b'FASHIONFASHIONMainstream fashion and traditional Indigenous craftwork come together FUSION at the Indigenous Fashion Arts Festival, a biennial event showcasing Indigenous creative talentT he Indigenous Fashion ArtsBy Jennifer Ashawasegai-PereiraFestival (IFAF) has become a cultural mecca in less than five years. Every other June, the Toronto-based festival brings together Indigenous fashion designers and artists from throughout Turtle Island. It features everything from traditional craft, such as moose hide tanning, to contemporary fashion performances and so much more in-between. Sage Paul is the Executive and Artistic Director and co-founder of IFAF, which first kicked off in 2018. As the urban Denesuline woman (English River First Nation) recalls, It exploded! Not only were people coming to see it, but so many designers were coming out. This space needs to exist.Grassroots are the building blocks and IFAF is entrenched in identity. It exists to lift up artists and designers to re/claim the ever-evolving world of Indigenous fashion. Workshops, runway events and a marketplace that showed the diversity and versality of Indigenous style were part of the most recent festival, held last June at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.To illustrate the grassroots reclamation of space, IFAF hosted an outdoor four-day brain tanning workshop. Participants learned about the brain tanning process of moose and deer hides, which includes scraping, drying, softening and smoking. According to the IFAF website, Brain tanning is the art of preserving animal hides using the emulsifying agents in the animals brain, which helps break up the mucous membranes that cause animal hides to harden. Interestingly, each animals brain has enough enzymes for its own skin. 64Fall/Winter 2022'