Meet Our Owner and Founder

Oki, Niisto niitaniko my name is Jeron Nathan Rainy Chief. I am a member of Blood Tribe, Kainai Nation. I say that first because it is first. Everything else follows from it.

My ancestors were chiefs and Fort traders. Rainy Chief (Sotai-na), Chief Red Crow (Mikaisto), Chief Charlie Davis (Kahkono'koomi — Hollering in the Morning). Then on the other side of the family, D.W. Davis and John J. Healy building Fort Whoop Up and Fort Macleod across Montana and Southern Alberta, doing commerce across cultures at a time when that was genuinely complicated. I did not grow up thinking I would open stores. But I also did not grow up thinking it was strange that I might.

I am Two-Spirit and autistic. My family is full of people who led and built things in situations that were not designed for them. I clocked that early.

I want to tell you about Rosie Davis because most people skim past this part and I think it is actually the whole thing.

One of the longest living members of Blood Tribe. A beadwork artist. Her work is in museums across the US and Canada right now, today, while you are reading this. I think about that more than I can explain.

I was too young to remember her. She passed before I could really know her and I have made peace with that without fully getting over it. Her hands held me. I believe something passed through them. Maybe that sounds like a lot. I do not think it is.

Growing up I kept noticing what was not there. Our designs lived in our homes, in ceremony, on the hands of our grandmothers and nowhere else. Not in stores. Not on television. Not in the everyday spaces where other people's cultures just existed without anyone making a thing of it. Nobody was coming to change that.

My grandmothers were beadworkers. Their hands understood things that took years to learn and longer to really see. The work was never decoration. Not made to sit behind glass. Meant to be worn, enjoyed, given away, passed along. That stayed with me.

My husband and I started 49Dzine out of our garage in 2016. Handmade goods, online. We were not trying to build a brand. We were just making things we believed in and seeing if anyone else did too.

Then the pandemic hit and things got strange fast.

Most businesses went quiet or closed. We did not, and I will be honest, that surprised me a little. We had been grinding online long enough that when everything moved that direction we were already standing there. Sales jumped. We took that money and opened our first storefront in Calgary in 2020, right in the middle of everything still being uncertain. Edmonton came the year after. Two stores during a pandemic while people around us were boarding up windows. I know how that reads. It was still the right call.

I went to Residential Day School. I am not going to write a lot about it here. What I will say is that it lives inside how I think about institutions, about trust, about why I would rather build the thing myself than wait for someone to tell me I can.

People think of us as a retail store. That is fair and also not quite right.

We are a design company. Everything starts in a story or a memory or something handed down. We work with manufacturing partners on the physical goods. The design, what it means and where it came from, stays with us. The handmade section is its own thing. Those pieces are made in-house or by local Indigenous artisans and they sit differently than everything else we carry.

Each location is stocked around the community it sits in. Not as a concept. As a practice that changes what is actually on the shelves.

Every store should feel like it grew up where it is.

Indigenous culture should not cost too much to access. Our Iron On Heat Transfers exist so people can carry their culture without it being a financial barrier. That is the whole reason they exist.

49Dzine Academy came from the same place. If we can teach something, pass something along, give someone a skill or a piece of knowledge that is getting harder to find, that is worth doing.

Most of the people who work here carry this history in their own families. This is not a job that happens to involve Indigenous design. They know what it is.

The store teams are in it every day. Conversations, regulars, trust built slowly. Two people run wholesale. Four manage e-commerce and online made-to-order store. They are not here by accident and neither is anyone else.

The 49Dzine Academy instructors teach beadwork, ribbon skirt making, traditional crafting. Artists. Sit with one of them and a student for a few minutes. What moves between them is not just technique. You can see it if you are paying attention.

• Active Member, Calgary Chamber of Commerce
  
• 2026 Cohort, Fireweed Institute Entrepreneurship mentorship program
• Indigenous Advisory Circle, Explore Edmonton Corporation (2023 to 2026)
• Invited by Canada's Trade Commission to give input on Indigenous trade classification under CUSMA
• We give a $6,000 scholarship every year through the Residential Schooling Survivors program. In 2026 it goes toward Indigenous Entrepreneurship, which feels like where it should have always been going.
• 49Dzine Academy is coming. 3D Printing Classes, Fall 2026.