http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/business/03nike.html?ex=1349150400&en=83f
6ee8742d5b87e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

October 3, 2007

Nike Adds Indian Artifacts to Its Swoosh

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

When Nike recently introduced a shoe designed specifically for American
Indians, the company said it was to promote a healthy lifestyle on
reservations.

But along with its trademark swoosh, the Nike Air Native N7 features
feathers and arrowheads, which bloggers have found off-putting.

“If this isn’t an example of corporate manipulation of race, I don’t know
what is,” wrote one of about 200 readers commenting online about an article
that appeared in The Rapid City Journal in South Dakota. There, the
response to the article was split.

“What makes this a ridiculously bad move is decorating it ‘Native American
style,’” added a reader identified as “la foi,” on the Web site of The
Portland Mercury, an alternative weekly near Nike headquarters in Bend,
Ore.

“They probably brought in a Native consultant and heard what they wanted to
hear, which is that Native Americans like sunrises and rainbows and feel
real connected to the earth and the night sky and stuff.”

But one of those consultants, Rodney Stapp, a podiatrist and a member of
the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, begs to differ.

“There are always going to be negative comments,” said Mr. Stapp, who is
director of the Dallas Urban Indian Health Center, “but most of them are
saying that because they are not really familiar with the whole process
that Nike went through.”

Mr. Stapp first contacted Nike several years ago, he recalled, after he
discovered that a Nike crosstraining shoe, the Air Monarch, was well suited
for his diabetic patients, who had turned up their noses at “those big ugly
black shoes” made specifically for diabetics. (American Indians are more
than twice as likely to be diabetic as non-Hispanic whites, according to
the Centers for Disease Control.)

Mr. Stapp contacted the company, which agreed to provide the shoes to him
at their wholesale price of $27.50 rather than the retail price of $60. The
clinic, which was financed by the federal government, in turn agreed to
provide the sneakers to patients free.

Three years ago, Nike approached Mr. Stapp about being part of a team of
consultants to design a shoe from scratch.

“Indians tend to have a wider forefoot,” he said, “but their heels are
about average,” which means that when shoes fit in the front, there can be
“heel slippage” in the back.

Of course, the shoes will fit many who are not Indians perfectly well, but
it is unlikely that they will be able to get their hands (or feet) on them.

According to a Nike spokesman, the shoes, which will be shipped starting
Nov. 1, will not be available at conventional retail outlets but only
through Nike’s Native American business program, which distributes through
Indian clinics and businesses, many on reservations.

Doctors who serve American Indians may have even more cause to nag their
patients to exercise than doctors elsewhere. Along with a higher incidence
of diabetes, deaths from heart disease are 20 percent higher than in the
American population over all, while deaths from strokes are 14 percent
higher, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The shoes have an $80 suggested retail price and will be sold to the Native
American groups for $42.80. The company says its first run of the shoes,
which come in men’s and women’s models, will be about 10,000 pairs, and
that all profits from those sales — estimated at $200,000 at first — will
be put into American Indian communities through a Nike athletic program
called Let Me Play.

While some have taken umbrage at the idea of designing shoes for a specific
ethnic group, others take this all less seriously.

“When I heard it, the first thing I did is I laughed until I cried, because
I just though it was hilarious,” said Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur
d’Alene Indian and a novelist, who is on a book tour for “The Absolutely
True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” a young adult novel.

“The day it was announced, I thought: ‘Are they going to have dream
catchers on them? Are they going to be beaded? Will they have native bumper
stickers on them that say, ‘Custer had it coming’?”