Their store, the Native American Trading Post on Redwood Road in West Valley City, carries an abundance of food, clothing and merchandise aimed at American Indians living along the urban Wasatch Front but whose ties to their reservations are strong.
Most of the clientele is American Indian, and most of those are Navajo. Others are Ute, Paiute, Shoshone and Sioux. There are fewer Anglos, as the Drurys call non-Indians, but their numbers are growing.
"You've got to be red, or red-hearted, to come in here," Bruce Drury said.
The Trading Post scarcely resembles the chichi specialty shops in Park City and Santa Fe that sell high-priced American Indian merchandise. To be sure, the store does sell rugs, jewelry and baskets. But it also stocks mutton, roasted blue corn, ceremonial supplies, knives, beads, herbs and other items destined for everyday use.
The Trading Post is also true to its name. Many customers buy supplies for beadwork or other projects, then return with finished products that are swapped for more supplies or sold to the store for cash.
"It helps a lot of people," said store employee Beverly Benally, a Navajo. "A lot of people meet here. It's like a chapter house on the reservation."
The Drurys' interest in American Indians goes back to their childhoods. Leslie Drury grew up in Myton, near the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in northeast Utah. Her husband, who was raised on a farm near Preston, Idaho, worked alongside American Indians who had attended the former Intermountain InterTribal School in Brigham City.
"We were thrown together on many things. What I noticed was they had a different way," Bruce Drury said. "They approached situations in life differently than other people I knew. They had a respect for plants and animals. I like those things."
The Drurys began to commercialize their interest in 1988. For years, they attended a swap meet at the Redwood Drive-In Theater. In 2001, a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they moved into a small building on Redwood. Despite a nationwide recession that had started six months earlier, the store was a hit, and in September 2004 the Drurys moved to their current site. With 5,000 square feet of floor space, the store is almost five times bigger than the old location.
The move appears to be paying off. Sales jumped 51 percent in 2005 and are up 31 percent this year, according to Bruce Drury. The gains are largely because the store has room for more inventory than the old 1,200-square-foot store could hold. The Drurys also try to stock items their customers request, even if it takes a couple of years to find a supplier.
"We had so many customers (that) they pushed us into a full-time business," Leslie Drury said. "Their needs pushed us into a seven-day-a-week store.
"We carry a lot of things that, if you lived on a reservation, would be readily available. But, in Salt Lake, they are not," she said.
She said the emotional rewards of running the Trading Post are as important as the financial payoff that comes from attending to the retail needs of an underserved population. On Thanksgiving Day, she and her husband had dinner with the parents of a store employee who were visiting from the Navajo Reservation.
"All of my friends are in the Native American community in Salt Lake. They are wonderful people," she said.
pbeebe@sltrib.com
