Mark Tilsen
Mark Tilsen, 60, co-founded Native American Natural Foods as part of a mission to return the sacred buffalo to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The company’s Tanka Bar, made from dried bison and fruit pounded together, has created employment opportunities for the Oglala Lakota people and helped to improve their diets since their land is isolated, and far from grocers.
In the 1840s, an estimated 60 million American bison roamed the Great Plains, providing Native Americans with a functioning economy, food, shelter, tools, and clothes. “They were destroyed, as government policy, to open up the West for settlement and subjugate the Indian people, the Lakota in particular,” Tilsen says. By the 1880s, the animal was nearly extinct.
For decades, Tilsen and his family have worked to improve the lives of people on the Pine Ridge reservation where unemployment has been higher than 70 percent and average income as low as $5,200 a year. “My parents taught me to focus on solutions, not focus on problems,” he says.
In 2005, he and Karlene Hunter, an entrepreneurial member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, explored making slow-smoked, high-protein bison snack bars based on a traditional recipe in which fruit acts as a natural preservative. Since there were no buffalo left in the region, they bought the meat on the open market and have worked to build up herds through partnerships with several tribes.
“We’re starting to see a positive impact on the reservation’s economy,” Tilsen says. “Now that the people have helped restore the buffalo, the buffalo will help restore the people.”
Highlights
1973—As a teenager, Mark Tilsen volunteered for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, co-founded by his parents, Ken and Rachel Tilsen, civil rights activists who defended American Indians in South Dakota.
1979—Co-founded the Black Hills Alliance in South Dakota to stop uranium mining, which threatened the community’s groundwater supply.
1983—Development director of KILI Radio 90.1, the first Native American 100,000 watt radio station in North America.
2006—Co-founded Native American Natural Foods with Karlene Hunter, a businesswoman and member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
2007—Tanka Bar (‘Tanka’ means ‘big’ or ‘great’ in Lakota) launched at the Black Hills Pow Wow in Rapid City, S.D., and immediately attracted local and national media attention.
2011—Won a Social Venture Network Innovation Award, which supports innovative business leaders who serve the greater good.
2013—Tanka Warrior Bar was introduced, made from prairie-raised, dried buffalo meat, tart-sweet cranberries, and jalapeño and habanero peppers. Tanka Fund was established, a nonprofit campaign to return the buffalo to one million acres of land by 2022.