ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - As publisher and editor of a year-old business magazine, George Joe admits that he has an agenda, and it's a daunting one: He's trying to spur business development across an American Indian reservation where running water and electricity are luxuries and unemployment is near 50 percent.
On the sprawling Navajo reservation, residents live far apart, the communities are small and it can be nearly impossible to start a business, according to Joe. It's not like America's urban neighborhoods where children get their start with lemonade stands on the street corner.
"There are no street corners on the rez," says Joe, a Navajo himself. "It's hard to be a small entrepreneur."
Joe, a few freelance writers, a designer and some of his friends have been working to change that with Rez Biz, a monthly magazine aimed at igniting the Indian entrepreneurial spirit. The magazine connects Indians interested in running their own businesses by providing a road map made up of the experiences of others.
A year and a few bumps and bruises later, Rez Biz is celebrating its first anniversary. Its anniversary issue is being printed this week.
"Incredible," Joe says of the magazine's success.
He says the more than 61,000 hits received by the Rez Biz Web site offer evidence that readership has more than tripled in the past six months. Magazine figures also show that for each printed copy, more than three people take a look.
It's distributed at grocery stores and other businesses across the Navajo Nation and in Albuquerque, Gallup, Flagstaff and Phoenix. It's also used as a teaching tool at a couple of Navajo schools and at the University of New Mexico's Gallup campus.
"Reader stats just keep going up and up and up," says Joe. "They want to know about the ups and downs, the decisions, the hardships, the day-to-day."
The magazine pushes to educate Indians about the ins and outs of business by featuring other native business owners. But Joe may be his own best example. He has experienced the difficulties of getting the magazine off the ground, keeping it going and actually making it successful.
Rez Biz nearly folded after the first issue because financing hadn't been secured, an issue that led to a rift between Joe and his former partner. Joe, the only full-time employee, was also stretching himself thin between the demands of the publication and graduate school.
"After all of that I have learned that you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it," he says by phone while making the interstate trek to Gallup after an evening class at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He's set to graduate with a master's degree in English in December.
Joe's attitude is not much different from some of the business owners and artists featured in Rez Biz over the past year. They all tell stories of hardships and rewards.
Kristina Haskell, a young Navajo-Hopi woman who runs her own accounting firm in Phoenix, reads the magazine regularly.
"One of my young cousins asked me, 'What do you do?' ... I told him I have my own company and his eyes got so huge and he asked, "People can do that?'"
"I think that's what Rez Biz does," she says. "Why not?"
As for the future, Joe sees Rez Biz as a national publication that will continue to highlight the accomplishments of Indians from all tribes while asking hard questions about cultural and bureaucratic barriers to business.
With the first year under his belt, he believes Rez Biz is already on track.
"What I really see happening, based on the comments I get, is more like a movement, a revolution," he says. "It's a like a team everyone want to be on."
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On the Net:
Rez Biz: http://www.rez-biz.com, http://www.myspace.com/rezbiz
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