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Why Homelands exists
A note from Danny
I grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, and I'm a citizen of the Spokane Tribe with family ties to Kamloops as well. That community raised me, and it's shaped everything I've built since — including this app.
Where the idea came from
In 2021, I learned that the remains of more than 200 children had been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Some of my own relatives went through that school. I didn't know how to sit with that news, so I did what I know how to do: I ran. I organized a relay covering 215 miles, one for every child, and the response from runners who showed up for it stayed with me.
The next year, I organized a virtual run challenge: log your miles, then figure out whose Native lands you'd covered. People showed up for that too, but the process itself was a mess. You'd have to bounce between your fitness app, a website, and a separate lands database just to get an answer. A lot of people gave up partway through, not because they didn't care, but because it was just too much friction for something that should be simple.
That's the moment Homelands was born. I wanted the answer to just show up — sync your watch, finish your run, and know whose land you were on without doing any extra work for it.
How I got here
I went to Spokane Community College, then Washington State University, where I earned my degree in business administration and economics with a focus on comparative ethnic studies. From there I did Gonzaga's MBA in American Indian Entrepreneurship — a program built specifically for Native students, and the only one of its kind in the country. It's where I found my voice as a leader, not just as a student with ideas I kept to myself.
Today I'm the finance director for the Spokane Indian Housing Authority, and outside of that I'm an ultra runner and a UESCA-certified run coach. Homelands sits at the intersection of all of it: business, community, and the trail.
What I'm building toward
This app is bigger to me than a fitness tool. Land acknowledgement and land back movements need to meet people where they already are, and for a lot of people that's mid-run, mid-hike, or mid-ride — not a plaque or a website they'll never visit. Homelands puts that history directly into a habit people already have, so it becomes part of the workout instead of one more thing to seek out.
Long term, I want the premium side of the app to hold real, living history: Wikipedia-style pages built with Tribes, carrying their own oral histories in their own words. And I want the app itself to give back — profits going toward my community, and eventually a youth cross-country team on the reservation, so kids out here grow up with both the running and the pride in whose land they're running on.
Bringing it to life
I bootstrapped the first two phases of Homelands myself — the branding and the user experience — before bringing on a development team, Appsketiers, to build the app. What stood out about them was that they were just as excited about this project as I was. My friend Beau Denison has been part of this from early on too, handling marketing and building the original Homelands website so we could get the word out and find supporters.
Homelands is fully funded now and heading into beta testing ahead of launching on the App Store and Google Play. It might take a little longer to get everything right, but I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.
More on the story
FaVS News: Spokane Tribe citizen developing fitness app to educate users of Native history →