AMBER-DAWN BEAR ROBE has a pretty great English name, but her Blackfoot moniker is even better: “Many Butterfly Woman” created the Santa Fe Indian Market’s Indigenous Fashion Show in 2014. She has produced every show for the past 10 years. That first show, she remembers, “was put together with gum and shoelaces. We had no budget. We drove all the models to the runway in the back of a U-Haul.”
A lot has changed since then: “We’re now maxed out at the largest venue where the fashion show can take place,” she says. “My hope is to expand this into an Indigenous fashion week.”
But she has a deeper mission: “I want representation of Indigenous designers on a national platform – not as curiosities but as North America’s original haute couturiers.”
Your Blackfoot name is Many Butterfly Woman.
I grew up in Canada, in the Siksika tribe. My great uncle named me in the middle of a powwow. I was really young. I remember chewing gum, thinking, This is so boring. But he had this dream of a teepee that was covered with hundreds of butterflies that, all of a sudden, came to life and flew away. But it’s interesting because I flew away — I left the preserve. I left the province. I left the country!
How did you get interested in fashion?
Like a lot of young girls, I’ve always loved fashion. But it really springboarded from contemporary art. My undergraduate was in art and in 1991, I went to Indigena, the first contemporary Indigenous art show curated by Indigenous curators. It was pivotal for me. Then I got my master’s in Tucson, where I met a good friend, Jessica Metcalf, who was involved in fashion – and our worlds sort of collided.
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Photo Tira Howard
