This company built its brand on appropriating Native culture. Now it’s working with Indigenous designers to make amends

07 Feb This company built its brand on appropriating Native culture. Now it’s working with Indigenous designers to make amends

Minnetonka first started selling its “Thunderbird” moccasins in 1965. Now, for the first time, they’ve been redesigned by a Native American designer.

It’s one step in the company’s larger work to deal with its history of cultural appropriation. The Minneapolis-based company launched in the 1940s as a small business making souvenirs for roadside gift shops in the region—including Native American-inspired moccasins, though the business wasn’t started or run by Native Americans. The moccasins soon became its biggest seller.

For decades, the family-owned business has been thinking about the challenge of its legacy. It quietly made donations to Native American organizations. It tried to make it clear that its products weren’t Native-made. (It also took some other smaller steps, like dropping “moccasin”—derived from the word for shoe in multiple Native American languages—from its logo in 2008.) But in 2019, the team started working with a Native American advisor to go farther.

“It took us a little while to take the first step,” says Jori Miller Scherer, Minnetonka’s president. “And the reason for that, to be totally honest, was fear. Because it’s really easy to do the same thing day in and day out, and it’s harder to take a step back and really ask yourself those tough questions, and then commit to doing something about it.”

Adrienne Benjamin, an Anishanaabe artist and community activist who became the company’s “reconciliation advisor,” was initially reluctant when a tribal elder approached her about meeting with the company. Other activists had dismissed the idea that the company would do the work to truly transform. But Benjamin agreed to the meeting, and the conversation convinced her to move forward.

“I sensed a genuine commitment to positive change,” she says. “They had really done their homework as far as understanding and acknowledging the wrong and the appropriation. I think they knew for a long time that things needed to get better, and they just weren’t sure what a first step was.”

The company was interested in working with Native American designers from the beginning, but Benjamin urged them to dive deeper into accounting for the past first. “We continued to meet people in the community here in Minnesota and did a lot of listening, a lot of learning,” says Scherer.

In 2020, Minnetonka publicly apologized “for having benefited from selling Native-inspired designs without directly honoring Native culture or communities.” It also said that it was actively recruiting Native Americans to work at the company, reexamining its branding, looking for Native-owned businesses to partner with, continuing to support Native American nonprofits, and that it planned to collaborate with Native American artists and designers.

Benjamin partnered with the company on the first collaboration, a collection of hand-beaded hats, and then recruited the Minneapolis-based designer Lucie Skjefte, a member of the Red Lake Nation, who designed the beadwork for another moccasin style and a pair of slippers for the brand. Skjefte says that she felt comfortable working with the company knowing that it had already done work with Benjamin on reconciliation. And she wasn’t a stranger to the brand. “Our grandmothers and our mothers would always look for moccasins in a clutch kind of situation where they didn’t have a pair ready and available to make on their own—then they would buy Minnetonka mocs and walk into a traditional pow wow and wear them,” she says. Her mother, she says, who passed away in 2019, would have been “immensely proud” that Skjefte’s design work was part of the moccasins—and on the new version of the Thunderbird moccasin, one of the company’s top-selling styles.

Skjefte’s son is named Animikii, which means Thunderbird in the Objiwe language. When Minnetonka asked her to rename the shoe, she gave it her son’s name: Animikii. As she worked on the design, she spent time studying traditional stories about thunderbirds, which Objiwe legend says can create thunder and lightning, start fires that lead to new growth, and purify water.

“I started thinking about all of those stories, and what resonated with me visually,” Skjefte says. The redesign, she says, is much more detailed and authentic than the previous version. “Through the redesign and beading process, we are actively reclaiming and reconnecting our Animikii or Thunderbird motif with its Indigenous roots,” she says. Skjefte will earn royalties for the design, and Minnetonka will also separately donate a portion of the sale of each shoe to Mni Sota Fund, a nonprofit that helps Native Americans in Minnesota get training and capital for home ownership and entrepreneurship.

Some companies go a step farther—Manitobah Mukluks, based in Canada, has an Indigenous founder and more than half Indigenous staff. (While Minnetonka is actively recruiting more Native American workers, the company says that employees self-report race and it can’t share any data about its current number of Indigenous employees.) Beyond its own line of products, Manitobah also has an online Indigenous Market that features artists who earn 100% of the profit for their work.

White Bear Moccasins, a Native-owned-and-made brand in Montana, makes moccasins from bison hide. Each custom pair can take six to eight hours to make; the shoes cost hundreds of dollars, though they can also be repaired and last as long as a lifetime, says owner Shauna White Bear. In interviews, White Bear has said that she wants “to take our craft back,” from companies like Minnetonka. But she also told Fast Company that she doesn’t think that Minnetonka, as a family-owned business, should have to lose its livelihood now and stop making moccasins.

The situation is arguably different for other fashion brands that might use a Native American symbol—or rip off a Native American design completely—on a single product that could easily be taken off the market. Benjamin says that she has also worked with other companies that have discontinued products.

She sees five steps in the process of reconciliation. First, the person or company who did wrong has to acknowledge the wrong. Then they need to publicly apologize, begin to change behavior, start to rebuild trust, and then, eventually, the wronged party might take the step of forgiveness. Right now, she says, Minnetonka is in the third phase of behavior change. The brand plans to continue to collaborate with Native American designers.

The company can be an example to others on how to listen and build true relationships, Benjamin says. “I think that’s the only way that these relationships are going to get any better—people have to sit down and talk about it,” she says. “People have to be real. People have to apologize. They have to want to reconcile with people.”

The leadership at Minnetonka can also be allies in pushing other companies to do better. “My voice is important at the table as an Indigenous woman,” Benjamin says. “Lucie’s voice is important. But at tables where there’s a majority of people that aren’t Indigenous, sometimes those allies’ voices are more powerful in those spaces, because that means that they’ve signed on to what we’re saying. The power has signed on to moving forward and we agree with ‘Yes, this was wrong.’ That’s the stuff that’s going to change [things] right there.”

Source: Fast Company