There is a whole industry built on looking Native without paying anyone who is. Walk through a home-goods store this fall and you will find "Native-inspired," "Southwest," and "tribal print" blankets and throws, almost none of them made by Native people or designed with a dollar going back to a Native artist. The look sells. The people it comes from do not see the money.
There is even a law about it. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 makes it illegal to market goods as Native-made when they are not, but the much larger gray market of designs that are merely "inspired by" runs right around it, and has for generations.
Eighth Generation was built to reverse that. Founded by Louie Gong, an artist of Nooksack descent, the Seattle company became the first Native-owned business to produce its own wool blankets. Its Inspired Natives Project is the deliberate opposite of the knockoff market: it partners directly with Native artists to produce, market, and sell their work, so the artist is paid and credited and the value stays in the community the design comes from.
"Cultural art is like any natural resource. If we don't put back into the environment that's sustaining that resource, we end up killing it."
Louie Gong (Nooksack), founder of Eighth Generation
Fall is when this stops being theory. As the nights turn cold and the gift-giving season begins its slow build, a blanket is one of the most common things people buy, and one of the easiest to buy wrong. The choice between a genuine Eighth Generation wool blanket and a mass-market "tribal print" is a small, exact test of what economic sovereignty means: does the maker belong to the culture, and does the money land with them?
Buy the real one. It will outlast the knockoff by decades, and the margin goes where it belongs, to a Native-owned company and the Native artists it pays. That is a warm thing to wrap around someone this winter, in more ways than one.
Storefront: eighthgeneration.com