The IKKIVI Podcast: Exploring Fashion, Culture and Values · Nivi Murthy

S3E20: Balancing Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Hopes Through Indigenous Knowledge Integration | Dominique Drakeford

·44 min·2 clips

Dominique says “revolutionize the sustainable fashion industry” means shifting power, not just messaging.

The fear starts with numbness. Dominique says education and marketing train people to stop noticing harm, stop feeling it, and accept someone else's definition of sustainability. Language comes first for her. She wants the climate crisis named through colonial history, because the words can make the systems around fashion harder to ignore. The conversation stays close and personal. The host sits with the uncomfortable part: even sustainable fashion work can stay on the surface when it hurries toward fixes. Recycling becomes the example. It can feel useful while leaving the power dynamic mostly where it was. Dominique keeps pushing past the polite version of the topic. She talks about shifting power, naming anti-Blackness, and facing the white settler colonial infrastructure behind industry habits. It does not play like a simple callout. It feels more like a plea to speak plainly before trying to repair what people have learned to treat as normal. The conversation widens from there. Historians, cultural workers, and political activists come in as voices needed to understand unsustainability at the root. Dominique calls herself a bridge, then keeps pointing toward people already deep in the work. The host brings it back to parenting and the next generation. Hope is present, but it is not tidy. The episode ends with Dominique sharing where to follow her work and hinting at storytelling with bite. The warmth stays, even when the conversation gets urgent.

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