Growing up, Quannah Chasinghorse, a Native American from Hän Gwich’in and Oglala Lakota descent was discouraged to become a model by the lack of her people’s representation in the fashion industry. But in 2021, at the age of 19, she would make the headlines for walking the MET Gala with a Native American outfit and for showing her distinctive traditional face tattoos. A documentary released in September of last year and titled Walking Two Worlds shows that, besides being a model, Chasinghorse also has an extensive record on Native American rights and climate change activism.
Chasinghorse was born in 2002 in the Navajo Nation of Arizona. Her mother Jody, also a Native American and climate change activist, is Hän Gwich’in, a First Nation with an estimated population of 310 and located in Alaska and the Yukon territory in Canada. Her father is Oglala Lakota, a Native American people living in North and South Dakota with an estimated population of about 115,000. Raised by her mother and two older brothers, she spent her early childhood between Mongolia, Arizona and New Mexico. At age 6 she moved to Alaska, her maternal homeland, where she was raised in the traditional customs of the Hän Gwich’in. As just a kid she remembers fishing, hunting, chopping wood and being transported by a dog team. After Chasinghorse’s mother got a promotion at her job they all moved to Fairbanks, back in Arizona, where she would spend her teen years.
In the city, Chasinghorse became involved in protests against the drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a project approved by president Donald Trump that threatened to drill millions of acres in Alaska. Drawing the connection between Native American Rights and environmental activism came naturally, and shortly after the protests she also served in a Native American local council educating on the ways of life and defending the original land of the Hän Gwich’in. Whilst speaking at climate rallies, she also started working with the Alaska Wilderness League, the lead organization fighting to protect the Arctic Refuge. In a press commentary reminiscing on the reasons for her involvement in climate change activism, she explained: “Our way of life is at risk. Our culture, all of those things that make us who we are, that make our identity.”
Her career as a model started a few years later, in 2020, when she was approached by a casting agent, whilst she was participating in a get-out-the-vote activity – Native Americans have been suffering disenfranchisement for centuries and have one of the lowest voting turnouts in every election –. In her first modeling campaign for Calvin Klein she would appear showing her traditional face tattoos, called Yidįįłtoo, that are linked to a Hän Gwich’in rite of passage and important moments in life. Her appearance, defying the western fashion standards became highly popular and soon she signed her first contract with a big agency. Since then, she has been featured in many of the most important fashion magazines such as Vogue and has posed for brands like Chanel or Ralph Lauren.
Amongst her most “iconic” moments are the 2021 MET Gala red carpet. Wearing a dress inspired by Native American style and jewelry from the Navajo Nation she made the headlines both for her unique appearance and for defying the theme, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” by wearing non-western fashion elements. Later Chasinghorse would admit on social media that “After a while of trying to fit in in a space where there is a huge lack of indigenous representation, I just started focusing on why I went in the first place”. The relationship of the fashion industry often clashes with climate change activism, Chasinghorse recognizes, but she is also aware that “you have to be at the table where they’re making these decisions”. She now uses her growing influence in social networks to amplify her activism and is often, almost daily, posting about different environmental, social and Native American causes.
Shortly after initiating her career as a model, Chasinghorse was contacted by Maia Wikler, a candidate in a political ecology PhD at the University of Victoria. Wikler, who knew Chasinghorse from her activism work in 2019, pitched her the idea of making a documentary about her career in activism. After a long pandemic with continuous filming pauses, the work Walking Two Worlds was released. The short piece, about half an hour long, features the life of Chasinghorse and aims to highlight her activism journey to engage more people in the Alaskan climate situation.
The title of the documentary is also a reference to a tension that Chasinghorse faces in her career and social activism. As one of the first Native American models to be featured by big fashion brands, the first with traditional face tattoos, she feels loneliness and loss of identity from her roots. She would be walking, figuratively, between an “indigenous way of life” and the “modern world”, as phrased by Chasinghorse’s mother in the documentary. After moving to Los Angeles to continue modeling, Chasinghorse felt anxiety attacks from being away from her homeland. In a poem featured in the documentary she expresses her feelings as a walker between two worlds:
I’m from the beaded moose hide in modern
clothes, the smell of sage, the taste of fry bread.
I’m from the trees, fireweed trails,
mushing, and nature walks.
In the Birch tree I used to climb,
those long-lost limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
From the hunting, fishing and berry picking trips,
the potlatches and the legends our elders tell.
I am from the Hän Gwich’in, Lakota
and Navajo family.
Besides these tensions in Chasinghorse life, her career keeps going on swiftly. In the recent March 2024 Oscar’s Gala, she wore again a Native American inspired dress and traditional jewelry. At only 21, she defies western fashion whilst serving as an inspiration for many Indigenous people around the world. Quannah Chasinghorse, model and activist, is an example proving that walking two worlds is possible.
About the author
Dario is a student in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously completed a bachelor in History at the University of Zaragoza and bachelor in Communication at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. During his bachelor years, he also had the chance to study abroad in countries such as the U.S., Italy or Romania, which have made him specially interested in transnational movements and perspectives. He is currently writing a dissertation on the unpublished autobiography of Vaughn Love, one of the African Americans who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In his free time, Dario is also a member of the Young Minds Network of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam.
For more information about the Young Adams Institute, check out https://www.john-adams.nl/.
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