Apology in Native American name row
Fashion designer Dame Trelise Cooper has apologised for an “embarrassing mistake” of naming a dress with a phrase associated with a bleak period in Native American history.
The “Trail of Tiers” dress has been called out on Twitter for its similarity to the phrase “Trail of Tears”.
During the 1830s thousands of Native Americans were forced to relocate from ancestral land. It is now referred to as the “Trail of Tears”.
Cooper yesterday apologised for the “embarrassing mistake in using a term whose meaning we were completely unaware of”.
Professor of Ma¯ori Education at Victoria University of Wellington Joanna Kidman described the event as a “genocide” as the Indian removal act of 1830 allowed white settlers to remove Native Americans in large numbers from their ancestral homeland.
It is estimated 46,000 Native Americans between 1830 and 1850 were forcibly removed by the US Government.
The trail is more than 8000km long, with thousands dying on the journey.
On Wednesday night while scrolling through the internet, Kidman came across an ad for Trelise Cooper, looking through the fashion labels website she came across the “Trail of Tiers” dress.
“The dress came up and I couldn’t quite believe it, I took a double take, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and then I realised what I was seeing,” a shocked Kidman told the Herald.
“The trail of tears is one of the most shameful episodes in American colonial history, it’s not the sort of thing one would generally use as a selling point for a frock, a polyester frock.”
The $299 dress has been taken off Cooper’s website, and is being recalled from stores to be renamed.
Kidman says the fashion industry needed to “engage more readily with indigenous populations and groups” so incidents like these do not continue.
Kidman took to Twitter to share the conversation nationally and internationally. Her tweet has received a lot of reaction, with many Twitter users shocked to learn about the dress name. Kidman has called on Cooper to donate all proceeds from the sale of her “Trail of Tiers” dress to Navajo Nation and Hopi Nation reservations in the US.
In a statement to the Herald, the Trelise Cooper Group apologised. “We called a dress Trail of Tiers because it is a long tiered dress with a trailing back hem, unaware of the meaning of the term Trail of Tears.”
This is not the first time Cooper has come under fire for her clothing line.
In 2014 Cooper apologised on social media after models on a runway wore a Native American headdress. In 2011, a number of Cooper’s models had the skin around their eyes stretched back with tape to create an “Asian” look.
Kidman said she wondered whether Cooper had not learnt from the past mistakes.