Amy Denet Deal is finally home. After growing up far from her Indigenous community with adoptive parents and building a career in fashion, Amy moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2019 to be closer to her Navajo roots.
“In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine that when I was little,” Amy says. The past five years have been full of learning, entrepreneurship, community engagement, and cultural reconnection through her fashion brand, 4Kinship. But most importantly, they’ve been full of joy. Amy has a profound desire to use her experience to create a space for Indigenous artists and entrepreneurs to thrive. Here’s how she’s doing that with her online business and her retail store in downtown Santa Fe.
From displacement to reconnection
Amy was adopted and raised in Indiana. She never knew her Indigenous birth family. So, her path to founding 4Kinship began with reconnecting to her cultural roots. “Literally, I would read National Geographic to learn about my Diné culture,” Amy remembers. (Diné is the word Navajo people use to refer to themselves.)
She pursued a career in fashion, working as a sportswear designer at companies like Reebok and Puma. But Amy gave all of that up, leaving Los Angeles to return to New Mexico in 2019, ready to immerse herself in and contribute to her community. “All those years I’d been living in other places, learning how to create wealth for corporations, to create marketing stories, to create visual stories, that all came back home with me.”
Building a community hub
Amy started 4Kinship, an upcycled clothing brand, with her daughter in 2022. Beyond selling her designs, 4Kinship uses her brand to help other Indigenous business owners learn the in’s and out’s of selling, both online and in her Santa Fe store. “I’m just basically here as the auntie or the matriarch that really makes space for our young people, because I’ve already had my career,” she says.
Amy’s store is one of the few native-owned businesses in her Santa Fe neighborhood, and envisions Santa Fe as a hub for native-owned businesses. “Imagine if this is the one place in the world where you could shop the most native Indigenous-owned stores.”
Giving back to the community
Amy wants to share what she learned from her corporate fashion career. She knows it’s invaluable to her mission of social entrepreneurship. “For everything that I take, I want to be able to give back, to have a balance,” she says.
One of the biggest projects she took on was building a skate park in Navajo Nation—a remote area with little infrastructure or athletic facilities. She has been surprised at how much the skate park has become an intergenerational community space. “I go there and Grandma and Grandpa are there with the kids, and everybody’s bringing stuff to cook out, and it just makes me realize how much we need the space out there. It’s bringing everyone together.”
The vision for indigenous entrepreneurs
Amy sees a future where Indigenous entrepreneurs can become changemakers and leaders in any industry. She emphasizes the importance of ecommerce as a tool for storytelling and economic empowerment. “We’re brilliant. We shine. It’s just a matter of amplifying and elevating that,” she says.
For Amy, the 4Kinship journey is about more than business—it’s about creating economic opportunity for other Indigenous people.
To learn more about Amy and her vision for indigenous futures through entrepreneurship, listen to the full interview on Shopify Masters.
