In 2000, Jeff Burnham had a great idea for a website: Sell books, videos, audiocassettes, CD-ROMs and other related materials over the Internet.

But Burnham's concept only sounds familiar.

Goodminds.com is unique in that it only carries material by and/or about the indigenous peoples of North America.

"One of our goals is to provide resources to Native communities so they can learn more about their culture," Burnham says. "But I also see a big responsibility to provide this information to the non-Native community so that they can have an appreciation for Native culture."

Peter Tiahur, Business Edge
Jeff Burnham, Goodminds.com president, is committed to delivering quality aboriginal products.

Burnham, who is president of Goodminds.com, doesn't shy away from comparisons with Amazon.com and other book commerce sites, but he points out that his company, based on the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, has important differences.

"There are some big wholesalers who have Native titles, but they don't put any criteria on them," he says. "They sell them simply because they are Native."

Goodminds.com, by contrast, screens each item before it is offered for sale.

Sheila Staats, Goodminds' Native information specialist, selects and evaluates each title to ensure it is factually correct and respectful of Native American/First Nations/Métis/Inuit history and culture.

"There are some bad books out there," Burnham says. "Some are very stereotypical or biased against Native people. Some are unintentionally racist. We screen those things out.

"We also don't carry anything that contains sacred material in it either. From the beginning, our mission has been to get a quality product in readers' hands so they received factual information."

Getting to that beginning required Burnham to overcome challenges not faced by most other small-business owners. A member of the Six Nations Iroquois community, he could not turn to a bank for financing.

"Native business is difficult because you cannot pledge a security on a reserve," he says. "I overcame that problem by funding it myself primarily and not taking anything out of the business. We were in the fourth year before I took anything out personally. It was a long go, much longer than I expected, but I knew we were in this for the long term."

Goodminds.com grew out of Working World Training Centre, a computer-training business Burnham established in 1987. One of the centre's classes on multi-media authoring needed a project for the students to work on collectively.

Burnham turned to a college friend, Raymond Skye. The artist, who lives in nearby Tuscarora Township, offered one of his pieces, The Great Peace ... The Gathering of Good Minds, a large work that depicts the history, culture and spirituality of the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations peoples.

"The idea was that the students would scan the image, make it possible to click on the 30 major images in that artwork and have a page of text that explained what that piece of the artwork was about," Burnham says. "That 30-screen project turned into four years of work and more than 2,000 screens of information."

The Great Peace CD-ROM was launched in 1999 and became a hit not only in the Native community but with libraries and educational institutions, which clamoured for other Native-related resources.

"At the time we had nothing else," Burnham says. "These customers would usually then proceed to tell me how hard it was to find good Aboriginal education resources. A lot of them were convinced that they just weren't out there. I knew it was hard to find, but I also knew there was more than most people realized."

The problem, Burnham says, was that the industry lacked a single source for Native-related material. Book publishers carry only a few Native-related titles, he says, and compiling a comprehensive list takes more time and effort than publishers are willing to invest in a niche market.

"After enough people told me how hard it was to find, I said: 'Hey, there's a business opportunity here,'" he says. "We started to build a website and I made a decision that, in addition to selling the CD-ROM, we would see how much other Native-related material we could get."

Over the last five years, Goodminds.com has grown from offering just the CD-ROM to more than 2,300 individual items. While impressive but potentially confusing for uninformed customers, the site features advanced search capabilities.

Visitors can refine searches not only by title, author or publisher, but also by tribe or educational level, from kindergarten to university.

"We stock everything that's on our pricelist," Burnham says. "Just like any business, we may get caught short on some items, but we get in-stock items out within 24 hours.

"Goodminds.com was built on trust that our list is good stuff," he says. "The other component of our success has been customer service. That combination has served us well."

Jefferson Gilbert, deputy executive director of the Ontario Library Association, says trust and customer service are not the only qualities that make Goodminds.com a valuable asset.

"Jeff has built quite a following in the library business community," Gilbert says. "There are a lot of people who want to support him because he saves companies quite a bit of time and money. In the book world, the harder a book is to get, the less money they make on it.

"And because he deals in a niche market, wholesalers see Jeff as a partner and not as a competitor," he adds. "That is a nice position to be in."

According to Burnham, Goodminds.com has grown by 20 to 25 per cent a year since 2000. And those numbers, he says, will increase now that the company has begun offering music CDs as well as books and educational resources.

"We recently added about 150 music CDs, ranging from traditional to contemporary," he says. "Eventually, there could be as many music CDs as there are books."

Burnham says the company will also expand its book titles. Along with the hundreds of existing titles the company has not evaluated yet, Burnham envisions the day when his site can encompass works about and by indigenous peoples from around the world.

"This is a niche market, but it is going to be a large enough market to keep us busy if we tackle it right," he says. "The thing that keeps me going is that we're dealing with such nice people in schools and libraries who really appreciate what we're doing."

(Mike McLeod can be reached at mcleod@businessedge.ca)