ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Small Business Saturday is giving the opportunity for local vendors to share handmade products and educate those about Native culture in an impactful way.

“Native American art is a big industry in Indian country,” Rochester Institute of Technology’s director of the Native American Future Stewards program Kendall Scott said. “It's a billion-dollar industry and it's important to protect it and showcase it because every day Indian or it's always fabricated, it's manufactured by big businesses. So it's important to support small local artists who this is their livelihood.”

Products are showcasing their traditions and culture at the Pop Culture Cafe.

“We mainly have bears which are just kind of like the head of the medicine, and they're just for healing,” sales associate for Neto Native Arts Gabriella Jamieson said. “Native medicine would help them with everything and just help them feel more connected to, you know, the things around them.”

Customers were not the only people to learn about the culture as vendors themselves continue to study their heritage through their own works.

“By seeing what I'm creating,” owner of Loretta Boerman Jewelry Loretta Boerman said. “I have Native American in my background on my dad's side, but I don't know what tribe. But when I do, I want to learn all that I can about that.”

They are highlighting advocacy for Indigenous communities through their works.

“I take every opportunity to have the world work for everybody where we respect each other and we're my grandkids are going to get beat up because they have a braid,” designer of Longhaus Of Lone Faye Lone said.

Lone is an award-winning fiber artist with several collections among museums including the Smithsonian Institute and Seneca Museum. Using her art, she is able to teach and demonstrate true depictions.

“I'm working on trying to reclaim our designs because the non-native artists will just chop up stuff they think is Indian and put it all crazy with weird colors and it looks horrible to me,” Lone said. “I'm so happy that there's one company that is working with native artists to get native design.”

She is hoping to turn the support of Small Business Saturday to every day.

“Even if I change the mind of somebody around water, it's important, how important it is or planting trees, how important that is, it's worth it,” Lone said.