Can fashion mend its relationship with Indigenous communities?

The lack of engagement with Indigenous communities is also notable given fashion’s increased focus on biodiversity. How can fashion hope to develop effective conservation strategies, experts wonder, if they aren’t consulting the people who are doing it best?

There can also be links between the two. “Indigenous peoples are critical for successful biodiversity, climate strategies — and many designs are influenced or come from nature’s nexus point,” says Quinn Buchwald, citizen of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana and director of Conservation International’s Indigenous and Traditional Peoples Programme. “Big companies have their own departments, but these principles are to advise all the departments. I can’t say one — biodiversity or the intellectual property side — is more important than the other. They should be engaging in all of these areas. I see these as connected, and they really are.”

The guidance is not one directional. Indigenous communities have much to learn from fashion as well — in marketing, consumer education and supply chain logistics, for example.

The guide is less about specific changes, and more about changing fashion’s relationship to Indigenous communities entirely. There’s room to fix past wrongs and create hopeful opportunities, but the underlying goal is far simpler: to open lines of communication, and to get past the point where fashion and Indigenous and local communities are mutually exclusive entities.

“I hope this will foster more innovation, collaboration and communication between the Global North and the Global South. There is so much we can learn from each other,” says Onwuka. “Working together is the only way to find a more permanent and relevant solution to the environmental crisis that we find ourselves in.”

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