For more information, visit teachingstrides.ca To learn more about Otahpiaaki, check out their website. SHOW TRANSCRIPT: Meg Wilcox: I'm Meg Wilcox and this is Teaching Strides—MRU faculty daring greatly. In this episode: how fashion can fuel resistance reconciliation and entrepreneurship. The word “Otapiaaki” is a Blackfoot term for the moment the vamp and moccasin are sewn together, and it's this togetherness that the project hopes to promote. When Spirit River Striped Wolf and Patti Derbeyshire first got started with the project, it was in a Mount Royal classroom. But today we'll talk about how Otapiaaki fashionweek has expanded beyond a club at the Bissett School of Business and is now a space for talented Indigenous creators to show off their work and what reconciliation really means. MW: Patti, Spirit, thank you so much for joining me. Patti Derbyshire: Great to be here. Spirit River Striped Wolf: Yeah, thanks for having us. MW: So Otahpiaaki is coming up very shortly, for someone who maybe has never heard of it before, how would you describe the program? PD: So Otahpiaaki began as a classroom project and really quickly became a social innovation movement. Most folks know us for Indigenous beauty, fashion and design week, which happens every fall. So, this year we go November 5th through 9th. And during that week, we invite Indigenous designers and creatives to Mokinstis. And we put up a series of workshops and they can, be on everything from traditional beading and embroidery through to, we're doing digital sash making this, this year with John Corvette. And then our showcases—so this year on Friday night, um, our fashion showcases and we put up our first four designers and that'll be with the Calgary Philharmonic orchestra and Jeremy Dutcher. And so it's so exciting for us because this is the year of Indigenous language. So to be co-presenting with Jeremy Dutcher who essentially revived his language and he is a celebrated Polaris-winning and Juno-winning musician around that language project. And so what we've done is curate the designers with that project. And then on Saturday night we've got a dozen more designers from treaty seven, treaty eight, treaty six. We've got a couple of special guests coming in from nations the U.S., and that's down at our new central library. So we're looking at about 500 people that night. And if you think of a runway in or New York or France or anything like that Otapiaaki puts on that kind of showcase and these designers come with that caliber of work. MW: So you mentioned that this started as a classroom project obviously what you've described is much bigger. What was the original classroom project? PD: Well, Justin Lewis, who is you know, kind of a long-time friend to this project runs a label called Section 35, so he's based in Vancouver, but he came from [unknown] so kind of mid province here, Cree community. And he came in and did a social innovation presentation. And it's actually become a piece of research that I've gone deep on now, but I'll talk a bit more about that later. But Justin really, really inspired this group of students, by helping them understand that Indigenous design and fashion and producing street wear, which is what he does, is so important to indigenous youth at this point in time, that they can see themselves in their own clothing. They can see themselves in their own language and that design elements really reflect who they are. And this era that we're in right now around truth and reconciliation. So fashion in the context of Section 35 is about seeking truth and literally about young people wearing those truths. MW: And so Spirit, when did y...
