Not private equity.A tribal community.

For more than a century, US cannabis policy criminalized Indigenous plant medicine alongside everything else. When state-level legalization began, most legal cannabis frameworks excluded tribal nations from licensure — treating tribes as customers of the state system rather than as sovereign regulators in their own right.

Minnesota took a different path. The 2023 cannabis law explicitly authorized state-tribal compacts that recognize tribal regulatory authority over cannabis enterprises both on and off reservation. The White Earth Band of Ojibwe was among the first nations to sign such a compact.

Waabigwan Mashkiki Mahnomen opened in August 2023 — among the first legal recreational cannabis dispensaries to operate in Minnesota under the 2023 state-tribal compact, predating the broader MN OCM retail licensure rollout that began in 2024. Three additional Waabigwan locations have opened since: Moorhead, Saint Cloud, and East Grand Forks. Chanhassen is next.

The TRA enforces seed-to-sale tracking (METRC), lab testing, age verification, packaging compliance, and every consumer-protection standard required of any cannabis retailer in Minnesota. The authority is tribal. The standards are equivalent or higher. See our grow operation for what that looks like in practice.

Profits from Waabigwan Mashkiki return to White Earth Nation programs: scholarships for our students (including hiring preference for our community), services for our elders, housing, language preservation, and infrastructure. There is no out-of-state MSO siphoning value off the reservation. There is no private-equity fund collecting dividends. The economic loop is closed inside our community.