Radical Entrepreneurs: First Nations Designers’ Approaches to Community Economic Development

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, contemporary Native Canadian fashion designers have been gaining increasing visibility and economic viability. Yet, their roles and purposes remain poorly understood. This article identifies a problem with conventional approaches to the question of Community Economic Development and Aboriginal participants in the garment industry in the New Economy. It proposes an alternative model based on the concept of the "radical entrepreneur," which incorporates ideas surrounding ethnic economies, "social entrepreneurship," symbolic capital, and "rootedness" in indigenous cultures and societies. Insights drawn from participant observation among, and interviews with, members of a Canadawide network of contemporary aboriginal fashion designers demonstrate that these "radical entrepreneurs" work as agents of social change both within their own indigenous communities and among national and international participants in a global fashion geography.

Drivers and deterrents of entrepreneurial enterprise in the risk‐prone Global South

“…More recently, anthropologists and other social scientists have studied entrepreneurship as socially sustainable (Bornstein ; Dacin et al ; Nicholls ; Short et al ) or from a power‐laden perspective, showing how innovation and risk taking both carve out and stifle economic opportunities associated with class (Hsu ), gender (Heyat ; Leshkowich ; Schuster ), ethnicity (Dana and Anderson ; DeHart ; Willmott ), and national politics (Little ; Milgram ; Pimentel Walker 2015).…”

Local Fabric: Mid-Century Modernisms, Textile and Fashion Design, and the Northwest Coast, 1940–1967

“…Designers such as Betty David (Spokane, 1938(Spokane, -2007, Himikalas Pamela Baker (Squamish/Kwakwaka'wakw/Tlingit/Haida), and Dorothy Grant (Haida) began working in the 1980s and 1990s and have been vital to the efflorescence of contemporary Native fashion at large. However, scholarship on the history of Northwest Coast Native fashion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries remains limited (Metcalfe 2010, p. 338;see Glass 2008;Baker and Tortora 2010;Willmott 2010Willmott , 2014Green 2013Green , 2016Kramer 2015;Allen, forthcoming). While this paper centers on the 1940s to the mid-1960s, it offers some reference points to contextualize North American and Northwest Coast fashion and textile design in the decades before and afterward, contributing to a more contiguous and intercultural design history of this region.…”