Our European correspondent Petor Georgallou recently visited four North American framebuilders who have been awarded SRAM’s Inclusivity Scholarship to attend Bespoked in Dresden, Germany, on October 18–20. In the third chapter of this series, Petor joins Christopher Schmidt of Colorado Springs, CO, who builds bikes under the name Good Grief Bicycles. What’s it like to be a Native American framebuilder in the USA? Join Petor and Chris for a thought-provoking conversation and take a look behind the bikes at Good Grief…

The tail end of a picturesque mountain drive didn’t drop a single hint as to what the Good Grief shop setup might look like. We drove through pockets of industrial buildings, expansive colonial-style houses, tiny homes surrounded by chain link fences with rotting cars in the front, and small-town shops.

We pulled up to a neat, well-maintained single-story house painted black, and I sat in the car for a while Bennet double-checked the address and I psychologically prepared myself for getting out of the car. I’d re-injured a slipped disc in my back earlier that day and, fresh from that injury, sat in the fairly low seats of the rental car, which had molded my posture over the previous hours driving to its shape as my body stiffened up.

Slowly and awkwardly I forced my body upright against its will. After a few minutes, I was standing, although my posture overall was hunched and lopsided and more or less still in the shape of a car seat. I shuffled pathetically up the steps, a total mess, covered in dirt from writhing around on the ground in pain on the trail earlier that day, into Chris and Lauren’s pristinely restored home, filled with the healthiest Monstera Deliciosa plants I’ve ever seen.

We ate, and then I ate the half a dozen remaining valiums from the first time I injured my back, washed down with a cocktail of anti-inflammatories, vitamins, and Manuka honey in the hope of the muscles relaxing enough to ride at least a little the next day. I don’t remember anything after that.

The following morning, I was back to being able to move like a regular 80-year-old and felt ready for a full day in the Good Grief workshop with Chris and his dog, Eddy Merckx. Eddy Merckx had followed Chris home as a puppy during a backpacking trip and they lived together ever since. We polished off a jug of pinyon coffee and made our way across the yard to Chris’s garage. Chris took a few bikes out to make space to work, and Eddy Merckx began to sing at the sight of his trailer, his entire body wagging with expectation.

The garage was spacious and well laid out, occupied by a couple of benches, a Bridgeport mill, a perfectly waxed VW beetle, and a bike stand in the middle. It was the kind of workshop Chris could navigate blindfolded, and while there were a lot of things, everything had its place.

The walls were lined with rare and historic track bikes, a Team USA Schwinn Paramount, a Serotta, and the sweet fixie that Chris built at Yamaguchi. There’s an intangible thread of quality and aesthetics that pulls the room together at Good Grief, and something super calm and methodical about the way Chris moves around the space. He put on an apron and a pair of gloves and began filing.

Petor: What are you working on at the moment?

Chris: I’m just working on the bike that I’m going to take to Bespoked. It’s going to be a 150 mm travel hardtail, but then I’m building a second fork for it so it can also be a cycle truck, like a cargo bike. My whole idea was calling it the RezRunner – kind of taking two different bikes that are intended for completely different purposes, like an enduro hardtail and a cargo bike, and making them one. Dual use! Rezduro also had a lot to do with it.

What’s that?

Rezduro is an enduro race that’s put on here on the Navajo reservation. The whole race is put on the Navajo land by kids who live on the reservation and it’s super cool! I got to meet them in Moab a few years ago.

Are there a lot of Native American builders?

No, I can only think of one: Terraplane, in California. He builds a lot of full-suspension stuff. He used to run a school too, that’s where the guys from Destroy Bikes learned.

That’s kind of weird that there are only two. Why is that?

I don’t know. When you’re Native American in this country, it’s kind of expected that if you go to college or anything, you have to assimilate a bit more. I don’t know how to explain it. Native Americans, at least in my experience, don’t get a lot of support in trying to follow things that are outside of the norm, or creative endeavors.

It’s like you should be grateful to be able to go to college and get a degree and get a job working behind a desk. I don’t know – I did that and it sucked! It’s hard enough for a lot of Native Americans to even leave the res, let alone go chase something creative, which is hard enough with all the privilege in the world.

What was your desk job?

I worked for the Olympic Committee for 10 years. I ran the velodrome and all the community programming and stuff. That was the best part of my career, doing all the track cycling community programs and stuff. That’s when I was the team mechanic too. But then during COVID, they laid off my boss and gave me a “promotion” to doing his job, so I had to go away from the track and wasn’t focused on the cycling side as much. It kind of killed me, being in an office for 8 hours a day and doing budgets and going to meetings and stuff. I just realized I didn’t really like it, even though I had the degrees to do it or whatnot. I have two Master’s degrees in things that don’t have anything to do with framebuilding.

What were they?

I have one in Sociology and one in Sport and Exercise Science. My undergrad is in Archaeology, so I was an archaeologist in Mexico for a little bit.

That’s such a weird trajectory! When you say it’s hard to leave the res, I actually have no concept – as a person who’s grown up in England – what that even means. Like, what is the reservation?

The reservation? It’s just a chunk of land that each tribe has here in the States – well, some do. During the history of the settling of North America, a lot of tribes were grouped together and put on pieces of land that they were “bequeathed” by the government at the time. There just isn’t a lot of opportunity there, at least by modern economic standards. Some tribes are super wealthy because they have casinos or stuff like that on their land. But most tribes just got put on all the worst pieces of land wherever they were at.

I’m part Paiute-Shoshone and part Zuni. Paiute land is in the Great Basin of Nevada, so it’s basically desert land, unusable land. There are a lot of cultural barriers for Native Americans, especially if you don’t want to assimilate into the white culture around you. For example, my Zuni family down in Albuquerque – well, in Zuni – they have dirt floors, so that’s like a really big culture shock for a lot of people when you go into their traditional adobe houses and they still have dirt floors, but with a big screen TV on the wall too.

Be sure to check out some of Chris’s work in detail from our MADE coverage earlier this year

It’s always trying to fit into somebody else’s culture. But I’d say there’s a big reversal of all that stuff going on at the moment. A lot of the youth is starting to connect through internet culture and doing things their own way, rather than trying to fit into that assimilation model. I don’t know if you follow Warpaint Mag or anything like that, but they are doing some really awesome stuff with Native Americans in action sports and making sure that they get coverage and visibility as well.

So how did you end up doing this as Good Grief?

I just fell in love with framebuilding. You know that guy Todd from Moonmen Bikes? He learned from James at Black Sheep. When I went to college, I was living with some friends, and one of them had gone on a couple of dates with Todd. He came over to our house once for a house party and he showed up on this titanium fucking jammer. And he was like, ‘Yeah, I made that,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck do you mean you made it?’ He was like, ‘I bent all the titanium and welded it and designed it.’

I was just so blown away at 19 years old, I was just like this is so fucking cool. Ever since then I’ve just been fascinated with framebuilders. Thankfully Yamaguchi is in Colorado because he’s the only person I wanted to learn from – I just fell in love with his bikes and like Japanese builders first. I was early into fixies, so everything was like, NJS or death!

Haha amazing. So that must have been like 2005-2007?

It would have been like 2007 when I started getting into framebuilding. It was so hard to find information on framebuilders or framebuilding in general back then – like we had the internet, but it was this constant search. Like have you seen that site Instructables? My first fixed gear bike was just a sprocket MIG welded to the hub body, because that’s how they were saying to do it on Instructables and I didn’t know any better.

It worked!

Yeah, that bike never broke. From then on, I was always experimenting. And then while going to college, I was working full time at Best Buy in their warehouse, and I saved up all my tax returns for like 4 years and that was enough to go to Yamaguchi. So when I graduated undergrad, I went to Yamaguchi. And that did more for me than my college degrees!

Good Grief hasn’t been going for a very long time, so I’ve only ever seen half a dozen bikes, but each one is incredible. Solid, practical and well-thought-out full builds that exist to serve needs outside of industry norms. It’s likely that I won’t see heaps of them either, because with his meticulous approach and willingness to spend a week finishing the joints on each frame to incorporate super clean features into bits no one will ever see (like under the bottom bracket), the bikes that Chris likes to build are inherently slow to build. But somehow in that slowness each step gets thought out and rationalized a little bit longer and they feel like an antidote to fast frames, to the total lack of standards in the cycling industry in modern times, and to unnecessary complication.

Thanks to Chris, Lauren, and Eddy Merckx for hosting us in their home. To see more from Good Grief, check out their website and give them a follow on Instagram. Stay tuned here to The Radavist for more builder profiles as we cover Bespoked 2024!