Ginew

Amanda Bruegl and Erik Brodt are physicians. She is a gynecologic oncologist, a cancer surgeon. He is a family doctor and the associate dean for Native American health at Oregon Health and Science University, elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021. They are also married, and in 2010, almost by accident, they started what is widely called the only Native American-owned and run denim brand in the world.

It began with a wedding. For their ceremony, Erik’s father hunted a buffalo, and the couple and their families fleshed, stretched, tanned, and hand-dyed the hide together in a garage, then made belts from it as gifts for the people who helped them marry. What started as a wedding project became, in Erik’s words, a creative exploration of a family story. They named it Ginew, the Ojibwe word for the golden eagle and part of Erik’s own Ojibwe name. In the teaching, the eagle sits atop a great white pine and asks the traveler one question: who are you, and who is your family. The whole brand is an answer.

Native Americana

Ginew calls what it makes Native Americana, and it means it literally. The garments carry their heritage inside them, an Oneida skydome and Ojibwe lodges hidden in pocket linings and stamped into hardware. The Thunderbird Coat is lined with a Pendleton wool blanket, the “We Walk Together” pattern, designed with the Sicangu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk and woven by Pendleton, a nod to the tradition in their communities of wrapping a newly joined couple in a blanket. Bruegl is Oneida and Stockbridge-Munsee, of the Turtle clan. Brodt is Ojibwe, of the Pine Marten clan. Every piece, Brodt has said, is inspired by one of their relatives.

The denim came later. Ginew started in 2010 with leather, the buffalo-hide belts made in their apartment, then grew into apparel and, in 2017, the jeans it is now known for. The flagship is the Crow Wing jean, named for a river that runs through former Ojibwe territory. It is a fourteen-ounce American selvedge five-pocket, made in the USA, with a rear patch of deerskin the couple hunted and tanned themselves. The cloth came from Cone Mills’ White Oak plant in the early years and now comes from Vidalia Mills in Louisiana. In 2024 the brand opened a new chapter with its first women’s denim, made with the artist Addie Roanhorse.

Honest About the Cost

Ginew has grown slowly, on purpose, run alongside two demanding medical careers. In 2022 it took a five-hundred-thousand-dollar investment from Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, an Indigenous-led fund, to push into its next chapter. And the founders are among the most honest voices in this whole census about how hard the made-in-USA path actually is.

The single greatest challenge to producing denim apparel domestically is cost.

Brodt goes further than most makers will. The market, he says, is proud of made-in-USA goods but not willing to pay the prices that domestic production actually requires. He describes their own insistence on it as a kind of stubbornness: “We made sure the labels were made in the U.S. Everything. We’re pretty nutty.” It is the cost problem stated plainly, by people who could have taken the easy path and chose not to.

The Bottom Line