In the context of Western knowledge systems, textile traditions and crafts are not traditionally seen as a valued form of knowledge on par with academia or public organization. This is the way it is for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is textile industries being historically women’s crafts or occupations filled by people of lower economic classes. This is not the case in other knowledge systems and pedagogies, most notably (for our purposes) in Indigenous cultures around the world. Textiles and garments form in these cultural contexts form real-world, visual-tactile representations of personal or community identity, shared history or trauma, authority or nobility, occupation or community role, as well as healing and reconciliation. Not only are the crafts themselves greatly valued, but the information, identities and traditional knowledges deemed valuable by the communities are inseparable from their textile traditions. As someone who places an enormous amount of herself into each sewn garment I create, I want to explore what that change in social weight and epistemology looked like, and how a reframing of textile traditions using Indigenous frameworks different contexts can help us learn more about the textile material record.