Tis the season for buying presents. As you peruse your local mall, you might find yourself drawn to beautiful geometric patterns in vibrant colors, long associated with Navajo rugs, Pendleton “Indian trade” blankets, and Southwest Native American pottery. They’ll be everywhere you look, on sneakers, pricey handbags, home decor, and high-fashion skirts, coats, and jackets.

But many Native Americans are less than thrilled that this so-called “native look” is trendy right now. The company that’s stirred up the most controversy so far is Urban Outfitters, which offered a “Navajo” line this fall (items included the “Navajo Hipster Panty” and “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask”) before the Navajo Nation sent the company a cease and desist order that forced it to rename its products. Forever 21 and designer Isabel Marant also missed the memo that the tribe has a trademark on its name; thanks to the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990, it’s illegal to claim a product is made by a Native American when it is not.

“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.

“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”

“Our land, our moccasins, our headdresses, and our religions weren’t enough? You gotta go and take Pendleton designs, too?”

Of course, this is not the first time Western fashion has appropriated imagery in the name of aesthetics, as fashion historian Lizzie Bramlett points out in her blog, The Vintage Traveler. For example, the pattern we think of as “paisley”—now most commonly seen on ties—was once a holy symbol of the Zoroastrians in Persia. And throughout fashion history, designers have been swiping motifs from other cultures—from China and Japan in Victorian times, Egypt in the 1920s, and West Africa and Latin America in the ’60s.

But Native Americans have a unique place in the history of the United States. Today, many Native American communities are still reeling from the impact of colonization, which started when white Europeans first invaded their homelands and continued as the colonists established a new order and repeatedly attempted to dismantle the native cultures. That this dismantling should continue at the mall can be especially disheartening.

Even Pendleton, which has fostered warm relationships with various Native American communities since it began producing wool Indian trade blankets more than a century ago, has raised a bit of ire with its new fashion-forward collaborations and collections designed to appeal to a broad, if well-heeled, audience.

Pendleton’s latest foray into young, urban fashion is its fall 2011 Portland Collection, first available in September. For the line, the patterns and fabrics used in the company’s 100-year-old Indian trade blankets were incorporated into high-end cocktail dresses, nerd-chic cardigans, and big blanket-like Tobaggan coats covering the white models like sophisticated Snuggies (models wearing the coats are pictured at top).

While these things are trendy and “in the now,” Pendleton blankets have a much more permanent place in Native American culture. In the 1992 book, “Language of the Robe,” Rain Parrish, a Navajo anthropologist, writer, artist, and former curator at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, explains that her family and friends always come to Navajo ceremonies and dances wrapped in their Pendleton blankets.

“As the light from the fire illuminated the moving bodies and blankets, the swirling shapes, lines, patterns, and colors sprang to life. I no longer saw blankets, but rather the familiar designs of the Holy People coming to life from the sand paintings. I saw moving clouds, glowing sunsets, varicolored streaks of lightning, rainbow goddesses, sacred mountains, horned toads, and images like desert mirages—all dancing before my eyes.

“Colorful blankets are often the chosen gift,” Parrish continues. “We welcome our children with a handmade quilt or a small Pendleton blanket as we wrap them in our prayers. For our young men and women, we celebrate the transformation into adulthood, by discipline, values, acknowledgement, and gifts. As they lie on a thick bed of Pendleton blankets, we massage their bodies for good health. For a couple’s marriage, … the woman’s body is draped with a Pendleton shawl, the man’s with a Pendleton robe. As we move into old age, we pay tribute to the spirit world with ceremony, prayers, and gifts. Often we bury our people with their special possessions and beautiful Pendleton blankets.”

Does that make the hip, couture Portland Collection the same sort of exploitation of Native American culture as the Urban Outfitter “Navajo” line? Here’s where it gets tricky: Pendleton blankets, while marketed to and adopted by tribes across the United States, were not originally designed or manufactured by Native Americans. So to understand the debate about the place of what we assume is Native American iconography in contemporary fashion, you have to look at the history of the Indian trade blanket.

Deep in the Southwest, as early as 1050, the Pueblo people had developed hand-weaving techniques on vertical looms. But the Spanish conquistadors, who invaded the Pueblos in the 1500s, had made their mark on the native weaving craft by the 1600s, seen in the use of wool and indigo dyes, as well as the simple stripe patterns. By 1650, the Pueblo Indians had taught their trade to the Navajo, who eventually developed their own distinct weaving style. They took inspiration from the land, and created geometric shapes to represent the things they saw, like mountains, clouds, owls, and turtles.

“We know that the blankets, especially the Navajo blankets, were inspired by the world around them,” Metcalfe says, explaining that these blankets had a story. “Sometimes, there were references to the geography, but they were abstracted.”

Tribes in the Northeast at the time relied on animal hides to keep warm. That’s why, in the late 1700s, insulating and water-repellent European felted wool blankets became the most coveted barter items for the local tribespeople trading with the Hudson Bay Company in present-day Canada. The most popular of these was Hudson Bay’s off-white, pointed “chief’s blanket,” striped with bands of cobalt, gold, red, and green on either end.

In the late 1880s, when the railroad finally opened the Southwest and the rest of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase to East Coast tourists, white Americans were enchanted with the beautiful geometric patterns used in Navajo blankets. The Victorians would take these blankets back to their overstuffed homes and use them as conversation-piece rugs. Traders, sensing an economic opportunity, encouraged the Navajo to weave these throws with stronger materials and more muted colors suitable for the floor.

Then, in 1895, a woolen mill opened in the Oregon town of Pendleton to sell blankets and robes to nearby Native American tribes. The mill went out of business, but in 1909, brothers Clarence, Roy, and Chauncey Bishop, who came from a family of weavers and entrepreneurs, reopened the facility as Pendleton Woolen Mills.

“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans, but also who gets to profit.”

Employing the Jacquard loom technology first imported to the U.S. in the 1830s, Pendleton and other new U.S. mills were able to make felted blankets with stunning colors and patterns. Naturally, all the these wool companies looked at the Native American populations, who had at this point adapted wool blankets, often striped or plaid, as a part of their ceremonies and rites of passage, and saw an opportunity.

To Pendleton’s credit, its loom artisan Joe Rawnsley spent a lot of quality time with the local tribes, such as the Nez Perce, to learn what colors and patterns would appeal to them most. As a side note, the Nez Perce most associated with the brand, Chief Joseph, who heroically stood up against the U.S. government for years, had very little involvement with the company. He was photographed by Major Lee Morehouse wearing Pendleton blankets in 1901, but according to Robert J. Christnacht, manager of Pendleton’s home division, that was “the extent of Chief Joseph’s relationship with Pendleton.”

Rawnsley’s early blankets were well-received by the nearby Nez Perce, so the company sent him on a six-month tour of the Southwest, where he lived with Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi to find out what blanket designs those tribes would prefer. He returned with hundreds of ideas. “Baskets, pottery, weavings, and regalia all inspired Joe,” Christnacht says. “Pendleton blanket designs were a blending of the images and colors Joe saw with his own design aesthetic.”

“It’s a crazy cross-cultural mix any way you look at it.”

Some might say that Rawnsley was simply inspired by the beauty of Native American arts and crafts, and he hoped to use his Jacquard skills to make beautiful blankets the tribespeople would love. And in that, he succeeded. Others might argue that this was an early and sly version of cultural thievery. It’s a slippery slope.

“From the beginning Pendleton marketed the blankets to various native communities, but the designs themselves are not authentic,” says Bramlett, a founding member of the Vintage Fashion Guild. “What’s ironic is that the Navajo were making blankets for the white tourist trade, and Pendleton was making blankets to sell to the native communities. That’s kind of a weird twist, but that’s the way it was.

“And the Navajo designs were not even traditional designs,” she continues. “A lot of the motifs that they used were Mexican inspired. Or when traders came to them with oriental rugs, they’d use them as inspiration. So there are oriental motifs in some Navajo weavings, too. It’s just a crazy cross-cultural mix any way you look at it. You’ve got the Pendleton blankets which are a mixture of native and non-native colors and motifs. Then you’ve got the Navajo blankets, which are the same way.”

What we do know is that Pendleton blankets were a hit, and quickly became a staple of life for Native Americans all over the country. They were used at powwows and rites of passage, as treasured gifts, as a means of non-verbal communication.

“Personally, when I think about that history, I think it’s a really cool, the fact that the entire company—and it wasn’t just Pendleton, there were other woolen mills as well—developed because the market for this item was so strong in native communities,” Metcalfe says. “These blankets were integrated right away into our ceremonies. Pendleton also realized that different communities and different tribes had different preferences for designs or colors. And then they created blankets that different communities would like.”

At the same time, Pendleton also sold the blankets to white people as exotic items for their homes.

“If you look back at the advertising of the day, it’s vague,” Bramlett says. “They didn’t come right out and say, ‘This is an authentic Navajo design,’ but they could lead you to believe that. They realized there was a market for non-native people to use these in their homes. Heck, they were in business to sell blankets. They didn’t care who bought them.”

All of this to say, it’s very hard to parse out the proper credit for these “native” textile patterns popularized by Pendleton and others—let alone when this appropriation first happened. In the early 20th century, Pendleton blankets seemed perfect complements to the rustic, spare style of the Arts and Crafts movement, and by the early 1910s, Christnacht says the company was expanding these patterns to couch covers, rugs, and robes. Later, they were adopted by cowboys and competitive horse riders as saddle blankets.

“The time when Pendleton came into existence, the 1900s, was the all-time low for native communities,” Metcalfe says. “This is at the height of the reservation era, when we were confined, we were essentially prisoners on these small plots of land. But in that same breath, while our cultures were under threat from this outside force, that’s when we turned internally to protect what we had, and we also get some of the most beautiful beadwork and most beautiful jewelry coming out of that period of great stress.

“Connected with that great assimilation movement was the height of collecting. The late 1800s was when a lot of our stuff left our communities. On the one hand, you have this push for trying to absorb or get rid of ‘The Indian Problem.’ Then, they were taking all of the items that embody that culture, to collect them and put them in museums and claim ownership on them.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, top American designer Ralph Lauren became enamored with Navajo rugs, Plains beadwork, and Apache pottery. He launched his Santa Fe line of clothing featuring concha belts, petticoat skirts, “Indian patterned” sweaters, and blanket jackets in 1981 as another defining aspect of American culture. In the 1990s, the Pendleton and other Native American-inspired designs swelled in popularity again with the return of “Southwest” style and rise of “new country” music.

In recent years, Pendleton has been going to town with collaborations using the iconic Indian trade blanket patterns. It had sold these patterns to Vans, famous for making skateboarder shoes; produced high-fashion lines with Manhattan couture company Opening Ceremony; and it is even offering products through Urban Outfitters. With Levi’s, Pendleton launched a line of jean jackets and cowboy shirts called Navajo Cowboys, hiring Navajo rodeo champions like Monica Yazzie as models.

“The reason why Pendleton was able to maintain themselves—and they’re the only woolen mill that survived—is because of their dedication to the native communities and realizing the native people were their main market,” Metcalfe says. “The blanket for us has become associated with idea of native pride, associated with achievement, community, and community service.

“Now Pendleton’s entering the mainstream fashion scene, doing these collaborations, and it is probably a smart move for them, as a business. But we feel like we have some ownership with this company, and we do question whether they’re stepping away from their relationship with us.”

For some, like Cherokee writer and Ph.D. candidate Adrienne K., who blogs at Native Appropriations, it’s confusing and saddening to see her beloved Pendleton selling stylized products to wealthy young Manhattanites who are as removed from the native way of life as any American could be.

“Seeing hipsters march down the street in Pendleton clothes, seeing these bloggers ooh and ahh over how ‘cute’ these designs are, and seeing non-Native models all wrapped up in Pendleton blankets makes me upset,” she writes. “It’s a complicated feeling, because I feel ownership over these designs as a Native person, but on a rational level I realize that they aren’t necessarily ours to claim. To me, it just feels like one more thing non-Natives can take from us—like our land, our moccasins, our headdresses, our beading, our religions, our names, our cultures weren’t enough? You gotta go and take Pendleton designs, too?”

Metcalfe says she’s observed, to her amusement, that the Vans collaboration has been a big hit with Native American communities, but the Opening Ceremony line is dismissed as ridiculous. For Adrienne K., the stratospheric prices of the haute-couture Pendleton items just adds injury to insult.

“There’s the whole economic stratification issue of it,” she writes. “These designs are expensive. The new Portland Collection ranges from $48 for a tie to over $700 for a coat. The Opening Ceremony collection was equally, if not more, costly. It almost feels like rubbing salt in the wound, when poverty is rampant in many Native communities, to say ‘Oh, we designed this collection based on your culture, but you can’t even afford it!’”

On the other hand, Native American designers, too, like Sho Sho Esquiro, of Kaska Dene and Cree descent, and Mildred High Elk Carpenter, a Minucoujou Lakota living in Montana, have also taken inspiration from the Pendleton blankets, sewing them into to modern fashion items like skirts, jackets, dresses, and even hoodies.

“It’s really cool to see how they reinterpret the blanket,” Metcalfe says. “For Sho Sho, she’s using very vibrant colors and the bold graphics of the Pendleton blanket and giving it this hip-hop vibe, by making these hoodies for men and women. She’s made the wearing blanket something cool for Native Americans to wear again.”

Bramlett says she’s glad Adrienne K. and other bloggers are speaking up, because it’s bringing up all the ways Native Americans have been exploited and misrepresented in mainstream culture. Having grown up in the ’60s, Bramlett remembers a time not so long ago when it was considered acceptable to portray “Indians” as violent enemies in movies, television, and children’s books and cartoons.

Even though the cultural tides are turning, a Cherokee-run company in North Carolina still makes knockoffs of ceremonial Sioux headdresses for children to play “cowboys and Indians” with. And Ke$ha and other young scenesters seem to think there’s nothing wrong with donning copies of sacred headgear for partying at summer rock festivals like Coachella.

“When you see pictures of some of these festivals where young white women are all dressed up in Indian regalia, you wonder, ‘What the heck are they thinking?'” Bramlett says. “What adult is going to do this? Do you not realize you just look dumb?”

And even though she finds fashionistas wearing the high-end clothing made out of Pendleton fabrics much less egregious than concert-goers wearing headdresses, Bramlett says it still can look like children playing dress up. “If it’s something that’s that strong a design that is so strongly associated with one culture, it makes you look like you’re trying to be something you’re not.”

Still, Pendleton, who is also known for folksy Americana plaids (inspired by Scottish tartans) and The Dude’s sweater in “The Big Lebowski,” has to find a way to stay viable in today’s brutal international market, Bramlett says, or it goes out of business—and its beautiful blankets go with it. Christnacht says that 100 percent of the blankets are woven and manufactured in the United States, and half of those, which go for about a couple hundred dollars a piece, are sold to Native Americans. In 2009, Pendleton, which employed about 900 people nationwide, had to lay off 43 workers and consolidate operations in response to slow sales during the recession.

“To stay in business, they have got to appeal to younger consumers,” Bramlett says. “They just have to. And so if they want to collaborate with Levi’s or Vans or whoever else they’ve been in bed with, that’s fine and good. If that industry were to collapse, it would be gone. I’ve seen this a dozen times. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and it’s very soon forgotten.”

Metcalfe says you’ll never get a consensus from the Native American community on what Pendleton should or shouldn’t do, but ultimately there is a great love of Pendleton, which has often produced blankets to give back to the community, like the one designed by Osage artist Wendy Ponca that benefitted the American Indian College Fund. It’s just—like you do in any long-term relationship—they get a little annoyed with the company sometimes.

“I think ultimately the collaborations are a good thing because they’re opening a door to greater understanding,” Metcalfe says. “Hopefully, those people wearing these clothes will learn a little more about Pendleton’s history and why we have respect for Pendleton. It is because their sense of service to native communities.”