Amy Denet Deal on Finding and Supporting Her Diné Community

Amy Denet Deal was a successful fashion-design executive for brands like Puma and Reebok when she decided to give it all up in 2019 in order to connect with her roots. Her mother, one of the thousands of Navajo children forced into boarding school in the early 1950s, became pregnant with Denet Deal shortly after leaving school. This was over a decade before the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was enacted, and a Catholic charity stepped in without consulting any family to put 3-week-old Denet Deal up for adoption with a white family in Indiana. “I had a lot of my culture erased through that displacement,” she says. “When my daughter graduated, I felt like this final chapter is for me. It was time to come home.”

Denet Deal donated almost all her possessions, filled a small U-Haul with necessities, and relocated near Navajo land in New Mexico. When the pandemic hit, she sprang into action getting aid that was sorely lacking onto the reservation. “We raised $1.2 million from me working out of my tiny little space in Albuquerque,” she says. The work opened her eyes to just how underfunded schools on the reservation are, and with support from celebrities including Tony Hawk and Jewel, she raised funds to build a skatepark. Last summer, she distributed 5,000 skateboards for the local Diné children. She now runs a sustainable fashion brand, 4Kinship, that she founded with her daughter, Lily Yueng. She is also creative director of Lilacreative, an independent design consulting firm. Denet Deal lives in Santa Fé, New Mexico; here’s how she gets it done.

On her daily routine:
I get up before sunrise to start my day. This is going to sound crazy, but when I wake up first thing in the morning, I feel like I’ve received a lot of messages. So my first step is to start manifesting those messages with visualization, writing things down, sending emails. Just connecting dots. Next I’ll do something within the creative process, like creating pitch decks for funding or projects. Then I’ll either go into the shop, or I’ll do some of our dye work in the afternoon, because that’s when I like being outside. I like interacting with people in the middle of the day. Towards the end of the day, when my mind gets a little slower, I’ll think, What did I learn today? How can I carry that into tomorrow? My brain calms down a bit, and I get ready to rest so I can start the next day fresh.

On rethinking her relationship to wealth:
Living my life’s purpose now has created this wealth that I never thought I could have. Even though my personal wealth has kind of plummeted, my cultural wealth, my mental wealth, my joyful wealth — that’s off the hook. I used to travel around Europe. I used to have these giant spaces to live in, fancy cars, and designer clothes. When you get down to the simplistic things that make you happy, those things do not require that same wealth. Now I drive a beat-up 2012 CRV with a cracked windshield. I live in vintage clothing that I re-colorize. I have a cozy little life, and it doesn’t get any better than this. When I think about my future, all I want is to go live on the reservation in a Hogan and teach kids. That’s not going to require ridiculous amounts of wealth. The wealthiest people I know are not that happy in their day-to-day life. I know I’m really onto something by letting go of that.

On what guides her decision-making:
When I started my decolonization process of letting go, the most important thing I learned is to make decisions based on heart. Every other decision I made previously was based on my brain telling me, Oh, I need to take that job because it’s more money. Or, I’m going to be more powerful if I’m vice president and not creative director. Now, everything I do is based on heart.

On organizing during the pandemic:
The skills I learned in fashion allowed me to go into action really quickly. I knew how to raise money, how to get things from Asia. Our people were dying at a ridiculous rate and no one was helping us. It was amazing to be of service at that time. We distributed PPE, food, and firewood. We helped keep a women’s domestic violence shelter open.

On building 4Kinship:
When I worked in corporate fashion, it was all about competition. You didn’t want to share anything. But with an Indigenous community, we’re just one big group trying to become a greater force within fashion. Reciprocity is the heart of who we are. That’s not normal for non-native brands. Sometimes when you work with indigenous peoples, just based on the amount of trauma that’s gone on for centuries, there’s going to be an element of that trauma that carries through everything that we do. It’s important to have empathy, to know that it’s a learning space, and to keep moving forward. The fact that I grew up in a non-native world, that I was working in corporate fashion for all those years, and now I’m back means that I can bounce back and forth between both places and talk to the other side.

On the power of skateboarding:
It’s just such a good solution for our young people. They can do it anytime they want. They don’t need to be on a team. They can do it with friends. They can compete. If they just need to go work something out, it’s a mental health tool. How do we solve diabetes? How do we solve high teen suicide rates? How do we solve addiction issues down the line? If you ask me, skateboarding will address all of those areas. We need more skateparks, more skateboard equipment, more skate mentors. I’m not just thinking about this as participating in the sport. I’m thinking of all the jobs it can create in the future. I come from the sportswear industry, so I know how many different things you can do once you get there. It’s also really cool: You hand the board to the kid, you see their face light up. We need more of that.

On returning to Navajo land:
There are so many people that were adopted out in the ’50s and ’60s before the ICWA. My story shows that you can come home, that you can reintegrate, even though the government has done everything they could to make that impossible. It’s very hard to come home. You feel like an idiot half the time because you don’t know the culture. There aren’t many books or guidelines on how to do this, but it’s been life changing. I’d highly encourage other adoptees to do the same, because it’s been the most joy I could ever imagine. It’s also the most pain, because I now know what has been done to us. That’s the driving factor in all that I do. I want to use whatever I know for this next generation. Maybe they will be the ones that break that cycle of trauma.

On the community who helps her get it done:
I unfortunately moved right before COVID-19. My Zoom friends worldwide were amazing for the first two years of me reintegrating, but since then, it would be so hard to name just a few people. That’s a different thing with native communities. It’s relatives helping relatives. Everyone has been such a big part of this for me; I never even knew that sort of support could exist.

On what the future holds:
I’m a 60-year-old person posting on Instagram and I get like, 10,000 likes. I have my people that follow this journey. My hope is that they get inspired to think, Oh, if she can do that, I can do that too. I’m just a designer. I’m just a single mom. One day I woke up and decided, Hey, I want to go home. And then I got home, and I’m like, Hmm, this doesn’t feel really good. What’s going on here? I want to do something to make it better. It started out with maybe a day a week, then 20 hours a week, and now it’s 40 to 80 hours a week doing work for others. When I look at the next ten years of my life — when I hit 70, I know I’m going to have to physically slow down a little bit — I’m gangbusters on building bridges, setting up these business ideas. Because once they’re set up, they can be repeated. Other than getting more projects done and the timeline of my age, I don’t really have pressure, because I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s a huge relief. It’s a spectacular feeling for a displaced person to finally make it home after 55 years.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.