How L.A. based Montana-born Bethany Yellowtail elevates Native artists — and women — through fashion

If art preserves the culture of the Apsáalooke people, then Apsáalooke women are the keepers of that culture, cultivating it to reflect the modern day.

Fashion designer Bethany Yellowtail grew up “riding horses and running in the fields and swimming in the river and being around [her] people” on the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation and Northern Cheyenne Indian reservations in southeastern Montana. She knows firsthand the importance of art — beadwork, textiles, quillwork — to sustaining Indigenous traditions, and in 2015 she turned that knowledge into her own brand: B.Yellowtail.

Yellowtail and her team have leaned into their values as a Native-owned business that’s “anchored in community.” Consignment artists within the Collective typically receive 70% of profit from retail sales and for a portion of the pandemic, the brand has upped that to 100%. Those extra proceeds have, of course, supplemented artists’ income through the past year, but the relationship is symbiotic: without the work of those artists, B.Yellowtail as it stands wouldn’t exist. And Native culture would feel the loss.