If you’ve been following fashion the past few years, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in vaguely Native American design. Whether it’s the avalanche of Southwestern-printed Patagonias on Grailed or the explosion of sterling silver and turquoise jewelry decorating the wrists and belts of menswear dudes (or even the goods of luxury brands like Dior, with its oblivious campaign for “Sauvage”)—Native American style is everywhere. In fact, it’s gotten so popular that last year, Pueblo and Zuni artisans went to court to force non-Native brands to stop illegally using their name on counterfeit goods. And the problem isn’t just that traditional Native designs are being watered down or used inappropriately, but that many Native designers and craftspeople have been left out of the boom.

One brand, however, is laying claim to its Native heritage in a profoundly new way: Ginew, based in Portland, Oregon. Meaning “brown eagle,” Ginew is part of co-founder Erik Brodt’s Ojibwe name. His wife and co-founder, Amanda Bruegl, is Oneida and Stockbridge-Munsee. Together, they’ve been making high-end denim and workwear in the USA since 2014. They use as many American textiles as possible (since Cone Mill closed, they’ve switched to a Japanese denim mill), while also trying to imbue their collection with motifs that are central to their identities. To do this, Ginew is looking to both the pre-Columbian and more recent histories of their tribes in order to reimagine what it means to be Native today. They’re also doubling down on a commitment to collaborating with Native models, artists, designers, and photographers. And unlike so many other brands putting out Indian kitsch in 2019, they’re offering a new way for outsiders to learn about and appreciate—rather than simply appropriate—their culture.

Haatepah and Mariah Makalapua wearing Wax Rider Jackets Kari Rowe / Courtesy of Ginew

Neither Erik nor Amanda trained as fashion designers or worked at a fashion company before starting Ginew. They’re actually both doctors, and when they spoke to me from their Portland home, they had to pause our conversation a few times to check if they’d been paged. Ginew began by accident: as a personal project and an unlikely product of their marriage.

“That’s a buffalo skull from our wedding. My dad shot the buffalo,” Erik explained, pointing to a huge white skull hanging on their living room wall. “Instead of buying gifts for our wedding, we made gifts for everybody who was on the drum, or who stood for us.” To honor the friends and family who participated in the wedding, Erik picked up some leatherworking tools he’d inherited from his grandfather and started making small leather goods with the buffalo hide. While Amanda was finishing a surgical fellowship in Texas, Erik decided to keep working with leather as a hobby—but soon he was getting inundated with requests from interested customers who passed by his shared workshop or heard about the belts through word-of-mouth.