Coffee brewed with Native representation

WAGNER, S.D. (KELO) – In bigger cities like Sioux Falls, there’s a coffee shop on almost every street. But in smaller communities, a specialty shop for your morning brew is harder to come by. That’s part of the reason a couple in Wagner, South Dakota, opened their own coffee shop.

“Coffee is universal, coffee speaks to everybody, everybody loves coffee,” Amelia Spotted Eagle, co-owner of Grind House 46, said.

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At Grind House 46 there is a whole story behind the coffee.

“There’s a whole background of what we are and we sell coffee,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said. “We sell it to everybody and it’s not just something that is to one group, it’s for everybody, but it just so happens that a Ponca woman and Ihanktonwan man are selling coffee but we’re doing it for everybody.”

Amelia and Kip Spotted Eagle opened the, as their kids call it, ‘little coffee shop that could’ four years ago.

“It came about kind of on a whim,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said. “He texted me and said, ‘let’s open a coffee shop,’ and I said, ‘you’re crazy.’ And four years later, here we are and everything just kind of happened so quickly.”

So quickly that they are already expanding.

“After getting, you know, four years of business kind of under our belts, so to say, we are looking in to coffee roasting,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said. “So we’ll be roasting our own coffee beans as well as providing beans for other shops.”

The decision to start roasting is grounded in both economic and personal reasons.

“It’s real helpful because, you know, with the economy right now, a lot of people don’t know that, but beans are going through the roof because of drought, weather conditions and, you know, other things as far as tariffs if they happen,” Kip Spotted Eagle said. “So, it’s kind of volatile right now.”

“Being a Native-owned business, we wanted to prove that we can expand, we can be successful and we can be able to provide another resource to the community and to also maybe nationwide,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said.

Their community is the driving force behind everything the Spotted Eagles do at Grind House 46.

“We would not be here if it weren’t for the community that shows up every single day,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said. “The community of Wagner, as a whole, has been amazing but we also have Marty and Lake Andes, Armour, Platte, we have people in Avon, you know, everybody from these little surrounding towns come through. It’s not just Wagner that supports, it’s the whole rural community as a whole and to me that’s really special.”

Not only do they want to serve that community, they want to inspire it.

“Inspire people that really want to do their own business and work for themselves and be their own boss and show them that you can do it,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said.

They’ve already seen that light of inspiration too.

“I never thought it would be like this but the impact that it’s had on my children — my kids go from, ‘I want to work for something’ to ‘I want to own something,'” Kip Spotted Eagle said. “And that was immediate, like when we started this business my kids were like, ‘there’s our shop, there’s our business.’ So that was pretty amazing to see that shift in consciousness.”

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So, to some, this is just a latte. But to the Spotted Eagles, there is something extra swirled in with the espresso and milk.

“To be a Native-owned business owner in a community where we have such a high Native population, but when you look in the town of Wagner you don’t see very many Native-ran businesses,” Amelia Spotted Eagle said. “So to be a Native-owned business in the middle of this community means pride because it’s not about us, it’s about our community. It’s about the community that we serve. It means pride, it means inclusion, it means representation. It means that I’m representing not only myself, I’m representing my staff. I’m representing my children. I’m representing the people that came way before me.”

An extra layer to Kip and Amelia’s coffee story — recently they visited Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, their alma mater, and helped a group of students start their own coffee shop there.

As for the expansion of their business, they are currently in the process of renovating a second location in Wagner where their roaster will go.