Ologies with Alie Ward - Indigenous Fashionology (NATIVE CLOTHING) with Riley Kucheran

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Fashion! Trends! Not really! This lively chat with Riley Kucheran, an Assistant Professor of Design Leadership at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion, covers everything from the history of industrialized clothing manufacture to current Indigenous designers he loves, political statements through beadwork, Indigenous art markets, and a dissection of Coachella headdresses. From Biigtigong Nishnaabeg Nation, Riley also describes his experiences climbing the corporate ladder in the fashion retail world vs. learning from elders and advising younger students during land-based education, while tanning hides in the bush. Also: uniforms, the good and the bad. Follow Riley Kucheran at Twitter.com/RSKucheran or Instagram.com/RSKucheran A donation went to Dechinta.ca Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/indigenousfashionology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey. It's your neighbor banging on a saucepan with a spoon at 9 a.m. on a Saturday. Alleyward. Back with some allergies for your ears. Let's get into it. Okay. First off, this is coming out a little bit late and I just want to say I'm sorry. It's been quite a week, so it's coming out late on Tuesday.

Thank you for your patience. Also, thank you patrons for making everything possible at patreon.com. A dollar a month gets you in. Thank you to everyone for spreading the word and telling a few friends about an episode they might like. Thank you for rating it and keeping it up in the charts and for pouring out your hearts in the reviews, which I read when I worry that I'm smelly and nobody likes me, such as this piping hot review from Very Tall Hobbit, who said, instant favorite, finding something

that can simultaneously pique my curiosity, warm my heart, and make me snort laugh is a tall order and allergies is that something. Thanks Very Tall Hobbit. And every single person who's left a review, I've really read them all. For realsies. I don't deserve the praise, but I'll take it. Indigenous fashionology. You may have so much imagery already populating your imagination.

I know. Cool your jets. We'll get there. But first off, indigenous comes from words meaning to be birthed. And fashion is derived from the Latin to make. So fashionology, it's a real word. It means the sociology of fashion. It's not used a lot, but it is used.

So people native to land making things. That is what this episode is about. When I think fashion, I think like runways, flash bulbs, labels, money, and trying to run on the highest speed of a trend bill. And I was kind of nervous to talk to thisologist because I don't consider myself a person who's terribly on trend or who gives like a ton of fucks. But I do consider myself a person terrified of being judged by people and cuter close in me.

I mean, aren't we all? So we became buddies on Instagram after he posted a very sweet comment about the Bisonology episode mentioning if I ever needed an indigenous fashionologist to holler, which I did a few milliseconds later in his DMs. And he has a bachelor's in the arts, a master's in communication both with the focus of social justice and culture. And he's now getting his PhD at Toronto's Ryerson University while being an assistant professor of design leadership at their school of fashion.

He's from the First Nation of Bikdigang, Nishnabeg, and his research involves indigenous fashion as a tool for economic and cultural resurgence. He also looks like a model, but frankly, that's just none of my business. And I have a few epiphanies. He's amazing. So get ready for everything from first row runway gossip to fast fashion to history, to cultural appropriation, to tanning, to uniforms, and more with indigenous fashion ologist Riley Kutcherin.

Yes, yes, it is a thing. I swear, fashionology is a thing. It's been used in a book before. I don't think a lot of people use it, though. I think we just call ourselves like fashion studies scholars and fashionology hasn't really caught on yet. But I mean, now is the time. Now is the time.

Now is the episode. How long have you been into clothing? Forever, forever. I think from a very young age, I was very interested in, I guess what you could call the glamour of fashion, which now, I think as a professor and as a scholar, I kind of critique the glamour of fashion, but I was very enamoured with it, you know, reading Vogue magazine and GQ magazine and seeing all these beautiful designs in the glossy pages really inspired me, especially as a queer person growing up in a rural community.

It was it was an escape, so to speak. So I always loved fashion and I originally wanted to be a fashion designer and I was going to applied fashion school and it got to the point where I needed to submit a garment that I had sewed myself. I was like, oh, crap, I can't sew. And that's when I stopped. That's where the dream ended. So upsetting.

So I thought I thought I'd be a fashion journalist instead, because I also love to write. So I thought, OK, I'll study journalism in school and I'll get into the fashion industry that way, since I might not be a designer myself. What was it about sewing? Because I'm miserable at sewing. You just need so much dexterity. Like my big man hands can't like handle all the tiny movements. And I've recently gotten into beading beadwork.

So I have been improving the dexterity. But yeah, it just it didn't click for me. I couldn't translate my visions into a make garment. And so that was very frustrating. You know, what I saw in my mind is like a beautiful garment. I couldn't actually do it or draw it and then design it and create it. And then just knowing how much I did love to write and learn about history and things like that, I just thought that was the better way to go about it.

Yeah, those are something in you that when you realize that you could still have a life that involved fashion, but have it be more broad and less technical. Were you just like, oh, I can do this? I think so. And it was for sure in graduate school that I actually realized you could make a career out of critiquing fashion, which is what I came to really love. It's kind of ironic that as a fashion study scholar, I'm kind of like anti fashion, actually. Wait, what?

OK, this is already veered right off course of my expectations and I love it. Which we can talk about. But when I realized that you can actually critique the harmful practices and I mean, I was working in the fashion industry throughout school to support my school. And I was really getting the behind the scenes look at how much product there was and how much waste there was and just this kind of hierarchical fashion system. It was that has fundamentally shaped our relationship to clothing. Like clothing has been reshaped because of the fashion system.

And I realized, oh, you can actually do something to critique that and to try and dismantle that fashion system. And so that was just my moment where like, OK, here it goes. Here it goes. It took me kind of eight years in the long way around to get back to fashion. But that's that was where the passion came from was understanding that you could actually change it. Yeah, and you wound up having a position of kind of power to to speak your voice more than be part of the system that you maybe didn't find completely healthy.

So I was very much, as I said, enamored with the fashion industry. And I started at a big corporate chain and I kind of worked my way up the ladder as many people do. And I think, you know, for so long, I was in that system and not really critiquing myself and my own practices and meeting sales goals and things like that. And it was actually a few mentors of mine in grad school who kind of, you know, related my passion for fashion with my interest in history and sociology and things like that. And that's when it all came together. And this is a stupid question, but you're a smart person.

But when when did clothing go from like regional and cultural to commerce? I know that that's like, I do even know that's like the big question. That's like, what is fashion? What is fashion? And of course, it's a complicated answer. There's some kind of general consensus that fashion emerged in medieval courts and with European trade. So I mean, in my mind, I'm always picturing Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

I have enough diamonds. And it's, you know, it's this really fashionable aristocrats who are deciding kind of what fabrics are in as the as the merchants are bringing in new fabrics from around the world as trade increased. And so that's where we start to see these kind of regimented changes of styles. So that's where we get this notion of seasons and seasonality. And what's in fashion and out of fashion is because these rich aristocrats, these rich white aristocrats were were deciding what was in fashion.

And then we started to see these rapid, rapid changes. And, you know, since then it just kind of explodes. But I think especially post World War Two, there's this explosion of what we might call mass fashion in which fashion kind of goes and becomes super popular and attainable by the masses. Whereas it used to kind of be the the purview of rich elite. OK, so sewing machines came on the scene around the industrial revolution in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

And then in the 1960s, mass fashion took off even more. But things got truly bananas after Y2K during the Lindsey Lohan goes clubbing with Paris Hilton years and like your ex-boyfriend burning you a CD of Strokes Song era. So those early aughts saw a rise in Boho chic and the demand for of the minute styles shot up to obsessive new heights. So styles constantly started flooding racks and our closets kind of became revolving doors.

It always strikes me that and I've never known how to talk about this, but it always strikes me that we have perfectly good clothes that suit our bodies, that we just throw out for something that is going to be cool. Yeah, 30 minutes because there's a nicer style or a nicer pattern on this newest this newest article of clothing. And I think that's I mean, that's why why fashion is so damaging because of that quest for novelty and what's new and what's hot. And it is just completely manufactured.

It's so impractical and you've seen kind of the recent explosion of even seasons, the number of seasons. You know, some some brand names will release a new collection every month. Like it's no longer these are your winter clothes. These are your summer clothes. Like, do you need your new winter parka? Like, no, it's like every single month, every single week, there's new deliveries of products that we just don't need.

Like the amount of clothing is just unfathomable. There's so much textile waste that comes from especially the fast fashion industry. And what exactly is fast fashion? So I guess you can consider consider fast fashion to be those major companies. So I think of H&M and Zara and really, it's just it's changed the model. It's really quick in the pace of delivery of products. It's mastered the supply chain so much that the the the amount of product has increased exponentially.

And I think, you know, it's part of a gradual shift from what we can might consider clothing made by the hands to manufactured, you know, machine made clothing. And I think that's exactly what indigenous fashion and what the work I do is trying to tackle. It's actually moving away from that super fast heightened model where clothing is produced so cheaply that it's attainable by millions of consumers. And I think fast fashion also does some damages because of how global it is.

You can travel anywhere in the world around the world. And on the same high streets, you see the exact same styles. A high street side note is like the main retail strip in the US. We call this Main Street or like the mall. But between cheap production and trends zipping around the internet in a literal instant, evidently, there's a pretty global consensus on what's cool right now and was so five minutes ago. So things have homogenized rapidly.

You know, it's it's destroyed the diversity of local indigenous clothing because it's so widespread. Mm hmm. And also labor practices, not the best. Not the best. Yeah. I think the the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh really did an incredible job of bringing awareness to these issues. Just for context, this would be the 2012 factory fire that killed over

100 workers and left hundreds more injured. It forced people to really confront the ethics of these labor practices and conditions. It was kind of bubbling up. And there were kind of anti sweatshop movements before then. And it goes right back through history kind of to the Industrial Revolution when people were raising these issues of just how devastating clothing manufacturing was. There's also reasons why those working conditions haven't improved.

Rather than kind of improving the processes in which we make clothing, we've just sent the labor offshore. So rather than investing in the technology to produce better clothing, we've just kept the same old technology, but moved it offshore to to where cheaper labor can be exploited really. Yeah. So what are some solutions to this? How do we pare down and not give a flippin' fig about being judged for

wearing last season's lumpy cerulean blue sweater? Who has a good life hack for this? Well, boy, howdy, Steve Jobs, Einstein and Wonder Woman all had one thing in common and it wasn't skin tightly at hearts. And how do you feel about people wearing kind of personal uniforms into it, not into it? Like someone, I read this, this article, it was maybe two years ago about an advertising executive who was just fed up with trying to decide

what to wear every day. And so she just she got like seven white blouses with a little bow tie and five pairs of pants. And she just wears that. Do it. Yes. Yes. Oh, I mean, think of your closet.

Think about how clean and simple it's like, this is my Monday blouse. This is my Tuesday blouse. Like, beautiful. Yeah, for sure. I think if you can find staples that you know are made in a really sustainable manner, if you're able to even identify who makes your clothes, you know, that's the absolute best thing you can do, I think. But yeah, if you can find like a staple organic cotton t-shirt that's

made sustainably, you know, even if it's local production, all the better. But yeah, just like go for that. If I could wear the same thing every day, I would. Yeah, I know that appeals to me so much just as someone who has like decision problems and also who I feel influenced a lot by the outfit I'm wearing. If it's something that I don't really like or, you know, kind of makes me day, but just know having that predictability seems like such a relief. Right.

Right. Well, other people say that fashion is like an extension of your body. Like it's it's an extension of your skin and it does that. So it makes perfect sense that it affects you in that way. And I think, you know, that's why they call it the power suit because you can put on a suit and it just transforms your your psyche and it gives you so much confidence. So yeah, clothing is really kind of magical in that sense. And how has clothing changed in First Nations and indigenous cultures?

When did we see a shift from garments that would be a hand sewn and hand fabricated and worn all the time to this fashion movement? Right. Well, I think you can really kind of trace that change by tracing colonization itself. How I really got into this work was through researching clothing practices in residential schools or boarding schools in the United States. When Riley says boarding school or residential school, he is not referring to a Connecticut finishing school for debutants.

This is a reference to the rounding up of tens of thousands of indigenous kiddos starting around 1870, lasting over 100 years until the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which allowed indigenous folks to finally run their own schools. And I think that is probably where we can see the most kind of concrete changes happening, you know, before the boarding school, residential school era. We actually see documentation of indigenous clothing practices changing almost immediately upon European contact.

And it's just incredibly unfortunate and disheartening that it was often, you know, this stripping of culture to kind of attack indigenous you know, diversity and indigenous identity itself. So, you know, when missionaries came over, they kind of had their preconceived notions of, you know, that quote unquote idea of the savage. And they they implanted that notion onto us and they started removing our clothing and trying to impose Western style suits and dresses and things like that. So it was it was for sure in that in that era of the boarding schools where

students, young indigenous students, kids would arrive to the school and literally their clothing would be stripped away from them and often destroyed and they would be forced to wear Western uniforms. And so that, you know, that era is hundreds of years long. It's so devastating that so much of our clothing practices were literally taken away from us. But obviously, you know, pieces were held onto and families would keep traditions alive and teach skills to their children.

It's kind of weirdly beautiful that although there was such abuse in the in that school system that it was through that school system that a lot of indigenous women learned how to sew and then, you know, they would have taught their their daughters, you know, and nieces how to sew and that way contemporary designers today have actually been able to, you know, fashion their own fashions and identity in opposition to all that loss. And what about indigenous clothing? How was it fabricated before industrialization?

Indigenous fashion is just so synonymous with land and land-based practices. So I think if you think of plans of indigenous groups who, you know, that old adage of usually using every piece of the buffalo, it's very true that, you know, all of our clothing would have come from land and from our harvesting and hunting practices, and it would have been incredibly situational and contextual to a local indigenous group. So I do want to, you know, say a disclaimer that, you know, I don't speak for all indigenous groups and there is such a beautiful diversity

that it's even kind of hard to talk about indigenous fashion while avoiding generalizations. And I mean, I can't even really speak to Anishinaabe or Ojibwe clothing practices, regions that I come from, because I don't know that history and that history with that history was very deliberately taken away from us. So it's kind of you always have to bear in mind that indigenous people aren't experts on everything and that they're often on this journey themselves to kind of reclaim these traditions and learn more about their own history. Yeah.

As you can imagine, during this time of trying to eradicate their culture, a lot of oral history was lost. What kind of history exists and survived has survived colonization? I know it's so difficult because so much of the records of indigenous design come from this anthropological tradition. And within that tradition, there is very clearly white supremacist beliefs about indigenous culture and indigenous culture was dying. And so we have all these ethnographers kind of rushing to save or salvage

indigenous culture. And so we get a really, really interesting perspective to put it lightly on indigenous clothing practices. You know, you never get context. You get, you know, this is a dress from this tribe and you never get whose dress it was. You never get the significance of the dress, you know, the family history and how that history attaches itself to the clothing and then also contextualizes it within a society.

Like you never get that sort of rich detail about clothing. And then when you do, it's often just outright racist. It is offensive. So you have to be very, very delicate when you do go into anthropological records and, you know, say there's like little tidbits of information. If you read missionaries and their their journals of, you know, their engagements with indigenous peoples, it's very, very limited. And I'm so hesitant to even encourage people to go in there and find it

because you won't have that kind of rich history. I think there have been a lot of beautiful examples of bringing in indigenous elders and knowledge holders into, say, a museum space and letting them kind of interact with the clothing and instantly you start to get some of that richness. And then it's, of course, there's just no or very, very limited oral record in any institution collection. So it is incredibly limited what I have access to,

which is why so much of my work has actually just been visiting. I spend a lot of time traveling or I guess I used to spend a lot of time traveling just really getting to know communities. And I think trying to, you know, explore the idea that indigenous fashion exists for one, that indigenous clothing isn't static because what those anthropological records do is that it freezes indigenous culture in a certain time. And then we get that kind of binary between traditional clothing

and contemporary clothing, which is actually pretty harmful. And I think we should try and kind of unpack that because it's fair to say that indigenous clothing has always been changing. It's never been static. And we've always been kind of adapting as new materials became available as we traded first with other tribes and then and then with Europeans who came to North America. So it has always been changing.

That's why you just need to spend as much time as possible with community members when you are doing this research. They'll be able to give you those richer details. And that must be so frustrating to. Well, I'll rephrase that because frustrating is not even the word. But infuriating. Yes, thank you. Like the notion of having your your people and your heritage

talked about in past tense when you are right there. Yeah, must be devastating. It is. And I think, you know, that's why I am so passionate about my work and why I get passionate about other issues that are that are so related to my work, like cultural appropriation, because it just it strikes my heart because it's it's my family who had those materials taken away from them. And there's a very, you know, there's a very clear reason why I wasn't taught Ojibwe traditional clothing practices

because of kind of systemic racism and colonization. So I think, yeah, it does hurt when people speak of indigenous peoples as having only existed in the past. But I think, you know, you shouldn't feel shame or guilt because of that because it really is our education system. Our curriculums were really designed to to ignore or delegitimize indigenous histories, the whole notion of Terra Nulius, the idea that North America was empty and that it was kind of free for the taking.

Like that was central to the colonizing mission. And that turns up in all of our curriculum. So it's I mean, even myself in high school, I learned nothing about my own indigenous history or the indigenous histories of the school where the school was located. It's almost not surprising that people still think of indigenous people as having vanishing. And I actually think fashion had a big role in that notion.

There's this idea of kind of the vanishing Indian that indigenous peoples were disappearing as as North America was being colonized. And that was kind of perpetuated through representations and through clothing practices, like the image of the stereotypical indigenous person on horseback in loincloths and things like that. You notice something strange about Indians. Like that was a fabricated image. Obviously, it was kind of amalgamated from actual indigenous practices.

But this myth of the Indian was so pervasive and so central to colonization. So that's why I actually kind of honed in on fashion as a critical nexus of colonization, because it's, you know, you needed to convince people that the land was empty, you needed to convince people that indigenous people weren't human. And once that was possible, then colonization could happen. And I'm trying to unpack the role of clothing in that process. I can't I it's so I where do you even start?

It's a lot, you know, I know, I know it's so much. I usually ask like I usually ask about like movies that get it right or wrong. And if you're talking about like a kind of fish, that's one thing. But like movies that get it right or wrong with indigenous cult, like how much fucking time do we have? You know, like everyone gets it wrong. Are there any pieces of media that would be that you feel like proud of any pieces of media that are made by indigenous voices that have been given that chance

to sort of try to erase colonist imagery? I think I mean, a lot of my favorite indigenous films are documentaries that kind of deal with the lived experiences of indigenous peoples. Alanisa Bomsawin is kind of the matriarch of Canadian indigenous cinema and so incredible. But I think in terms of non documentaries, we're seeing a bit of a renaissance or a resurgence of indigenous film right now in all genres. You know, there's some really incredible indigenous horror films now

and things like that where filmmakers are kind of playing with those perceptions. So we are seeing a resurgence. I think one of my absolute favorite films is called Angry Inook. And it talks a lot about the ceiling industry and how anti-seal activists have been so hurtful to Inuit communities because seal skins and ceiling is so integral to Inuit livelihoods and culture. It's just, you know, everything comes from ceiling and clothing practices all come from ceiling.

I've never really met these anti-sealers face to face and I have some questions. When Angry Inook just does a really incredible job of unpacking that long history of anti-sealing and kind of the questionable rise of that movement. And then also just includes some really, really beautiful parkas. Like everyone in it is wearing just incredible Inuit parkas. And Victoria Arctic Fashion is one brand that I love

because it just honors those traditions and just creates some really, really beautiful pieces that are just, you know, it's like it's the most insulated coat you could buy because it's, you know, you're you're wearing a seal over top of you and they're they're designed for the Arctic. So that film is called Angry Inook and I'll add a link to it on my website. Also, I got a really great letter a few months back from a listener named Rachel and it was about the Migratory Bird Act.

And she writes, we recently had two opportunities to discuss an issue very close to our family when listening to both the Plumology Feathers and Nesology Taxidermy episodes when you and your guest experts discussed possession of feathers and the attached felonious consequences that come with them. As an indigenous family, she writes, it was an opportunity for us to stop and talk about the widely discussed topic of the fashion industry that is the most cited as the reasons for enacting on the laws.

However, we also discussed the time period in which these laws were enacted. This was one of many tumultuous time periods for the Native American population. And these laws were used often to arrest and prosecute native peoples for the possession of feathers. Raids were made regularly on gatherings and powwows. And it's viewed by many as yet another way to destroy the spiritual life of our people. Even into the seventies and eighties, gatherings were held in remote fields and were kept secret for this reason.

She continues, feathers are a gift from the Creator for us. And carrying and gifting them has strong medicine power in our lives. There are messages and lessons to be learned in their finding. Forced assimilation from the past and the tearing away of spiritual practices has done incomprehensible harm. And it still continues today with the stripping of tribal recognition and destruction of sacred land and water. It's a well known and long understood thing in our communities

that these feather related laws were often used as an excuse to arrest, quote, upstart Indians. She writes, home, Wado, thank you, Rachel, back at you, Rachel. Thank you so much for that. I'm so grateful for this letter from Rachel because it makes so much sense. And with her permission, I forwarded it to a few of the bird experts that have been on the show, the taxidermy experts, and none of us had heard this before. We were all blown away and so grateful to know this and get this context.

And I asked Riley, too, like, what is of what this? I'm so mad about it. But the Migratory Bird Act wasn't actually put into place to protect birds. It was put into place to prosecute indigenous folks who were using feathers in their clothing and in their regalia. Have you heard anything about that? Is that something that's well known? Wow, I did not know about that.

It's actually bizarre. One of the reasons why indigenous people can actually make and wear their own regalia in public is because of rodeos. Yeah, when, you know, so Buffalo Bill Coyote, you know, was very, very big. And, you know, when rodeo culture was exploding across the US and Canada, they needed Indians to play in their rodeo pageants. So literally it was because of these like Western rodeos, which is why some of the laws prohibiting indigenous people from wearing

their own clothing were reversed because they needed indigenous peoples to play Indians in those productions. Yikes, which is so weird and problematic. But I think it just goes to show you how pervasive colonization has been and how recent it is that we have actually been able to to practice our own clothing practices. Like it's been very, very recent that we can actually start making and sharing publicly these kinds of beautiful creations.

And before you think this is just a thing of decades past, there are still restrictions put on native students barring them from wearing traditional regalia and items like eagle feathers for their graduation ceremonies still in 2020. Now, what about for every day wear? What is Riley seeing? What about what's happening now? What about some indigenous designers of clothing that you love?

Like, can you tell me about what trends there might be or what what you're learning about? Right. So I think I've changed a lot of my thinking actually since even talking about this subject. When I first got interested in indigenous fashion, I think it was because of t-shirts. There's a lot of incredible indigenous companies doing graphic t-shirts with some really powerful messages, you know, there's one that I love that says Native Americans Discover Columbus.

And it just does this beautiful kind of switching and it makes people think and people have stopped me on the sidewalk to ask, like, what does that t-shirt mean? So I think indigenous t-shirts, it's a really kind of accessible way to represent your culture and to start critical conversations. And I think that's really, really important. But I think the kinds of indigenous fashion that I'm more interested in now are really land based and they come from within communities.

I've studied a lot about the mainstream Western fashion industry and how damaging it is. And I actually think that, you know, we shouldn't be striving to participate in that. This indigenous fashion movement that's happening right now is bringing a lot of awareness to indigenous clothing practices. And that's really, really beautiful. And it's so important to support indigenous designers. But what I don't want is indigenous designers to try and, you know,

enter that mainstream and start producing their clothing at unsustainable levels. I think the beauty of indigenous fashion is how small it is and how slow it is. So I think some of my favorite designers are really just based in the community. I mean, one person that I really talk about a lot is Tanya Larson, who's Gwichin and based in Yellowknife. And they really involve their whole family and their whole community. And when it's land based for Tanya, it means that she works primarily with hides. So hide tanning is an incredibly beautiful process.

It's very labor intensive. It takes so long to scrape a hide after it's been harvested. You have to scrape the fur off and scrape all the memories off. So it's a very smelly process and you're sweating by the end of it. And all you want is to shower, but you're often in the bush. So it's like there's no showers. Very sticky. So it's just it's such a beautiful process.

And I mean, when that process is happening, that's where, you know, culture is really being shared because you're you're talking with people. You're scraping a hide for hours or days at a time. And that's where you're sharing stories. And within those stories are all the beautiful values and lessons that shape indigenous culture. And so I think, you know, when you focus on those land based practices, that's when you tap into that culture and you tap into your whole community

and you really support the whole community because, you know, it's not just one designer. It's the hunter, it's the tanners, it's the beaver guard, it's Tanya herself. So she's really supporting this whole micro economy with her own label. And I think that's the kind of indigenous fashion that I want to encourage is fashion that gets us back on our land because land is so essential to indigenous culture and it's constantly being threatened. So as much as possible, if youth can get back on the land and start engaging in these land based practices, I think that

is going to push indigenous fashion to where it needs to be. And it's it's so far ahead, actually, of mainstream fashion. I think in the last couple of years, sustainability has become, you know, a key issue in fashion studies, but indigenous fashion is inherently sustainable. It's inherently community based. There's kind of like no room for waste, really, when you're in the bush and you're so you're so dependent on land for your survival. So that's that's the kind of fashion that I'm really, really interested in right now.

What was the last thing you saw that just made you like swoon? Oh, my God. There was a I don't even know the Beaver artist. I will try and look it up. But they beaded a police car on fire. It's like a big patch in this beautiful, you know, beadwork is so incredible and it can be so detailed. So it was like, I think it might have been an LAPD police car that was on fire

and was beautifully beaded. Oh, my God. I was at that mart. So it's beadwork is especially beautiful because it's so topical and you can be whatever. Side note, OK, your old dad ward did not set any cop cars on fire because that is not good for the environment. But I did attend a march or two in L.A. Masked, squirting, some hand sanitizer and sunscreen on any stranger who asked. But this got a giggle out of me because the imagery of using

such an intricate, time intensive craft to depict something so chaotic and then to use a collection of tiny beads to capture so much emotion and frustration and injustice boiling at the surface is just so beautiful and so deaf. Indigenous artists are using beadwork to express so much. And I'll link some artists on my site that sell beadwork and also stickers that are photos of their gorgeous beadwork with really powerful messaging. When the Mandalorian came out, everyone was beating baby Yoda's because everyone kind of felt that Yoda was like a little mini elder.

So everyone was beating Yoda. But I think it's just so it's so beautiful that beadwork can speak to contemporary issues and kind of immediate political issues and raise politics. I think that's that's another reason why Indigenous fashion is so special is because it's so political. Tanya Larson, she showed at Indigenous Fashion Week, Toronto last year. And one of her kind of signature looks was this beautiful cape. And on the back of the cape said, protect the caribou.

And it just struck me so much because without caribou, we don't have Indigenous fashion. Yeah. You know, if there's if there's fracking and resource extraction happening on Indigenous lands and it's affecting caribou habitats, it means we can't harvest caribou. It means we can't eat. It means we don't have fashion. Like it's just it's also connected.

Indigenous designers who are, you know, fluent in their culture and based in their communities just know how much everything is connected. One of those phrases that we often repeat ourselves is to honor all our relations. And that's what Indigenous fashion does. It's every single part of the supply chain either comes from the land or is embedded in community values. And I think that's what's just so beautiful. And it really hits home.

The difference between fashion as a consumptive commodity versus fashion as expression and fashion as a voice. Yeah, it's just the we've been so removed. Like the producer and the consumer are so removed right now. Like you have no idea. I have no idea who's made ninety nine percent of my wardrobe. And that kind of removal of the person and removal of the hand and kind of this separation of producer and consumer.

I mean, it's very deliberate. Fashion has been called the the favorite child of capitalism. Yeah, because of how I know because of how I mean, fashion was so important in introducing those cycles and creating our kind of lust for novelty. There's such a difference. You can imagine mainstream fashion practices that do a better job, but often they're reserved for very elite people who can afford them.

Like if you think of a bespoke suit in which you need to kind of visit a tailor a few times and they're, you know, intimately measuring your body and discussing fabric and fit and changing those, you know, that's actually an equally engaged process where you're working with one person and it might even be a tailor that your family has used for generations. But this is not available to most people. And I think it should be like, I think, you know, luxury fashion and the values within luxury of the hand and quality and longevity.

I think those should be available to everyone. Yeah, we are so, so far removed from from who makes things that we put on our naked body. Yeah, that's like what gets closer. You know, yeah, and I have so many questions. I want to add this is such a huge topic of so many questions that I want to ask you. OK, I'm going to let patrons ask some questions. I just like want to hang out and talk to you literally all day.

Love me some patrons. OK, but before we please them, let's just let's throw some cash around. Each week we donate to a cause that theologist chooses. And this week it's Deschinta Center for Research and Learning. It's a globally recognized organization. They have faculty that include northern leaders in the field of indigenous studies, political science, environmental studies, law, geography, fine arts. And for over a decade, Deschinta has been a destination

institution for students and researchers specializing in indigenous studies from across Canada and internationally. So to learn more or to toss them a little bit of dough, there's going to be a link to Deschinta.ca in the show notes. And that was made possible by sponsors of the show, which I will mention now. OK, let's get seamlessly through your questions. OK, all right. So, well, Stephanie, Uncle wants to know,

how can non-indigenous people support indigenous fashion in culturally appropriate manners? Right, cultural appropriation is a massive part of the work I do. It takes up a lot of my time, but I think it's it's an important question. As much as indigenous people, I think, are tired of talking about cultural appropriation because every time it happens, it's just like a punch to the gut. And it seems to happen every week or every month. But it is important to continue these conversations.

And I actually love when people ask because it signals that they have a more ethical approach to their their clothing practices and their thinking about their consumption choices in a conscious way. I think, you know, you can think of cultural appropriation as a spectrum. So on one hand, we have outright theft, outright exploitation of indigenous designs by a non-indigenous person or a company and they're profiting from an indigenous culture. And on the other side, we have actual indigenous cultural products

produced by indigenous people. So I think as much as possible, it's obviously better to support indigenous makers and indigenous designers. And then there's kind of a gradient. So there's, you know, from outright theft, there's cultural misappropriation and cultural appropriation, appreciation, collaboration. OK, so non-natives, think of a no, a big no in red at one end of the spectrum. Those things would be poorly made imitations or Halloween costumes.

And then toward the green light and supporting artisans and designers and artists with respect and paying them for their labor and spreading the word about their work. So it's very hard to kind of draw a line and tell people, OK, these are OK. This is not OK. But I think there's a couple of things you can do to kind of ensure that your choices are more ethical and actually supporting indigenous people. One is to follow the money. Show me the money.

So if the money is going to a large corporation like Urban Outfitters, who is notorious for appropriating, avoid that. I think as much as possible, try and build a relationship with indigenous people. And, you know, that's obviously it doesn't have to be a personal relationship. I think you can do some research and find some really great indigenous designers who are putting themselves out there online and at festivals. Because I think when you have a relationship with an indigenous person,

you're going to know that they would never sell you something that is a sacred item. It's kind of been a double edged sword since indigenous fashion has become more visible. It's become more susceptible to appropriation because indigenous people are putting their designs out there. So generously and wanting people to actually actually appreciate and understand a bit more about indigenous culture. It means these large corporations can just can just take it.

So if you want to see some indigenous design and appreciate the artistry and craft and support indigenous artists, how do you know what's on the green end of the spectrum? Well, there are various annual markets and the Department of the Interior website. I just looked it up. They have a list of all of them. Many are postponed until 2021, cross your fingers, people. And others are online for the perusal, such as.

So, for example, the Santa Fe Indian market is incredible in the US and in Canada. We have indigenous fashion weeks in Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto. And the organizers of those events and those fashion weeks, you know, they're not engaging with non-indigenous people who are appropriating. So if you if you can support those artists and those designers who are involved in those festivals, you kind of know that they've been vetted by community,

because that's that's what we do is we're always kind of checking in. We're asking people where they come from. There's just been so much, you know, claims of indigenous identity that are just outright fraudulent and people who aren't connected to any community in any way. So you have to kind of do a bit of research and you can't, you know, just purchase the first thing that you see. I think you have to build that relationship, establish that trust.

And then I would say, you know, continue to support that artist. Like we were talking about kind of finding your your wardrobe and investing in key staples. I think you need to do that. And one of the things that I try to work on a lot is updating people's perceptions of indigenous cultural products. You can walk into a mainstream store and buy a piece of faux or fake beadwork for, you know, ten dollars.

But beadwork or any indigenous cultural product really takes so much time. So I'm trying to also kind of change the notion that indigenous cultural products are cheap, like it's it's actually a luxury product. When you think about all the time that goes into a piece of beadwork, like it can take over a year for a very large piece of beadwork. So I think you have to be prepared to fork out more money if you also want to buy indigenous products, which I think is is not a bad thing. We should be honoring the time and the culture and just all that kind of knowledge

that that is passed through these objects. Absolutely. I feel like there was a moment at Coachella that brought a lot of cultural appropriation really kind of into the spotlight. Is it is that an American perception or is that kind of global? OK, just a historical side note. So this did make headlines in native newspapers, such as Indian country. Today's headline, quote, Supermodel uses sacred headdress

to get totally stoked for Coachella. And this was in 2014. This is two years after Victoria's Secret strutted a headdress replica down the runway via a European supermodel wearing a very tiny fringed deerskin and leopard bikini. And this ensemble was layered with a bunch of turquoise necklaces, which, from my understanding, is not even close to a cohesive appropriation. Rather, it's just like a cobbled mishmash ripping off several distinct cultures,

kind of like if you're least aware and made a casserole out of notes and oofs and a couple of yikes. But the headdress, yeah, it was such a pivotal moment, I think, in the cultural appropriation conversation. Dr. Adrienne Keane is at Brown University and she ran the blog, runs the blog Native Appropriations. And I think since 2008, she had been documenting all of these kind of horrible instances of appropriation by companies and at festivals.

So I think just that that constant pushing of the conversation really, really helped. But I think it had that side effect of making some people afraid to wear or purchase indigenous products because they feel like they'll they'll be piled on online if anyone ever sees a photo of them in anything indigenous. Oh, and there's and there's a I guess a big difference between purchasing something from an actual indigenous artist and honoring that versus, like you're saying, finding something a target that is that's beaded. It actually becomes your responsibility to tell people about the beautiful actual product.

Like if you if you purchase the beautiful beaded necklace from the Sanofa Indian market, it becomes your responsibility to be to be proud of that and to share that. And when someone says like, oh, my God, that necklace is so stunning, you're like, oh, it is this artist, they're from this nation. You know, it's from this family. And then you can actually take on that role of educating others. Because I think, you know, everywhere I see indigenous fashion, education is a part of it. It's tackling that those stereotypes.

But it's also in the place of those stereotypes, educating people about real indigenous culture. So Dr. Adrian Keane is a scholar and an activist and also a podcast host. She co-hosts All My Relations and their episode number eight is Native Fashion. So I'll link that on my website. It's such a good podcast. And I really enjoy Dr. Keane's work and they were supposed to meet up during Indigenous Fashion Week of Toronto this summer, but that did not go down as planned. And it was canceled because of COVID-19 and I had been working on a symposium

so that in addition to the runways, which are so incredible and so different from any mainstream runway, I mean, I'll give you one example. In a mainstream runway, the front row is often reserved for the Anna Winters of the world. You know, the elite of the fashion set. At the Indigenous Fashion Show, the front row was reserved for elders. And I just, it's my heart, my heart. It's just it was so beautiful and so different. Like it wasn't about being seen and seeing and this kind of like elite, glamorous fashion week.

Like it was so much about community in supporting our traditions and supporting each other and really coming together because, you know, in addition to not being able to wear our own clothing, we were outlawed from gathering. You couldn't gather in large groups because then you could talk to each other and, you know, strategize and be like, oh, shit, how are we going to, you know, fight back? So now that we're actually like able to gather and able to create these beautiful events and fashion weeks to just learn from each other, that's just so beautiful. This year, of course, due to COVID, Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto will gather online.

And there are so many great panels and symposiums. Some are moderated by Riley himself. And that's going to be November 26th through 29th, 2020. So I'm going to put a link to that on the episode page at alleyway.com. Also, Patron Bailey Sperling is a first time question asker and also a fashion student. So what advice does Riley have for designers in general or better yet? And I was going to ask to advice for Indigenous designers. Any like words you would you would want to share with them or resources?

I think, you know, my words of encouragement would be that you're for sure not alone. One of the kind of defining features of the fashion system is that if you're not in a big company, you're an individual entrepreneur. You know, most of the designers I speak with, they are their marketing team and their production team and their entire sales force. Like it's one person doing everything in a small business and a small fashion business. And I think that's actually so counter to, you know, many Indigenous values of community and sharing responsibilities and how everyone in a community

has a different role to play. So I think if an Indigenous designer, you know, wants to start a fashion business, for example, I would suggest that they involve their community as much as possible. You know, those aunties and the grandmas, they have all the skills and they have all the knowledge. So if you can involve them as much as possible and then, you know, make your fashion business work for your community. Bethany Yellowtail is an incredible LA based designer, but it's not just her.

It's a whole collective of Indigenous designers. And I think those collective models, cooperative models is something I'm very interested in because I think Indigenous fashion can be like an economic driver in communities because everyone's so involved. As much as possible, reach out. There is this growing Indigenous fashion movement and reach out if you can. Attend a fashion week if it's near you or not, I think, or online, online. So, yeah, I think just reach out because there's no reason why young Indigenous designers

should be doing it on their own. Heather Densmore had a question about the role of color in Indigenous clothing. Are colors created in a traditional way? What's the question? Are colors used in a way to convey deeper meaning than maybe we see in fast fashion? Yes, absolutely. It is specific to Indigenous nations.

So I can't speak for one color for all Indigenous groups. And actually, this is an area of research that I'm so excited to dive into when I'm able to start visiting communities again, is to kind of track how different communities perceive different colors. What I do know is that every color will come with a story. And it's through those stories that we that we transmit our values and our morals and our ethics. So, for example, there's a story about why the raven is black.

And the raven is often seen as a trickster character. And so within that story, there's all these values and lessons about being a good person, how to live in a good way so as to avoid the dangers that raven gets into that turns raven black. And every community I've visited so far has a different reason why raven turned black, but there's always those stories and lessons. It's so interesting that all of our aesthetics come with so much knowledge. And I mean, it makes perfect sense that because so much culture was transmitted

orally, that we would use, say, a color to to be an inspiration for a story. So yeah, I'm so excited to dive into colors and to understand them more. But yeah, that's future research goals. Yay. So this next question is from Patron Sigwani Dana, who is Penobscot and a high school teacher and a science communicator. And I follow her on Instagram and her photos of off the grid life in Maine are super gorgeous. Anyway, she asked and they say growing up, they went to many native basket and jewelry shows.

Their dad makes birch bark bark baskets and they've always felt that it's important for non natives to buy our things to support us. In contrast, when I see non natives wearing our jewelry, my brain instantly thinks they're appropriating our culture, even if I know they bought it from a real native. And their question is, why is my brain doing that? And also a follow up question is, how do we work on pressuring or maybe educating native artists to get sustainable materials

rather than buying plastic beads or plastic feathers? Right. Well, I actually think that it's not their brain doing that. I think it's their heart. I think it's that gut punch. It's that heart string that is being pulled and it's like an ancestral memory. It's knowing that so many of your ancestors were not able to do that or they had their indigenous jewelry taken away from them. And you feel that pain.

And I think that's that's probably why it'll always be a bit weird when non indigenous people wear indigenous products. But that's that's perfectly OK. And there's there's nothing wrong with that. I guess, you know, I might also offer that there will be indigenous or there are indigenous, you know, fashions that remain in the community. So sacred stuff, hands off people. If you wouldn't steal someone's wedding dress and wear it to an EDM festival

in the desert, don't do it with native stuff. There will be certain items that are specific and remain within our culture and are not sold, and there are many, many things that should not be commodified. So I think, you know, maybe just taking solace in the fact that, you know, I would hope that what is being sold and what is being wearing by non-indigenous people is totally fine. And it's it's supporting a community economically and the kind of, you know, the more sacred items are being kept for our own community,

the traditions are being maintained. OK, in a non fashion sense, I'm just going to use this opportunity to drop a big old bundle of white sage into the convo and give you a heads up that before you go smudge sticking or buying big heaps of dried sage, think twice because a lot of wild sage has been over harvested for commerce. And it's a sacred and medicinal plant for many native populations. Also, as long as this is a PSA, even if you mean so well by saying someone or something is a spirit animal, leave that term to our Indigenous friends.

I'm only telling you this because I know you'd want to know. And I do agree that it's so important to encourage Indigenous artists to use more sustainable materials. It's probably going to be a very controversial opinion of mine, but there's so there has been this explosion of beadwork. And I think it is so incredible. But I do agree that using plastic beads that have been produced in faraway places and have traveled around the world in plastic feathers,

we need we need to minimize that as much as possible. I think, you know, commodification for commodification's sake and to, you know, make money at events, things like that. A lot of Indigenous people are rightfully, you know, tempted to do that. And it is because of systemic marginalization that puts them in that position where they need to sell things with questionable origins. But that's exactly why I encourage, you know, taking a luxury strategy or thinking about your goods as highly prized, highly valuable goods

and demanding fair prices for them and really just kind of, you know, abandoning those kind of very cheap cheaper products. It's within our culture to be sustainable. It's inherent. So so producing or, you know, manufacturing things that are not sustainable goes against our culture. And even though it might represent our culture or teach people about our culture, I think it's counterproductive if those practices are unsustainable.

I hadn't even thought about bead materials until right now. But before plastic strolled along into our lives for the next several thousand years, beads were, of course, made with earth stuff such as dried berries and bone and shell and teeth. And nowadays, there's glass beads. They're a little heavier and more expensive. So if you're making jewelry or buying it, just know that the price does deserve to go up based on materials. And if you choose non plastic, wear it with the knowledge that after you're dead,

it won't live inside a turtle nose for a hundred and fifty years. I'm sorry to bum you out. Let's get cute. Joseph asks, I would love to hear you talk about land based education and your thoughts on its role in cultural resurgence. And P.S. I love you. Oh, my God, that's my partner. Yeah. He is such a neologis fan. He's like the biggest colleges fan when he first found it.

He's like, one day I know you're going to be on all the G's. I was like, oh, my heart. Oh, that makes me so happy. Seems like a good one. I think he's in the other room making sure the cat doesn't make loud noises. I love him. I love them. I just wanted to read Joseph's because I think that's so sweet. So Joseph loves you.

But yeah, Joseph loves me. He asked about land based education, which is such it has such a special place in my heart. I was so fortunate to as a master's student, I applied for a grant and was able to travel to Dachinta, which is a center for research and learning that's entirely land based and community based up in Denne territory near Yellowknife in kind of the northern regions of Canada. So what is land based fashionology education?

It's the methodology of creating indigenous fashion. It's just so incredible when you get students on the land in the bush where they don't have access to their cell phones. They don't have access to junk food. And really what we're doing on the land is modeling decolonization. We're really trying to imagine what a decolonized future would look like by trying to build it. So literally we are building camps and maintaining the fire

and collecting water and chopping wood and so much hard work that just goes into being able to live off the land through kind of time on our traditional practices. And it really just changes your perception about, you know, the amount of work that goes into everything. I was talking about high tanning and we do a lot of high tanning on the land. And it's just it gives students a new perspective, I think, about what it takes. And the amount of, you know, interpersonal conflict that comes up

speaks to the amount of governance that's needed. When we're working, sometimes scientists will visit. We're kind of like analyzing the land and connecting the dots to climate change. And it's just it's such a hands on experience. And I'm just so fortunate it just it changed my whole life, really, getting that land based experience. And I think we're seeing these land based programs all over North America. And so I highly encourage, especially Indigenous youth,

to to look into these programs because they are life changing. Big shout out to my cousins, Boyd and Lila Evans in Montana, who you may remember from the Bisonology episode. Lila is of the Blackfeet Nation and they've donated a buffalo in the past to young native students to learn about butchering and high tanning. And I just think that's very cool. They are a cool pair. You know what, speaking of men's and women's and everything in between,

patrons Sam Daniels, Genesis Cabrera and D.B. Narveson had questions about gendered clothing. And Jennifer Lowe asked, many Indigenous cultures have up to five genders recognized. How is this reflected in their clothing? One last patron question I wanted to ask a few people asked about notable gender based differences in design or material or function. Do we see as much of a binary in Indigenous fashion or no? You know, so this is also a question that the answer would have changed with

colonization. So one of the first kind of practices that was purposefully attacked and outlawed was two-spirit gender diversity amongst Indigenous people. And it was actually because of clothing, when missionaries came over, they would have noticed people who look like men wearing clothing typically worn by women. And it was that kind of that cross-dressing, that that different type of dress practice that actually, you know, identify people and made them susceptible to be attacked by colonizing forces. So for sure, there there wouldn't have been as rigid gender binaries.

There are two-spirits study, two-spirit scholars who are looking into roles of clothing, but I do know that gender binaries would not have been as strict. And if you're not familiar with the term two-spirit, it means a person who has the spirit of more than one gender and is said to be blessed by the creator to experience life that way, which is so beautiful. And I will put a link on the show page on my site to some two-spirit authors that you may enjoy reading. OK, this next question was asked by patron Laurence, and it's spelled with a U.

So I'm going to enjoy saying it, Laurence. You know, I typically ask about flim flam to debunk, but, geez, Louise, where does one start? Um, like all of it, all of it, essentially. But any big myths in terms of indigenous clothing that you would love to erase from people's minds? Well, I know, I know. Yeah, it's kind of upsetting just how much I have to try and convince

people that indigenous fashion exists. In fashion studies, in particular, fashion came from Europe and in everything else was dress or costume. And there was this kind of hierarchy established where only certain elite people in Paris and London kind of established fashion codes and everything else was clothing and it wasn't worthy of this designation of fashion. So I think I for sure like to tackle that myth that there are multiple fashions, that fashion is not just the mainstream industry that we all love to

hate, but there are fashions that exist in all communities. One of the myths that we tried to tackle at the school of fashion that I teach at Bryerson is that young people, indigenous fashion shouldn't strive to be this star designer. There's this notion of, you know, going to an art school and getting discovered by a luxury label and becoming this like major international celebrity designer. And that path is just not realistic. And I think it's actually problematic because it feeds into this

hierarchical system. And instead, I would encourage young fashion designers to start their own companies and work with their own communities and turn to local production. Because I think as much as possible, we need to really be abandoning this fashion system and starting to create our own. That's such good advice, too. And, you know, the hardest thing about your job, the thing that you are worked most about, whether it's from something really petty to something huge.

Well, the emails aren't great, but the racism is probably worse. I had to. It is the worst thing about my job. It's so, I mean, it's very timely given given the climate right now, but the racism is so systemic and it's all those beliefs about the vanishing Indian and indigenous fashion not existing and this like superiority of certain fashions and other things being denigrated. Like it's just, it's so tied to racism.

And I think the industry is showing signs that it wants to change at least. It's hard because the system is so powerful. How can you actually change an entire system? And I think that's why I encourage indigenous designers to start thinking about their own systems and not playing into the mainstream industry because it is just so damaging and so racist. I think a lot of us are kind of fed up with the fashion industry. So fashion is the worst thing about my job.

Which must be so hard for you to explain. If someone just sees fashion in what you do, they're like, oh, let's talk about the latest come to garselle trend. Yes, like I'm not like a trend forecaster. I mean, I teach in the business stream of the school of fashion. So I'm interested in entrepreneurship and, you know, social economies and scaling up designers. So there is so much to fashion.

I think a lot of people are curious about materials themselves or fabrication, but it's just fashion is such a big part as such a big industry. So there's so many facets to fashion. It's complicated. Who knew that that was a job too? Like you landed in your seems like your perfect job. Yeah, I think it's very serendipitous. I do put a lot of faith in the universe and ancestors who open doors

because it does seem like I just had, you know, I had the mentor who encouraged me and I had the experience and I met the right people at the right time at a school of fashion that was really kind of paving the way in terms of thinking about sustainability and alternative fashion systems. And they have been so welcoming of me and we're so devoted to incorporating anti-racist fashions and indigenous fashions into our court curriculum because I think it does a disservice to fashion students when they don't get to experience that.

One of my favorite assignments that we give to first year fashion students is called a wardrobe assignment and they have to interview someone and we actually encourage them to interview someone from their family about something in their wardrobe and what goes into their wardrobe and maybe their favorite pieces and my favorite assignments always come from students of color who interview their grandpa or something like that. Their grandpa is talking about, you know, all of these amazing clothing practices and then they talk about, oh, and then I started wearing suits and I kind of,

I gave up my traditional clothing and then, you know, I don't know why, but I became less interested in these kind of bright fabrics and I started wearing gray suits all the time. And to see students start to unpack that and ask, well, why did you think you stopped wearing that? And it's always connected to representations and trying to advance careers and at the expense of diversity of clothing. So I'm so amazed when students are becoming part of diverse fashion

movements and there are now black fashion weeks and indigenous fashion weeks all over and that's where I think we should be heading. Oh, that's great. I knew none of this before this interview. It feels like just bringing awareness and dismantling a system that is essentially built from aristocracy and from waste and from consumption and from alienation and erasure. Like.

Yeah, it's like a flaming garbage, like it's all of it. I definitely think the emails are bad, but the racism is worse. Needs to be stitched on a pillow, needs to be beaded on something. My God. What about the best thing? What do you love the most about what you do or about indigenous clothing? Anything? Well, I'm so inspired by the youth.

The youth are all right. Ally Ward, let me tell you. They can so clearly see colonialism and they can so clearly imagine decolonization. I mean, I think my generation was especially attuned to environmental issues. And I think this this next generation of indigenous youth in particular are just fed up, they're fed up with colonization. You know, they can see how our current systems are the obvious inheritors

of colonial systems, they're fed up. And I think they're they're ready to start building and rebuilding their own worlds. And so I am so inspired when I get to a community and see that from such a young age. And I think it's also incredible that my job includes spending so much time out on the land. Like, yeah, to be a graduate student and now to be a professor who gets to spend time in the bush and chopping wood and learning from elders by a fire

with bush tea. Like that's it's incredible that that my office hours happen out on the land, so to speak. And it's just I mean, it says a lot about our education systems. And I think if we can imagine an indigenous graduate education, it would be very different from our kind of colonial PhDs and master's degrees. And it would be so community focused and you would learn from elders over a lifetime rather than, you know, spending time in a classroom.

I'm just so grateful to be part of a school and to have mentors and I'm in a department that supports that research. And I mean, it's just speak so much that they support indigenous fashion and they see it as a legitimate field of study because that's very recent. Like it's very, very recent that people would even consider something like this worthy of study. Oh, I'm sure there's going to be people that want to follow you, hit you up, ask questions.

I hope that is my dream is that there is so little written about indigenous fashion, like literally one or two dissertations I can find in libraries and one really great book called Native Fashion Now by Karen Kramer at the Peabody Essex Museum. But that's my dream is that, you know, every nation could have a fashion scholar, like I think that's what we need. That's what I'm so excited is really these like international and international collaborations that can come forth because it's such a

beautiful, robust field. Oh, and how can people find you to stan you, essentially? I am on Instagram and Twitter, R.S. Kutcher in my last name. Yeah. I'm so excited about this one. I could just sit and talk to you for days. The feeling is mutual.

I was more nervous slash excited for this interview than I was for my qualifying exam. No. So ask smart people, unfashionable questions and wear whatever you want, whatever you want to. And thank you to all the indigenous writers and creators and artists and activists and designers out there using your work to lift up fellow native voices and to educate so many of us.

And links to Riley's social media are in the show notes, as well as a link to learn more about the land-based education programs and so much more. Follow Riley, check out links at alleyward.com slash allergies slash indigenous fashionology for more resources on indigenous art and markets and more. We are at allergies on Twitter and on Instagram. I'm at alleyward with one L on both. Allergies merch is available at allergies merch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch for managing that.

They host a comedy podcast called You Are That. You can be a patron of allergies for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com slash allergies. Thank you to all the patrons who support the show. Thank you to Aaron Talbert, who admins the Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thank you all for all of your birthday wishes there. Thanks to Emily White, professional transcriptionist and all the Allergyite volunteers who help make free transcripts available on our website.

In case you need them, thank you to Caleb Patton, who bleeps episodes. So they are kid friendly. Those are up at our website as well. Thank you to Noel Dilworth, who helps with scheduling all these wonderfulologists, professional assistant editing by recreational boyfriend, Jared Sleeper, and of course, lead editing by the always in style, Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the podcast See Jurassic Right and The Percast. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music.

And if you stick around until the episode, I tell you a secret. And this one is that it finally got cold enough in LA to turn the heater on. And you know that first time you turn the heater on for the first time in the winter and it burns off all that weird dust that's been accumulating. I don't know. I love that smell. It smells like burnt dust because it's burnt dust. But it's always like, oh, here we go. Winter. Anyway, stay safe.

We got a lot of work to do. America, let's do it. OK, bye bye.