Language Carried in Cloth by Sariah Park

Cloth carries knowledge differently. It holds what is felt before it becomes language, and it preserves what has traveled across generations without ever needing to be written. Listening to Indigenous designers, Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo) and Ramona Salo (Sámi) in conversation, I was reminded again and again that fashion, in its most essential form, is not merely an industry but a fluent, living continuum, a method through which memory, relationship, and sovereignty move.

What emerged was not a discussion about trends or aesthetics, but about orientation: the way a creative practice can tilt itself toward the Land, toward community, toward the long reach of ancestral instruction. In listening to these designers speak about their work, I was struck by how each described craft not as a single act of making but as a constellated language. Wool gathered from flocks on familiar terrain, dyes coaxed from native plants, technologies adapted and reimagined, each became a verb, a gesture, a sentence in a vocabulary inherited and continually reshaped. 

Fashion, in this sense, is not the performance of identity but the enactment of a relationship. It is built slowly, sometimes repetitively, through material practices that are as much about remembering as they are about innovation. Ramona Salo spoke of art becoming her new language after the loss of her mother tongue; Patricia Michaels described how working with hide and fiber makes her feel her ancestors’ hands in her own. Across their words ran a shared belief that making is a form of listening, listening to the Land, to season, to ceremony, to the subtle ways knowledge passes through the body. 

What struck me most is how seamlessly sovereignty emerged from their descriptions, not as a political declaration, but as a way of being. Sovereignty was present in the insistence on responsibility: to community, to materials, to rhythm, to craft that refuses haste. It surfaced in the refusal to sever artistry from worldview. It showed itself in the conviction that fashion does not need to replicate the extractive speed of global markets to be relevant or powerful. Instead, it can model another tempo: one that honors intention, reciprocity, and care. 

This approach reframes what fashion can be. It positions Indigenous design not as a subset of the industry, but as a critical site of cultural leadership, one capable of shifting how value is measured. Here, fashion becomes a long-form conversation between generations, a place where the future is shaped not through resistance alone, but through continuity and the deliberate carrying forward of inherited ways of knowing. In this continuity, the quiet act of returning becomes its own form of power. 

The conversation also acknowledged the complexities of visibility: how entering global platforms offers opportunity while simultaneously risking distortion. Their reflections invited a larger question of what does it mean to be seen without being consumed? The answers they offered were grounded and nuanced. They emphasized discernment, boundaries, and the importance of designing on one’s own terms. They imagined futures where Indigenous designers define their own platforms, where success is measured in alignment rather than scale, and where craftsmanship is recognized for its depth, beauty, and rigor. 

What I carry from this conversation is a renewed clarity: that Indigenous fashion is, at its core, a site where cultural continuity is enacted in real time. It is not a revival. It is not a response. It is an ongoing presence, an articulation of worldviews that have never ceased evolving. Through each garment, each stitch, each choice of material, Indigenous designers are not simply expressing identity; they are maintaining relationships, honoring teachings, and shaping possibilities for the generations who will come next. 

To witness this is to recognize fashion as something far more expansive than clothing. Fashion is a living thread. It is evidence of survival, yes, but also of imagination and care. It is a testament to how knowledge moves in nonlinear ways, through textures, through scent, through color, through the rhythm of hands repeating movements learned long before we were born. 

It is language carried in cloth. 
And it continues to speak. 

Not in words, 
but in the way it holds our bodies, 
the way it remembers the Land, 
the way it carries our names. 
I follow its language 
back to where we began.

Sariah Park (Chiricahua Apache) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans visual art, fashion, and installation, engaging themes of memory, identity, and material culture. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Women’s Wear Daily, Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar, and appears in traveling exhibitions, artist portfolios, private collections, and in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Sariah currently serves as Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Social Justice at Parsons School of Design, where she has developed a suite of courses on Indigenous Fashion and has taught across art and design disciplines for the past fifteen years.

Listen to the Withstanding Episode 13: On Indigenous Fashion Design

This essay is commissioned as part of the Withstanding Podcast Season 4. Listen to all the episodes of Season 4 from here. This program is made possible with support from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.