Aamjiwnaang member Chelsee Pettit has plans for Canada’s first fully Indigenous-owned department store. She is the Sarnia born and raised entrepreneur, fashion designer, and retailer behind the streetwear clothing line, aaniin.
Most recently, Pettit won the grand prize on season two of Bear’s Lair, a reality series aired on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). The show is similar in concept to Dragon’s Den, and it has Indigenous business owners pitch their ideas to a panel of experts and compete to win $100,000.
Pettit plans to bring together several different business owners under one big umbrella. “I want to create an Indigenous conglomerate,” Pettit says.
Beyond reconciliation, Pettit believes in economic reclamation and “taking back our own economy and ensuring that we are the top owners.” In her view, this is the only way to create a thriving Indigenous economy.
Pettit already had great success with the aaniin pop-up fashion boutique in Toronto’s Stackt Market, a trendy marketplace on Bathurst St. designed entirely out of shipping containers. The store featured not only her aaniin brand but ten other Indigenous businesses.
“We sold out of all of our inventory,” Pettit tells us.
Along with having a fully online shop, Pettit has another pop-up coming to downtown Toronto this holiday season, representing her department store vision and featuring over forty Indigenous brands and businesses.
A lot of the ideas that Pettit pitched to Bear’s Lair have already come to fruition even before the series aired and she was awarded the winnings. Now she has set her sights even higher. Beyond just making her idea work and breaking even, she believes in being profitable. "This is a good idea,” she says, “and it deserves to scale at the level of all these other multi-million-dollar companies we see across Canada.”
Pettit wants anniin to be community-owned and to build a landscape that will support not just her brand and the other businesses she currently works with, but future brands that will be created over the next five to fifteen years.
As the focus of its designs, the aaniin clothing line uses Indigenous syllabics, an aboriginal writing system used for many languages including the Ojibwa language of the Aamjiwnanng First Nation. Syllabics are glyphs that represent consonant–vowel pairs determined by their rotation, very distinct from Latin script used for European languages. According to Cree oral history, syllabics were the invention of a man named Calling Badger in the 1800s.
Though used officially in Nunavut, syllabics vary in use throughout Indigenous communities. Interest in reviving and utilizing them has grown tremendously, and Pettit has had a lot of support and encouragement from her community.
When she was younger, Pettit only encountered syllabics in textbooks and museums. Walking in Toronto one day she was excited to see someone wearing a shirt with syllabics on it. She soon realized it was just an ordinary triangle, but this sparked her idea for the aaniin clothing brand.
Though aaniin is used as a greeting like hello, it translates literally in Ojibwe as “I see your light.”
Direct translation from Indigenous languages and dialects through syllabics to English is not always straightforward. There are many dialects represented by syllabics and it takes a lot of research and consultation before Pettit feels comfortable using a particular phrase in her designs.
Another phrase that appears on Pettit’s clothing is gaawiin geyaabi which means “no more.” Pettit doesn’t want people who wear her clothes to automatically become advocates for Indigenous issues they do not understand, but this simple phrase is a gentle way to introduce some of these topics and a way “to help start tougher conversations.”
“When you whisper in a loud room, people lean in to hear what you’re saying, that’s what I’m trying to accomplish with my clothing brand.”
Growing up in Sarnia was not always easy for Pettit and she recalls the casual racism she faced being Native in a predominantly white community. In elementary school, when learning Canadian history, she remembers the teacher asking “is anybody here Native American?” She was the only one to raise her hand and everyone else’s eyes were on her. “I remember that moment to this day.” During the recess that followed she was chased around by other kids pretending to throw tomahawks.
Trying to fit in with white kids in Sarnia there was a lot about her culture and heritage that Pettit pushed aside. As an adult, she says she no longer tolerates the racism she accepted as a child, and says her culture is “something I feel like I am reclaiming every day.”
Moving to a diverse city like Toronto was a revelation for Pettit. There she saw every culture from around the world celebrated. Still, she didn’t see much Indigenous representation even though she was able to connect with the large community of urban Natives living there.
When she opened her first storefront at Stackt Market she found that she had to have a lot of conversations justifying that Indigenous people are present in the city. “People expect to see Natives in typical regalia and don’t accept that we’re here wearing regular clothes like everyone else.”
Having these conversations can be emotionally taxing and Pettit hopes people will take it upon themselves to do their own research, question, and learn about the people who were here first.
Up till now, aaniin has featured clothing that anybody can wear, but the new pop-up store will be testing the waters with more culturally sensitive items that not everyone can necessarily wear and enjoy. It will include custom beadwork and ribbon skirts, and will teach customers what is appropriate to wear as an ally.
Along with her plans for a department store that will help reclaim Indigenous economy, Chelsee Pettit is all about creating a dialogue between Indigenous people and other Canadians. The motto of her company is “every conversation starts with aaniin.”