monthly haircut,” Thomas says.

Thomas is one of the only farriers at work in Northern Arizona and he travels for miles to see his four-footed clients. It’s an old school skill but he’s in high demand. “It’s a dying breed, you know. No one wants to do it no more, you know?” he says.

He’s training his brother-in-law as an apprentice, teaching him not just the blacksmithing but also traditional ways of getting a horse in balance. “Just get the horse in tune with nature,” Thomas says. “There’s a lot of cultural significance that is built in within the horse; if you pick up the feet there and look at the frog there, in our tradition they say that’s part of an arrowhead.”

Thomas was taught those traditions and his skills growing up on the Navajo Nation, but he didn’t know how to turn it into a business until he enrolled in a yearlong crash course run by Change Labs. The nonprofit was founded in 2019 by Heather Fleming, who says it’s uphill work to get silversmiths, sheepherders, and others with traditional skills to see themselves as small business owners.

“In Navajo we don’t have a direct word or concept for ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘business.’ I think that’s part of the challenge; that when we talk about these things, we talk about in the context that it’s something we’re borrowing from another culture,” Fleming explains.

Specifically, from Silicon Valley, where Fleming moved when she was eighteen. She started a company there, swept up in ideals of fast growth and high revenue.
“When I came back to the reservation, initially, I brought all those concepts and ideas with me, and I was frustrated by how slow everything moved, so slow.”

But then she began to feel Silicon Valley could learn something from the Native way of doing business, where bonds of kinship matter more than the bottom line. “Success isn’t necessarily defined by how much money you make,” she says. “Instead, we look at metrics like the impacts that we have on our communities and community wellbeing.”

Change Labs offers aspiring business owners what Fleming calls “culturally relevant support,” like loans that don’t require background or credit checks and workshops on how to file taxes.

A study commissioned by Change Labs found on Navajo land, it takes seven times as long to start a business and costs twice as much as it does off the reservation. Racquel Black, Change Lab’s coworking manager, says, “It’s a really hindering process, it’s a really a daunting process, especially if the steps to get that down aren’t completely clear.”

Black shows off a brand-new building in Tuba City called the Entrepreneurship Hub. It’s got a conference room, Internet, a printer, electricity, and water, all things in short supply on the Navajo Nation. “We want to be a safe space for people who have entrepreneurial aspirations, for them to be able to come here and ask the questions they wouldn’t necessarily ask someone else,” Black explains.

More than sixty Navajo, Hopi, and Salt River Pima have come through the business incubator program, among them Crystal Dugi, who turned to art after receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “I chose painting because it was something that didn’t require any practice yet,” she says. “It was something I could do just comfortably and follow my own guidance, and it blossomed into what I have now.”

Happiness is her metric for success, and enough income to pay for her bills and medication. She says she’s achieved that by auctioning her art on Facebook and dreams of opening a gallery someday.

“There’s no pressure to become a multi-million dollar company in so many years. The goal is to get there as a business. The goal is a mutual community of businesses to come together and create a network of people that are going to be successful,” she says.

A network of people that don’t have to leave Native land to find work, but can stay and run businesses of their own, walking a path that goes back for generations.