“We don’t want to think about the plants we are wearing when we wear cotton, and we don’t want to think about life and death,” he said in phone interview from Alaska. He thinks it should be the opposite.

Mr. Williams comes to this belief as part of his birthright, and he expresses it in the form of a pencil skirt. He calls hand-sewing a “prayer” and says that for him, hunting equals environmentalism equals spirituality. For him, the universal language of fashion is the best vehicle for amplifying the heritage and legacy of his people while at the same time ensuring the future of those people — in part because his staple material is one of the most precious pelts no longer widely available.

Sea otter was once among the most prized skins because of its lush pile: more than a million hairs per square inch. (The Chinese referred to it as “soft gold.”) By the early 20th century, the animals had been almost hunted out of existence, before they were protected by the Treaty for the Preservation and Protection of Fur Seals in 1911.

But an amendment to the Marine Mammal Act of 1972 exempted “Indians, Aleut, and Eskimos (who dwell on the coast of the North Pacific Ocean) from the moratorium on taking provided that taking was conducted for the sake of subsistence or for the purpose of creating and selling authentic native articles of handicraft and clothing.”