In sacred fashion
Ogap’oge is recognized around the world as a destination for Indigenous art. This place, nestled between mountains, visited by millions each year, and the present-day state capital of New Mexico, has a long history of revolt, revolution, and renaissance. It is a place where decisions are made and where history is decided. For more than 100 years, Santa Fe has been the host for the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts’ annual Santa Fe Indian Market, an event that has helped open doors and gain exposure for North America’s first artists in spaces that existed only in our ancestors’ wildest imaginations.
Artwork as a commodity is not necessarily an Indigenous concept. Our peoples’ nature is inherently beautiful as our Earth is inherently beautiful; as an ancient people at home on this land, we have always been adept at adjusting to our environment. Our adaptability has made us ineradicable. Our kinship to the sun and water, air and earth, plants and animals has made us permanent. As long as there is day and night, we will exist here, as will our ideas, our histories, our stories, our love, our pain, our babies, and our creativity that allows places like Santa Fe to continue to exist as the Indian art capital of the world.
It is an honor for Santa Fe to be the platform for Indigenous innovation, a relationship that continues to be nurtured year after year with mutual respect, trust, and reward. This ingenious kinship has made the Santa Fe Indian Market Fashion Show one of the oldest of its kind. This May it will be the first organization to host a Native Fashion Week in the U.S. (See stories pages 29-39.)
To be able to speak about the significance of this inaugural fashion week, it is important to ground us in this place, to understand the history, and to acknowledge those who paved the way for what is about to happen May 2-5.
A fashion show launched 11 years ago on pure Indigenous mojo and determination has become a standout four-day event with 17 designers from the U.S. and Canada, 120 models, and 20 stylists and makeup artists. That is growth, that is resilience, that is breaking the buckskin ceiling and taking a seat at a colonial-carved table that was never meant for us. To sit in chairs reserved for those who called our clothing and jewelry primitive, folksy, savage — all while stealing it into their own peoples’ fashion language for years and years and years.
So, what is Native American fashion? I don’t know. What is a Native American? What am I? A product of colonization. A person who would not exist were it not for every joy and every evil and every step and misstep my ancestors took; ancestors from Diné Bikaya, from Ireland, from Sephardic communities in Spain, from the metal and gunpowder of the conquistador, from the brutality of Western Expansion, from some instinct to consume, to rape, to kill, but also to love, to nurture, and to teach. The inextinguishable human impulse to survive.
What is it to be an Indian? What is it to create Indian art, Indigenous fashion, literature, a new generation, a community? What is it to exist as a colonized people in a world where cars can drive themselves along highways that pass through parcels of land where we still herd our livestock by foot or on horseback? What is it to have children whose necks arch toward screens while clean water remains elusive to us? What is it to have the first American Indian woman as the U.S. Secretary of the Interior while we live in fear of becoming disappeared, or worse, for our child to become disappeared like a wisp of smoke?
We make beautiful art because we are beautiful people in a beautiful place that we are all struggling to keep sacred. When you hold the things we have made for you, don’t forget to also thank the blood and tears that have gone into this beauty.
So what is Indigenous fashion? It is all of these truths and more. It is undefinable, just as our DNA is a swirl of triumphs and tragedies. This fashion week is an opportunity to learn, and to wrap your body — whomever you are — in many narratives of survival, brilliance, and immovability. It is to be respected and carried by you as a wearable story into new spaces that have never heard our laughter or seen our tears.
Ungelbah Dávila (Diné/irish/sephardi) is an award-winning freelance writer and photographer living on occupied Tiwa land in so-called Bosque Farms. When she isn’t chasing around her toddler and menagerie of pets — including two potbelly pigs, one miniature goat, and some conventional sized cats, dogs, and turkeys — she holds the title of communications and public relations specialist for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Follow her at @udavilaphotography.
Follow us:
@Thepasatiempo
@Pasatiempomag