Building Community and Economic Resilience
The next entrepreneur video comes from Southern Oregon. Meet Clay and Theresa Chocktoot. Clay is a member of the Klamath tribes, who returned to Chiloquin after a life changing illness. Eight months ago Clay and his wife opened Black Buffalo, a coffee shop and Internet cafe that they envisioned for many years as a community-gathering place. “We are doing this because our community deserves it.” In the first nine month of business they have been able to break even and this fall are kicking off a school to work program with the local high school. Clay is also working to build his collection of Piute, Modoc and Klamath Indian portraits and artifacts from his family heritage.
The Black Buffalo Cafe is in Chiloquin (If you don’t know where Chiloquin Oregon is, when you look at the map, look south.) The Chiloquin area is roughly 540 square miles in south-central Oregon in the heart of Klamath County and is home to about 3800 people. What I didn’t know until I started working with Clay and Theresa was that in the 1920′s and the 1930′s Chiloquin was a rowdy little boom town, often referred to as “Little Chicago”. The closure of the lumber mills has changed the area significantly, but still there is a population of forward-looking individuals who are working towards steady, controlled regeneration and the town is gaining respect among many in surrounding communities.
