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If you’ve been following fashion the past few years, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in vaguely Native American design. Whether it’s the avalanche of Southwestern-printed Patagonias on Grailed or the explosion of sterling silver and turquoise jewelry decorating the wrists and belts of menswear dudes (or even the goods of luxury brands like Dior, with its oblivious campaign for “Sauvage”)—Native American style is everywhere. In fact, it’s gotten so popular that last year, Pueblo and Zuni artisans went to court to force non-Native brands to stop illegally using their name on counterfeit goods. And the problem isn’t just that traditional Native designs are being watered down or used inappropriately, but that many Native designers and craftspeople have been left out of the boom.
One brand, however, is laying claim to its Native heritage in a profoundly new way: Ginew, based in Portland, Oregon. Meaning “brown eagle,” Ginew is part of co-founder Erik Brodt’s Ojibwe name. His wife and co-founder, Amanda Bruegl, is Oneida and Stockbridge-Munsee. Together, they’ve been making high-end denim and workwear in the USA since 2014. They use as many American textiles as possible (since Cone Mill closed, they’ve switched to a Japanese denim mill), while also trying to imbue their collection with motifs that are central to their identities. To do this, Ginew is looking to both the pre-Columbian and more recent histories of their tribes in order to reimagine what it means to be Native today. They’re also doubling down on a commitment to collaborating with Native models, artists, designers, and photographers. And unlike so many other brands putting out Indian kitsch in 2019, they’re offering a new way for outsiders to learn about and appreciate—rather than simply appropriate—their culture.
Neither Erik nor Amanda trained as fashion designers or worked at a fashion company before starting Ginew. They’re actually both doctors, and when they spoke to me from their Portland home, they had to pause our conversation a few times to check if they’d been paged. Ginew began by accident: as a personal project and an unlikely product of their marriage.
“That’s a buffalo skull from our wedding. My dad shot the buffalo,” Erik explained, pointing to a huge white skull hanging on their living room wall. “Instead of buying gifts for our wedding, we made gifts for everybody who was on the drum, or who stood for us.” To honor the friends and family who participated in the wedding, Erik picked up some leatherworking tools he’d inherited from his grandfather and started making small leather goods with the buffalo hide. While Amanda was finishing a surgical fellowship in Texas, Erik decided to keep working with leather as a hobby—but soon he was getting inundated with requests from interested customers who passed by his shared workshop or heard about the belts through word-of-mouth.
The idea of starting a brand crystallized on a camping trip near Marfa, Texas, when Erik began to sketch out concepts for a capsule collection. “I drew these things I couldn’t find or buy anywhere else,” he said.
This meant clothes for everyday indigenous life, not just “special things to only be worn as regalia at a powwow.” What they ended up with was a series of tough, hard-wearing pieces that look just as at home in the city as they do on the reservation: puffy down vests with Western yokes, thick cotton twill jackets, and heavy selvedge denim with deer-leather patches. Almost all of the buckskin Ginew sources is personally hunted by Erik and Amanda or their extended network of friends and family. “We know what goes into an animal offering its life for us,” said Erik. “What goes into hunting and skinning and salting and fleshing.”
And while they wanted Ginew to make clothes that reflected ancient traditions, they also wanted to honor more recent ancestors, like Amanda’s grandfather, who worked as a welder for Harley-Davidson. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, he commuted to work at the factory in Wisconsin and came home to the Mohican reservation on weekends. To commemorate his legacy, they created the Rider, a chopped trucker style in a tawny waxed duck canvas.
“When people saw that jacket, they were like, ‘What’s Native American about this?’ ” Erik remembered. “Because they were expecting bows, arrows, feathers, whatever. But to us, everything is Native about it. In fact, a lot of the designs and the meaningful symbols, we’ve put those in the clothes.”
You just might not notice those details at first glance. The Rider is lined with a unique Pendleton blanket designed for Ginew by Native American artist Dyani White Hawk. The pattern—called “We Walk Together”—is inspired by the custom of wrapping newlyweds in a blanket to symbolize their union, and the colors are drawn from the red and yellow sunrise, and the purple of wampum.
“For people who appreciate a high level of detail, they’ll understand and do a little research,” said Amanda. “And for other people, they can just think it looks cool.” The symbol most used by the brand is the thunderbird, which is chain-stitched into a denim jacket and also featured on Ginew’s club coat, T-shirts, and bandannas. In Ojibwe culture, thunderbirds are revered as powerful, spiritual protectors whose wings create thunder and whose flashing eyes cause lightning. Growing up, Erik saw images of them carved into logs or painted on the sides of houses as a blessing, but today they’ve become a common visual motif throughout America—you’re just as likely to find a thunderbird on a Ralph Lauren tie clip as on a hand-carved canoe. Ginew wants to reclaim the symbol and use it to educate non-Native people about its heritage. Even the Ginew T-shirt strives to pass along these traditions, emblazoned with the Ojibwe saying "mino-bimaadiziiwin": to “live the good life" or "walk the good path."
Of course, it’s not easy to promote authentic Native American design when there are so many brands willing to use the culture for “inspiration,” or sell straight-up fakes. So far, Erik and Amanda have found other heritage and workwear brands surprisingly willing to engage in dialogue, but there are plenty of companies in the fashion industry that—despite letters, protests, and lawsuits—appear uninterested in getting it right. “The space that we’re in has allowed us to have some conversations,” said Erik. “Whether or not they’ve fallen on deaf ears, who knows…”
Amanda interjected. “The ignorance is still so persistent.”
Ginew’s founders realize they can’t possibly reach every appropriator—nor is that really the job of a niche fashion label. The brand is small, only sold at about a dozen stores around the world, and they intend to stay that way in order to maintain their exacting standards. But they’re also hoping that when designers and buyers are presented with a Ginew garment, they will be able to connect with Native culture in a genuine way, and perhaps understand that the people behind it don’t live in some mythic past to be used as a romantic backdrop. To realize that fashion—and, by extension, modernity—is a place for Native Americans, too. “It’s about maintaining and increasing visibility of contemporary Indigenous life in fashion,” said Erik. “So many people don’t realize that we still exist.” Amanda nodded. “It’s sort of a quiet resistance.”
