Morley Community School students develop clothing line

The hoodies and tee shirts that five Morley students designed are not only popular with classmates but have found a market with tourists and residents from Lake Louise to Calgary.

Members of the school's entrepreneurial academy were tasked with re-branding the school store and also coming up with a way to promote community spirit along with the Stoney dialect.

"It's a great source of pride for us because it's language that we spoke for a long time really like our ancestors," said 17-year-old Jace Young. "It's our language, our native language so of course, it's important to us and important to spread merchandise like this and every chance we can get one to spread our language."

They were inspired by other Indigenous clothing lines and contacted a local artist Tyson Crawler to create a meaningful design to put on the clothes. Some of Crawler's work can be seen on signs driving into Morley from the Trans Canada highway. This was a chance for him to create a piece of wearable art.

"I feel it's nice, it's got a nice feeling to it," said Crawler. "I'm honoured the students approached me and you know, I appreciate that."

PRESERVING THEIR LANGUAGE

Theodore Mark is 16 years old and said it's important the Stoney language isn't forgotten by his generation. He's eager to learn it and is happy to see people in his community wearing clothes with Stoney phrases on them.

"That's definitely what impressed me is like, especially that I know that other people outside of the community will be wearing them and it'll be cool to see them wearing them with "iyethka" Nakoda language on it," he said.

Grade 11 student Lacavaler Simeon is learning to speak Stoney from his mom and grandfather and tries to write words down to remember them.

"I'm glad to see that more people are recognizing a lot of Stoney words nowadays," he said. "Because before I used to just speak like English, but now I'm totally learning (Stoney)."

Lavavaler's mom Lisa tries to teach the younger generations every chance she gets to speak their native tongue.

"I understand all of it," she said. "I can speak it and I try to teach my kids you know, like I try to talk around the house, I try to talk Stoney as much as I can, there are a few kids that do speak Stoney and like that's really impressive but yeah, there's a lot that don't and I do think that it's really important."

Renette Kurz is a teacher at the Morley Community School and heads the entrepreneurial academy. She says well over 100 items have sold to people in and outside the community.

Now she's in the process of ordering more shirts and hoodies for people who want them.

"We have a couple of big orders and actually the Lodge at Bow Lake in Lake Louise is now carrying our hoodies," said Kurz. "So they just got them this week and so that's kind of exciting, they approached us."

Kurz is already thinking ahead to the next school year where new students in the academy will figure out what to add to the clothing line.

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