Arctic Indigenous Fashion: Honouring Women’s Roles and Sustainable Practices

Arctic Indigenous communities have long adapted to extreme environments through women's expertise in crafting garments from fish skin (salmon and Arctic char), birdskin (seabirds: eiders, loons and puffins), gutskin (sea mammal and bear gut) and woven seashore grass (cottongrass and rye grass). Colonial-era collecting removed many of these belongings to distant museums, severing cultural ties. This study explores collaborative provenance research aimed at restoring relationships between museums, communities and their material heritage.Over 35 years, the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, supported by consultations with Alaska Native Elders, has returned more than 600 artefacts, culminating in a permanent exhibition at the Anchorage Museum. Since 2017, as an ASC research associate, I have facilitated community-led workshops involving clothing to consult Indigenous knowledge systems and re-establish cultural continuity.In 2025, ASC and the Penn Museum co-hosted the ‘Deep Dig: Arctic Fashion’ virtual course, featuring Indigenous artists, scholars and museum professionals. I co-led two of the sessions, examining Arctic clothing as cultural heritage and sustainable innovation. In ‘Arctic Fashion: Sustainability, Identity and Healing’, together with ASC curator Stephen Loring, we contrasted the ecological knowledge of traditional Arctic garments with the impacts of Western fashion. In ‘Salmon Entanglements’, with Native Elder June Simeonoff Pardue, we discussed the role of fish by-products in Arctic life.Sugpiaq Elder Pardue's contribution exemplifies collaborative provenance research and the transformative potential of community-led participation. By building bridges between historical belongings and Indigenous communities, museums can repair historical legacies, developing new methods of knowledge co-production and dissemination.