by Paul Levy

White Earth, Minnesota (AP)

Over gravel roads and through dense birch forests, visitors from as far as Hawaii have come to this impoverished reservation community 200 miles northwest of the Twin Cities to sip freshly roasted gourmet coffee, buy designer sweat shirts or open their laptops in the area’s only cybercafe.

This is the White Earth Reservation, where eagles soar but the Natives struggle to rise above the poverty line. And it’s home to the year-and-a-half-old Native Harvest Cafe, a picturesque log building where the gourmet cookies are warm, the birch-bark gift baskets are filled with locally processed wild rice and the organic coffees roasted a few miles away are occasionally named after local legends such as Chief Hole-in-the-Day.

“This was absolutely the last place I ever expected to find a cafe like this,” said Janet Entzel, 64, a customer from Coon Rapids.

“But as odd as it seems, there is something so perfect, so powerful about this cafe.”

The cafe opened in a vacated restaurant in 2004, but the Native Harvest catalog company is more than a decade old. Each day, the company ships an average of 100 boxes with Muskrat Coffee, wild rice, locally produced jellies, maple syrup, candies, birch bark and beaded gifts, or other reservation-produced items, said Janice Chilton, the cafe’s chef and director.

Customers who have signed the cafe’s guest book have traveled from as far as California, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, said Chilton. “Even a guy from Nigeria.”

“Who would have thought it?”

Native Harvest and the “rez roasted” Muskrat Coffee Co. are byproducts of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. Nearly 20 years ago, activist Winona LaDuke started the project, with hope that some of the 830,000 acres of the White Earth Reservation that were promised to the original Ojibwe settlers will be returned to tribal members through negotiations with the state and federal government and private corporations that long ago took over the land.

But LaDuke, the politically savvy Harvard graduate who in 1996 and 2000 ran for vice president on Ralph Nader’s ticket, is also an astute businesswoman.

The reservation has 47 lakes, and much of the lakeshore property belongs to affluent owners who travel to northwestern Minnesota from afar.

“I’d like to see some of that money kept on the reservation,” LaDuke said.

There are no $4 lattes at the cafe. The most expensive coffee drinks sell for $2 or less and the special – a cup of fresh-roasted coffee and a gourmet cookie – costs $1.50, said cafe manager Todd Sisson. A pound of coffee costs between $7.40 and $12, depending on the blend.

The affordable prices may appeal to tribal members, but cafe management knows that outsiders, catalog and Internet sales ultimately determine the success of the business.

“A lot of people who come up here don’t know they’re on a reservation,” LaDuke said. “We want to make sure they’re aware of our culture and local gifts.”

Twenty years ago, LaDuke and Margaret Smith, 87, a former arts and crafts teacher, pooled $750 and began the Ikwe Marketing Cooperative in Osage, Minn. Ikwe, which means “women” in Ojibwe, packaged and sold locally harvested wild rice and helped area artists sell their crafts.

By 1995, Ikwe had given way to Native Harvest, another extension of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. Native Harvest now processes, packages and sells 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of wild rice each year, much of it through catalog requests or retail sales at cooperatives and specialty stores throughout Minnesota. Among the other popular sellers are books by Indian authors including LaDuke and CDs by local native artists such as singer Annie Humphrey of Cass Lake, Minn.

But LaDuke, 46, wanted more.

“What I really wanted was a good cup of freshly roasted coffee, made from organic beans and grown by farmers who were receiving a fair price,” she said. “And I couldn’t find one anywhere in northern Minnesota.”

So, through Native Harvest, she bought organically grown beans from certified fair-trade growers of Mexico, Costa Rica, Ethiopia and Nicaragua and roasted her own. In her home in Ponsford. Much to the chagrin of the six teenagers living with her.

“The boys want their room back,” LaDuke said.

The coffee-roasting machines are expected to be moved to the Native Harvest Cafe within weeks, LaDuke said. (Smith, for one, wondered how painful it will be for LaDuke to part with her roasters. “Winona loves her coffee,” Smith said. “And her house smells so wonderful.”)

But moving the roasting machines into the cafe necessitates another move by Native Harvest – the purchase of an additional building (possibly a vacated school), where Native Harvest can store and package products.

LaDuke won’t rush expansion. She’d as soon talk about the Mino-Miijim (Good Foods) program, in which Smith distributes specialty foods to the reservation’s diabetics and needy, as talk about Native Harvest’s possibilities.

Two years ago, LaDuke and Smith received the “Slow Foods Award” at a food festival in Naples, Italy, for their efforts to protect wild rice markets. A “slow foods winner,” LaDuke says, shouldn’t move too hastily.