The owner of a local distillery says he fired one employee and plans to provide race sensitivity training for everyone else at Santa Fe Spirits after a Laguna Pueblo woman alleged she had faced racial discrimination at the business’s downtown tasting room.

Santa Fe Spirits owner Colin Keegan said in an interview Thursday he took the steps after 35-year-old Amanda Cheromiah, who was raised in New Mexico but now lives in Arizona, posted a video on the social media platform TikTok, where she has more than 18,000 followers. In the video, Cheromiah accuses the business of racism and says a worker refused to serve her and her friends. She also urges people not to go there.

The video was viewed more than 600,000 times, received more than 63,000 likes and was shared more than 1,500 times between Sept. 18 when Cheromiah posted it and Thursday evening when she took it down.

The video shows Cheromiah, who has a doctorate in education, standing outside the tasting room in a colorful, patterned face mask as she speaks about her experience.

Text on the video reads: “FYI Santa Fe Spirits is a racist establishment. We were the only brown people here. White people came in after and were served.”

“See this guy right here,” Cheromiah says in the video as her camera pans the building and shows the employee who has since been fired. “He refused service to us. That’s him, right here. His name is Jesse. Don’t come here.”

Cheromiah gives more details of the interaction in several subsequent videos, still posted online,

We’re just trying to cope with the fallout and hunkering down and trying to protect ourselves and our staff. There was one guy [employee] involved in the incident, but all 10 people’s lives in my company have been very upset for the last week because of all this.” Santa Fe Spirits owner Colin Keegan

in which she says she and two friends, “men from one of the nearby pueblos,” arrived at the “quaint” establishment on Read Street around 6:30 p.m. Sept. 18. They joined about seven other patrons and two musicians in the tasting room’s small, homey interior.

They stood at the bar, perusing the menu, she says in the video, but no one acknowledged them.

Three or four minutes later, she says, the waiter — who told her his name was Jesse — walked through the room and saw the trio standing there but didn’t stop. Instead, she says, he went outside and began talking to someone she later learned was a former employee.

After she and her friends had been standing at the bar for about 10 minutes, Cheromiah says in the three-part follow-up video, one of her friends went to the door and calmly asked the worker if he was the only bartender and “can we get service?”

“The waiter said, ‘You are condescending, and I refuse you service,’ ” Cheromiah says in the video. When she asked him why he was refusing them service, she says, he told her he had the right to refuse service to anyone.

“Because there was no justifiable reason why we should be denied service,” Cheromiah says in a video. “I interpreted that he was discriminating [against] us because of how we looked and how we occupied that space in the establishment. We were singled out.”

She adds, “We left the establishment. As we were leaving, a group of white elderly folks came into the establishment, and Jesse immediately served them.”

Cheromiah breathes deeply and appears to be fighting tears in one video.

“I’m doing this because you, my Indigenous family, especially the youth, you mean a lot to me,” she says. “… Our voices matter. Our narratives matter, and I hope this gives you some courage to speak up for what is right.”

She encourages others who were at Santa Fe Spirits that night, including the bartender, to post their perspectives of what happened under the hashtag #indigenouspatron.

In an interview Friday, she said no one had done so.

Within half an hour of leaving the tasting room and posting the video, Keegan said Thursday, Cheromiah “spoke to a manager and got a call from Jesse, the bartender, who apologized and said he would do anything to make it right.”

The bartender told a manager he “might have been a bit short” with Cheromiah and her companions, but “there was no racism intended,” Keegan added.

Santa Fe Spirits business manager Caitlin Richards said the employee lost his job because “he just did not provide service to a customer and then said he could refuse service … so that was the basis for firing him.”

The company addressed the incident on its Facebook page, saying it “was handled poorly by our staff” and “disciplinary actions have been taken.”

“We immediately communicated with the party involved and had our staff personally apologize for the way they were treated,” the post said. “After we spoke, the party agreed that the company handled the situation effectively and appropriately and the party forgave our staff member.

“Moving forward, we are mandating race and sensitivity training for our entire staff to address our own intrinsic biases to ensure nothing like this ever happens again to our valued customers,” the company’s post continued. “We have spoken to the affected party about this and they agreed that these were appropriate measures for our company to take to remedy the situation.”

Keegan said he spoke with Cheromiah personally.

“She has said she forgives us. It sounds like from what she’s told us that she has moved on,” he said.

The company has received comments, messages and emails — and even some physical threats — in response to the incident, he said, but it also has received support from regular customers.

“We’re just trying to cope with the fallout and hunkering down and trying to protect ourselves and our staff,” Keegan said. “There was one guy [employee] involved in the incident, but all 10 people’s lives in my company have been very upset for the last week because of all this.

“It’s unfortunate how social media has kind of warped the situation,” he added. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”

Cheromiah said Friday she accepted the bartender’s apology in a phone call, though she felt it was forced.

Santa Fe Spirits manager Weston Simons handled the situation well, she said, adding there is no quick fix for the racism Indigenous people face on a daily basis.

She decided to remove the original video Thursday evening, Cheromiah said, in part because she realized the bartender was only one representative of Santa Fe Spirits.

“I recognized the power of my voice,” she said. “That one video prompted a lot of people to go to their page. I recognized there was a lot of power in that, and people were going to leave reviews. I thought it was fair to take it down. But I think it reflects my experience that we did experience racism in that establishment.”