Indigenous Barbie apparel creates inclusion amid movie buzz, Manitoba business owners say

Aug 05, 2023

Two Manitoba moms who recently launched a clothing brand together were surprised by the response to an Indigenous Barbie design created by one of their teenage daughters, but say it's evident of a hunger for Indigenous representation in pop culture.

Shayna Gray and Jenine Mowat, both single moms and lash technicians from Manitoba, last month started their own clothing line, Enclave Apparel, to create Indigenous-inspired clothing.

"That's when the Barbie thing came along and it just kind of blew up on us," Mowat told CBC News.

The two, who have been friends for a decade, wanted to include young Indigenous girls in this summer's inescapable Barbie trend since the blockbuster movie Barbie did not feature any Indigenous characters, she said.

Mowat's 13-year-old daughter, Alexis Mowat, has been painting since she was a toddler and created a stylized image of an Indigenous woman's head and shoulders above the word Indigenous, shadowed with the classic Barbie pink.

Mowat and her daughter both hail from Norway House Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, and they sold out of their Barbie apparel almost every day of the community's Treaty Days event in early August.

"I knew there was interest in the sweater when we started posting it on social media, but I was not expecting them to just fly out of the boxes like that," said Mowat, who was proud to see people wearing her daughter's design. "It was crazy."

It took two days for the 13-year-old to create the Indigenous Barbie digital painting on an iPad. She didn't anticipate the items would sell so fast at the Norway House pop-up event either.

"I was happy. There were a whole bunch of little girls running around wearing my sweaters," Alexis said. "It was really cool."

Plans are in the works for an Indigenous Ken design, which Alexis said has been a bit harder to create.

"I've never seen an Indigenous Ken doll, so it's taking longer than the Indigenous Barbie did."

Since releasing the Barbie design earlier this month, the business has sold about 100 items in total and has been working to fill back orders since, Gray said.

There were young girls whose faces lit up when they saw the Indigenous Barbie design, but there were also many men and women interested in the apparel, she said.

She enjoyed the recent movie and thought there were many important messages in it, but Gray wanted Barbie merchandise that reflected Indigenous people like her and their children.

"Leave it up to us to include ourselves," she said.

Enclave Apparel's first storefront, set to open in Winnipeg's Corydon area next month, aims to offer items that help Indigenous people feel included in pop culture trends, Mowat said.

Patricia McCormack, a professor emeritus of Native studies at the University of Alberta, said it's often up to Indigenous people to create their own representation because companies like Mattel aren't going to do it for them.

McCormack made her own Indigenous Barbie about 20 years ago as part of a course that examined how racial stereotypes evolve and circulate over time.

Her Blackfoot Barrel Racing Barbie was dressed in denim and a pair of cowboy boots, offering a genuine picture of contemporary Indigenous women, she said.

While Mattel has released a number of Indigenous Barbies over the years, McCormack said they're often dressed up in fancy clothes or regalia, which is not how the Indigenous people in her life typically dress.

"It conveys the message that if you're a white, middle-class girl, you can be anything you want to be. But if you're an Indigenous woman, you have to be special. You have to have ceremonies," she told CBC News.

"What if you're wearing just blue jeans and sweatshirts? Does that make you somehow less of an Indigenous woman?"

She once wrote to Mattel to ask how their Dolls of the World collection was developed, as it features dolls from many different cultures — often dressed in special garb — but said she did not hear back.

However, McCormack doesn't think a lack of Indigenous representation in the recent blockbuster film was intentionally disrespectful, saying "in the scheme of things, Indigenous people are too few in number to count."

Throughout its history, Mattel has been innovative in its expansion of Barbies and the things they could be, but the toy manufacturer could do better in any future representations of Indigenous women and girls, she said.

She would love to see more realistic Indigenous Barbie dolls.

"A hockey-playing Native Barbie would be wonderful."

Accurate representation in the Barbie world is important because the dolls send subliminal messages to society, reinforcing how people view each other and themselves, McCormack said.

"If we define these things differently, we'll think about them differently."

Reporter

Özten Shebahkeget is a member of Northwest Angle 33 First Nation who joined CBC Manitoba in 2021 through the inaugural Pathways program. She is Anishinaabe/Turkish Cypriot and grew up in Winnipeg's North End. She holds a master of fine arts in writing from the University of Saskatchewan. You can reach her at [email protected].

With files from Kalkidan Mulugeta