Fashioning decolonization: telling stories of Canadian Indigenous women through fashion hacking

Decolonization is a complex, often discussed in academic or political environments, it is challenging to discover tangible ways for individuals to practice it in daily life. A gap between the personal understanding decolonization and the academic definitions of decolonization was identified through oral history interviews, so this research shares the unique stories of eight Canadian indigenous women through fashion as a way to inform a more accessible and embodied definition of decolonization. The participants took part in a fashion-hacking workshop to began to answer the questions: What does the lived experience of decolonization look and feel like for Indigenous women? How do Indigenous women think about decolonization in the personal aspects of their life and how can that be expressed through fashion? The format of this paper explores different perspectives and ways of knowing by jumping back and forth between storytelling, art, Indigenous and Western academic research.