I grew up valuing these kinds of keepsakes. But like any kid, I slowly began wanting what I couldn’t have. Sure, I loved the native regalia lingering around our household, but they didn’t look like anything I saw in the magazines. I was mesmerized by the pages of Vogue. All these pretty accessories and clothes felt so foreign to what I knew. The ads were my favorite. These are actual real things being sold, I would think to myself. The jewelry campaigns were especially mind-boggling. In my community, women sported beaded earrings—you were a boujee native if you had the giant hoops—yet here were glamazons wearing giant Tiffany & Co. diamond earrings. The biggest rock I had ever tried on was a ruby Ring Pop!

It wasn’t until my college years, when I moved to Toronto, that I finally got to see luxury fashion up close. During my four years in the city, I made obsessive visits to Holt Renfrew, the Canadian equivalent to Bergdorf or Saks. I would roam those halls like a maniac, window-shopping on a broke student’s budget. I remember splurging on my first pair of studded Prada sneakers there (heavily discounted, of course) and feeling that initial contact high. Yet a day or two later, I was hit with buyer’s remorse, as though someone had hit me in the back of the head with a Manolo. It felt like an empty purchase—not at all like the special feeling I got when someone made me something back at home. I realized then and there that I don’t value luxury fashion in the same way I do cultural pieces. And I probably never will: Even today, I still feel uncomfortable with buying anything unnecessarily extravagant.

Now, I would much rather spend my money on beadwork. It is a particularly time-consuming art form. Indigenous artists bead each earring, bag, or necklace by hand, a laborious process that demands loads of patience and skill. Where I once spent hours taking in designer collections on Style.com (now Vogue Runway), I now find myself up staying up way too late scrolling through beadwork accounts on Instagram, taking in every detail of a piece. (Isn’t that what the zoom-in feature is for, after all?) In doing so, I’ve discovered a wide range of talented beaders—badass ladies such as Jamie Okuma, Tania Larsson, and Molina Parker come to mind—who are creating pieces that combine traditional techniques and motifs with innovation.