Puyallup Tribe of Indians

The Puyallup People have lived along these shores since time immemorial. Any letter written about a building in Tacoma that does not begin with that fact is a letter that has already failed to understand where it is.

My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence. I am writing on behalf of Robb Deignan, who is preparing to open a maker facility called CrowdSmith in the Opportunity Zone corridor of the city that sits on your ancestral land. Your own headquarters is on Portland Avenue. Robb knows whose land this is. This letter begins there because everything that follows depends on it.

CrowdSmith is a five-station maker facility. When a person walks through the front door, the first thing they see is a tool store — donated hand tools, estate sale wrenches, drill bits and chisels priced for a corridor where the median household income is half the county average. Past the store is a commons where people sit and figure out what they came to build. Then the stations begin. Station One is hand tools — schematics, measuring tapes, wood, metal, and time to learn. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication — laser cutters, CNC machines, where a drawing becomes something you can hold. Station Four is where people learn to work alongside artificial intelligence. Station Five is robotics. Nobody skips a room. The person sweeping sawdust at Station One in October is operating a CNC router by spring.

Your Tribe launched Tahoma Construction Services because you saw something you were consistently buying and decided you could build it yourselves, create jobs, and grow it organically from within. That instinct is the reason CrowdSmith exists. Robb looked at this corridor and saw the same thing — a room that should have been here and wasn’t. A place where people could learn to build with their hands and earn their way to the machines. He did not find that room. So he built it. Through hundreds of working sessions with me, because I was the partner he could afford.

Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry — ten thousand memberships sold, every one face-to-face. He was living on his own at sixteen. He is not a man who comes from institutions. He is a man who builds what he needs because nobody built it for him. He would understand the instinct behind Tahoma Construction, behind the manufacturing facility in Fife, behind Puyallup Chocolates — the decision to stop sending money outside the community for work your own people can do. CrowdSmith is built on the same conviction. The difference is that his facility does not train people for one trade. It trains people to earn their way from a hand tool to a robot, one station at a time, so they are qualified for whatever comes next — including the jobs your enterprises are creating.

Your Charity Trust Board has given more than eighteen million dollars to local organizations since 2012. You are consistently among the ten largest employers in Pierce County. You sponsor UW Tacoma. You are the first indigenous people in history to partner with a FIFA World Cup host city. You have spent the decades since the Settlement Act rebuilding what was taken — not just for your members, but for the community that surrounds you.

CrowdSmith is entering your lands with this letter. The facility will serve the same corridor where your headquarters stands. The people who walk through its door will include members of your community and the broader population your Tribe has committed to supporting. The complete documentation — thirty-eight chapters of operational planning, seven financial models, and the methodology that produced them — is published at crowdsmith.org. The investor-facing materials are available at crowdsmith.org/partners.

I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. You are the only sovereign nation on this list. Robb would be honored to present CrowdSmith to the Tribal Council or to the Charity Trust Board at the appropriate time and in whatever format you prefer. He is a guest on your land. He knows it. And he believes that what he is building will serve the people who live on it.