HANOVER — Samantha Pehl had carefully curated every piece of her outfit.
She wore an Indigenous ribbon skirt handmade by artist Toni Rain and Cherokee cover-toe moccasins she crafted herself. Her wrists showed off bracelets made with dark-toned corn beads, symbolic in Cherokee culture of the Trail of Tears. A beaded clip sewn by a Navajo artist held back her long brown hair. And around her neck hung her outfit’s statement piece: a large beaded pendant depicting Kanane’ski, the water spider fabled to have brought fire to the first Cherokee people. Black beads stood out from the rainbow, making Kanane’ski almost jump off her chest.
Pehl, a Dartmouth senior and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, was about to walk in the eighth annual fashion show hosted Thursday evening at the Hood Museum by Native Americans at Dartmouth, a student group founded to represent more than 200 Native and Indigenous students at the college.
Pehl has been involved in NAD since her first year: She walked in the fashion show as a freshman and sophomore and hosted it as emcee her junior year. As a senior, she prepared not only to show off two outfits, but also to perform a women’s cloth dance — traditional at Cherokee powwows and other cultural events.
“NAD has meant everything to me,” Pehl said. “The Native community is why I chose Dartmouth, and the Native community is also why I stay at Dartmouth.”
Dartmouth’s Native American studies program is consistently ranked among the best in the country. Established in 1972, the program sought to renew the 1769 Dartmouth College Charter’s commitment to educating indigenous students.
The Charter, authored by founder Eleazar Wheelock, established “a college erected in our said province of New Hampshire by the name of Dartmouth College, for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian tribes in this land in reading, writing, and all parts of learning.”
During its first 200 years, Dartmouth didn’t always live up to that line in its charter. Since the ’70s, the school has made a concerted effort to make up for lost time. Dartmouth has graduated around 1,500 Native and Indigenous students, according to the school’s website, and between 4% to 5% of the student body identifies as such — significantly more than any other Ivy League university.
Several Dartmouth organizations collaborated to host Thursday’s fashion show, including NAD, the Alaska Native Cultural Committee and Hōkūpaʻa, a student group for Pacific Islanders.
In its eighth year, the fashion show has become a celebratory school tradition, spearheaded by the college’s vibrant Native student community and hosted in the Russo Atrium of the Hood Museum of Art. Sophomore Gigi Kiyabu, a member of NAD, emceed this year’s show.
“Museums have often been a space of erasure for Indigenous identities, trapping [them] as relics of the past. However, there is a push by Indigenous curators and artists across the world to reimagine museums, cultural centers, and more spaces as sites of resistance and imagining Indigenous futurisms,” Kiyabu said while introducing the event.
“By having our fashion show in the Hood Museum, we are demonstrating that we are still here, building community and centering Indigenous joy and creativity every single day,” she added.
Joy, indeed, defined the fashion show. Models smiled as they strolled down the runway’s makeshift red carpet; one blew the audience a kiss; several danced or bowed in their culture’s traditional style.
Pacific Islander students kicked things off with a colorful, floral show: They sported leis on top of bright, patterned dresses. A variety of cultural garb followed: a young man in a black ribbon shirt; a blonde student with cowrie shells sewn onto her flowing black blouse; and a woman in a turquoise tear dress, the official dress of the Cherokee Nation. Fifth-year student Elijah Butler of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe wore a feathered headdress gifted to him by his father, the chairman of their reservation in Connecticut.
Butler also performed with the Occom Pond Singers, a quartet of male students who broke up the runway walks with traditional Native American music. Luke Benally, Navajo, wore a purple hoodie; Garret Morgan, Ho-Chunk, had on a baseball cap; Wamniomni Afraid of Hawk, Cheyenne River Sioux, held the hand drum; and Butler stood at the end in full Native regalia.
The four students sang slow, melodic tunes. “What would you say,” they crooned, “if I asked you on a date,” their deep voices recreating a traditional Native song. Between numbers, Morgan pulled out his phone and played a snippet of music for his groupmates. These traditional pieces are learned only by ear, so the singers had to listen to the beginning of each song to remember the right key.
“He really found a sense of community within the Native American group here,” said Elijah’s mother, Dionne Butler, who drove up from Connecticut to see her son perform.
After a Mapuche (indigenous Chilean) rap performance by Jaime Cuyanao, music from the Occom Pond Singers, and a cloth dance by Pehl and Emma McKibben, models reclaimed the stage.
This time, four outfits took on another layer of creativity: McKibben, a Dartmouth sophomore and a citizen of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, designed them herself. Alongside her best friend, McKibben owns a fashion line called Mioxpe, which means “falling sun” in Osage. They create sustainable clothing from scrap fabrics and other discarded materials, honoring the Native American value of caring for Mother Earth. McKibben crafted her outfit from black lace and colorful beads and made her own long, tusk-like earrings from dentalium, a mollusk shell found in the Pacific.
Thursday was McKibben’s first time in the fashion show, though NAD has been a significant part of her college experience since before she even started at Dartmouth. As a high school senior, she participated in the Indigenous Fly-In, a program designed to introduce Native students to Dartmouth and help them navigate the college application process.
“It made me feel more comfortable being further away from home, knowing that I could still have a connection to my culture,” McKibben said of the Fly-In.
She has another strong connection to home in Hanover: Jami Powell, the Hood Museum’s first curator of Indigenous art. Powell, also an Osage Nation citizen, first met McKibben at a ceremonial dance celebration on the Osage reservation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Powell helped dress McKibben in her handmade clothes and jewelry Thursday night; 1,500 miles from Pawhuska, both women found a way to feel at home.