[emotional music plays] [birds chirping] - [Luke] I grew up on the Qualla Boundary.

There's just always this feeling of belonging, being in this area.

[waterfall trickling] Cherokees that are from Oklahoma, when they come back here, they just feel like they're home.

Being in Kansas for 12 years, every time I came home it was like, I was like renewed, I guess.

There's just something about this place that is special.

Being who I am, I always wanted to come back and help my people in some way.

My thought was, "Oh I'm gonna come back and work for the tribe," but that didn't really pan out.

There's not as many jobs available, so I had to figure out a way to give back.

And I think I have figured out a way to do that by creating Buffalotown.

[slow emotional music plays] Buffalotown is a company that me and my wife started in 2017, and it started out as just T-shirts but with a Cherokee focus.

I like to think of our brand nowadays as a lifestyle.

It's kind of a way to show people who we are, where we're from, and to kind of show that connection to the community and the culture.

So, growing up, being a Native kid, the only way to identify as a Native person was to rock something like a Cleveland Indians hat or, a Redskins hat or shirt or whatever.

It's just anything we could find with a Native on it.

Now these days, there's an alternative to that to say, this is something authentic, authentically Cherokee.

We can rep this and show who we really are.

Hopefully I'm offering something to the youth now that they can say like, "Hey, that's my culture.

I can take that.

I can wear that and I can kind of be proud of who I am."

[slow emotional music plays] Osiyo.

My name is Luke Swimmer, owner of Buffalotown Clothing with my wife Tabitha, and Snowbird, AKA Buffalotown, is my home.

[slow emotional music plays] [upbeat piano music plays] This is what the shorts look like when I'm working on the designs.

These all have new basket designs in them.

And that's what people don't understand.

I didn't just take it and copy and paste.

I had to actually re-weave the dang basket design one splint at a time on the computer.

You just kind of gotta let the pattern speak to you.

And it's not like I'm sitting down knocking out these designs in the afternoon.

Man, it takes months of planning and design work and everything else to get to that final product.

It's cool.

I've heard people say, "I like what you're doing.

You're making our our stuff cool again or you're helping make our stuff cool, or making the young people want to wear their culture more."

It's not a lot of people carry baskets anymore, but if we can take those patterns and put them on other stuff that people do carry, maybe book bags or shorts or shirts, that's still kind of repping who we are in a new way.

So ton of respect for basket weavers and to make it with your hands, and pottery to go around and make all these designs.

I mean, it's crazy.

[upbeat orchestral music plays] It's kind of surreal thinking of where we started to now, seeing it in multiple stores.

We're at Over the Mountain and REI.

We carry in the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Quality Creations downtown, a couple stores here in Cherokee and looking to expand.

We get people reach out and say, "I wanna carry your brand," but we kinda have to take a look at the store and see if it falls in line with what we're trying to do.

[upbeat orchestral music] Everything that we sell in stores, it's always exclusive to that store, so not everybody's gonna have the same shirt.

We're gonna make you kind of do some work if you want all the designs or shorts or whatever.

So we just don't wanna throw any old design in whatever store.

[upbeat orchestral music plays] - [Julia] And here we are at REI in Pigeon Forge and this is our Buffalotown section.

We have been really happy as an REI store to be able to partner with Luke Swimmer.

It's been a really awesome way that we've been able to engage with people who are just coming to visit the park for the first time.

It gets to go past what you think of when you think of like a Smoky Mountain National Park souvenir.

You actually get to take a piece of culture with you.

So we have the spider design as well as these panther designs.

And then what's been really cool is these designs with an arrowhead with the Kuwohi name.

It's been an ongoing project to bring back the name Kuwohi to what a lot of people know as Clingmans Dome.

And these have been a great way to engage with people and just bring light to the people that have called this land home for a very long time.

[upbeat orchestral music plays] - [Luke] So it's kind of like looking at the old patterns and the old baskets and the old artwork.

At some point that was a new design, that was something new for the people, that was that artist's interpretation of what was going on around them at that time.

So it's kind of like me and another smaller group of artists are kind of taking that and like, "Well let's create new patterns or new designs, or let's take old designs and revamp them and make them popular again."

So that it's not just shirts and stickers, it's fellowship.

It's people coming together with a common goal.

It's us as Cherokee people having that resistance and that ingrained in us to keep going and to do whatever it takes to survive.

[slow flute music plays] - [Luke] Growing up, I didn't grow up with anything.

I didn't have a lot of stuff.

So I always seen my dad and my grandma, if we needed extra money they would create something 'cause they're all potters, so they would make pottery.

You go to town and sell it.

And that wasn't unique to our family.

That was a common practice for a lot of families here in Buffalotown.

It was kind of my way of making something and making money so that I can support my family.

I got five kids now, so we got a household.

[laughs] - [Tabitha] So it started out Luke had some extra money, extra prize money from the powwow and that's how we did our first run of shirts.

And it was a super small run, but we just set up on the outdoor courts down here, and that's how we sold it.

It started out $500 and that's how we got it.

It's crazy to see where we started and see how much we've grown over time.

Hopefully, you see our stuff all over the U.S. now.

I'm thankful for sure.

A lot of our customers are repeated customers from the area and I'm really thankful for them for the support that they've shown over the time.

They're the reason why we're where we're at now.

- [Luke] So this is the annual 4th of July powwow.

It's like our biggest event every year.

This powwow's always been around since I was a kid, and I think I've been dancing like 13 years now.

I just always kind of was attracted to the style of dance, and when it was my time to start dancing, I was like, "Man I wanna be a chicken dancer."

And ever since then, I've been a chicken dancer.

And the dance is to imitate the prarie chicken.

It's like a little grouse type bird out in the Great Plains kind of area.

It does a mating dance, when we're out there dancing, like we're imitating that bird.

And it comes from the Cree and Blackfeet people up near Canada.

- [Powwow Announcer] Senior Men's Chicken.

Good luck, gentlemen!

Medicine Tail.

[upbeat drums beating] - [Luke] I dance powwow just to be connected.

It's a way to show who I am as a Native person and take pride in that.

[upbeat drums beating] - [Luke] The biggest thing I want is that connection to the community and the culture.

We're awesome people.

We have a killer history.

All the resistance that we went through, everything that the United States tried to do to get rid of us, and we stayed here and we did what we had to do to survive.

So that's the big thing, the understanding.

At the end of the day, it's just a T-shirt, but it's cool that that shirt has kind of created these emotions and feelings and everything you want as a brand.

It's awesome to see people that I don't know wearing the brand, people that I look up to wearing the brand.

We're for everybody and we're a community and I wanna send that message to people.

You don't have to work for the tribe to help your people and you can do all kinds of things.

It doesn't have to be a nine to five.

So just like all the Native people in my community that I seen growing up, making baskets, making pottery to kind of supplement their income.

Just have fun and keep it fresh and make the people proud if you can.

[upbeat drums beating]