Amelia Schafer
ICT
LAC DU FLAMBEAU RESERVATION, Wisconsin – On the second weekend of July, four dancers dressed in velvet dresses held up by straps danced gracefully across the arena at the annual Bear River powwow, the dresses glistening and gleaming in the hot summer sun.
The dancers and those who wear the dress are part of a growing movement, one to bring back traditional clothing worn by Indigenous women in the North American Woodlands that was erased alongside Indigenous language, cultures and traditions during colonization and the boarding school era.
The dress, a rectangular-tube shape held up by two distinct straps of fabric, is known by many names: Our Grandmother’s Dress, the deer dress, or as settlers called it – the strap dress.
“There’s so much of the story that was almost lost to us,” said Siobhan Marks, who spent years researching the dress and now hosts workshops in different tribal communities to teach about it. “We’re bringing it back.”
It’s an innovative design that predates contact. Originally, the dress was made from two deer hides. One hide was used for the body of the dress, held up by the deer’s legs. The sleeves of the dress were crafted from the deer’s hind legs. Open in the middle to allow for airflow and easy removal when working or if it was warm outside.
“It’s an absolutely ingenious design. There’s no other dress in the world like it,” Marks said.
Once different materials were introduced, women still honored the deer by using the same design.
There are four eras of dresses, Marks said, the first being the pre-contact deer hide era. The second era, the fur trade era, started once settlers introduced trade wool, usually blue or red with silk ribbon, beads and metal brooches. Later, during the reservation era, velveteen was used for dresses, typically black adorned with floral beadwork, silk ribbon and brooches. Now, a new era is born, she said. The revitalization era, where dresses come in many different colors of velveteen and cotton with intricate appliqued designs.
Marks, who is an Eagle Clan and a lineal descendant of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe in northern Wisconsin, was drawn to the dress when she wanted to start dancing.
“I looked out there, at what our women were wearing, and all I saw that was really discerningly Anishinaabe or in my case Ojibwe were jingle dresses,” Marks said. “Which are beautiful, but there’s teachings about jingle dresses. … I asked the question, ‘Well what did we wear other than jingle dresses?’”
So she reached out to her uncle, Neil Oppendike, who had been studying Ojibwe beadwork all of his life. Oppendike, an expert in woodland designs, pointed her in the right direction, and she began to study and research the dress. Marks said she spoke to elders, visited museum collections across the globe and poured over scholarly archives and historical paintings and photos. The level of erasure is immense, she said.
“It was a matter of looking at everything I could find,” she said. “Only five museums in the world actually had an example of the dress and none of them have the full dress.”
Her first dresses were made from stroud wool and was insanely hot to wear in the summer sun, but she did it.
“It was amazing,” she said. “Of course I stood out, but it was a very humbling experience.”
Now, Marks travels across the Woodlands giving talks about the dress and hosting workshops to encourage women to make their own. The workshops are powerful, she said. Often participants will have dreams about their dresses and feel intensely emotional while working to bring back the ancestral clothing.
“Part of the story is that it was almost full erasure for us, that’s why so little is known,” she said. “So much of this story was almost lost to us, and we’re bringing it back.”
In 2019, she gave a TedX talk in Green Bay to discuss the dress, its eras and importance.
Marks discusses how she learned that these dresses were worn by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous women in the woodlands region pre-contact. From the dawnland in the northeastern coast to the Great Lakes, the dress spread far – reaching Cree and Dakota women.
Since she first wore her dress in 2007, it’s exploded in popularity. The past two years, the dress has gained even more popularity after specials at the annual Mantiou Ahbee powwow in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Sinclair and Solider families, who held the special, was first introduced to the dress during one of Marks’s workshops in Canada and through their friendships and mutual interested in the dress.
The powwow, one of the largest powwows in Canada, held a “Welcoming back the Strap Dress Special” in 2024 and 2025. This year, over 90 Indigenous women entered the arena, some for the first time ever, wearing their dresses.
“It’s almost hard to conceive,” Marks said. “It’s something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.”
Now, famous Indigenous regalia makers like Michelle Reed and Sharon Gustafson travel to major powwows wearing their dresses. The dresses are also beginning to appear at smaller powwows, like the traditional Bear River powwow in Lac Du Flambeau.
“Most of the time I was the only woman wearing this dress and I got a lot of questions, I still get a lot of questions, but I get less people doubting me,” she said.
Marks herself hadn’t visited the Bear River powwow in years, having experienced initial pushback about wearing her dress. Many still don’t accept that the dress was worn by their ancestors, she said, but that’s beginning to change as more people learn about their cultures and themselves.
“The story of this dress is our story,” Marks said. “We can reclaim, pick up those clues that our ancestral grandmothers left for us along the way, pick those up and bring it back and reclaim for ourselves.”