Friday, November 8, 2024
Danielle Barrett, a program assistant for MPS’s First Nations Studies, checked out a prominent display of Nike brand T-shirts at the Marquette University Spirit Shop for the first time recently—but it wasn’t the first time she’d seen the shirts. In fact, she designed them.
The shirts debuted at the shop November 1, in time for Native American Heritage Month, and will be worn by the MU men’s basketball team during warmup for the November 30 game. Barrett was still a senior at Marquette when she created the design for Nike’s N7 project, an opportunity that came at the invitation of Jacqueline Schram, MU’s director of public affairs and special assistant for Native American affairs.
An artist in her free time, Barrett jumped at the chance, especially since Nike’s N7 Fund supports youth programming in Native communities. “I feel it’s important to do that,” said Barrett, who noted that the Native youths who are living on remote reservations can be underprivileged and isolated. At MU, a portion of the shirt sales will be donated to the university’s Native American Student Association.
The opportunity to raise awareness of Native peoples also appealed to her. The narrative around Indigenous groups typically focuses on them as historic people, Barrett observed, but it’s important to acknowledge Native Americans in contemporary life, as well.
For design inspiration, Barrett turned to her own heritage as an enrolled citizen of the Long Hair Clan of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. She also looked through pictures of men’s fancy dance regalia, the dance her father performed when he was a child.
The three stripes at the top and at the bottom of the shirt in the front represent a significant expression of Indigenous culture: ribbon shirts and skirts. Ribbon clothing, which has become a symbol of Native identity, dates to the time after European contact, when ribbons were first added to Native clothing.
The top stripes on Barrett’s design represent the ribbon shirts worn by men, with the shirt’s ribbons across their chests, and the bottom stripes represent the ribbon skirts worn by women, with ribbons often at the bottom of long skirts.
The design makes use of triangles, representing the dominance of geometric shapes in her tribe’s beadwork. On the front of the shirt, triangles represent the four directions, going outward and also pointing back to the “MU” at the center. Here, the triangles also represent students graduating and going out to fulfill the Marquette motto of “Be the Difference,” and others point back to the MU to pay respect to Marquette for all the school has done for her, Barrett said.
Extending the design to the back of the shirt required special permission, Barrett said, but it’s high impact. 
A series of seven triangles in descending size trail down, representing a braid. The Long Hair Clan is known for wearing hair long and braided or twisted, although braids are culturally significant to Native people in general, Barret noted.
The number 7 has double significance. The Eastern Band of Cherokee is made up of seven clans (represented by a seven-pointed star on the Eastern Cherokee flag). More broadly, a number of Native cultures follow the Seven Generations principle — “a mindset that we have to make sure that we are respecting and setting up an environment that is healthy, hospitable, and loving,” Barrett said, not only for this generation but seven generations into the future.
At the bottom of the stylized braid is a dot that says N7, the name of the Nike project. To Barrett, the design altogether looks like an exclamation point, as if to emphasize the message behind the shirt.
Barrett also designed the braid as a remembrance of Indian Boarding Schools, operated by the federal government and churches in the U.S. from the 19th century to the mid-20th century. The government separated Native children from their families to send them to the schools, where the children often faced abuse and were forced to assimilate to Western ways. Staff typically cut off children’s braids. Barrett’s own grandfather was sent to a boarding school, she said.
Barrett, who graduated from Marquette in spring and began working in MPS’s First Nations Studies in August, will be seeing the shirt she designed again. She will attend the basketball game November 30 at Fiserv Forum, when the team will be wearing her design during warmup. Barrett will be at the game with her proud father — his favorite of the three versions she originally designed turned out to be the one chosen for the T-shirts.