It was a standing-room only audience at the final runway show of this year’s Indigenous New York Fashion Week. The crowd squeezed in right up to the door of this year’s venue: the brand new home of the American Indian Community House.
It was exactly what executive director Patricia Tarrant (Mandan and Hidatsa) had in mind when she signed a seven-year lease on the space. Founded by Native American volunteers in 1969, American Indian Community House (AICH) has bounced around about a dozen locations over the decades.
With around 9,600 square feet in the heart of the Garment District, AICH’s new, sixth-floor space is a big upgrade from its previous location in a cramped 1,700-square-foot, 20th-floor Madison Avenue office. It’s also custom built-out for the organization’s multiple needs — including hosting high-profile events. AICH moved into the new space on March 1.
“With this space we have so many more opportunities and I think we can be more economically sovereign by renting out our space to other organizations,” Tarrant says. “You can rent out a space anywhere but here you could also give back to Indigenous folks and that’s what we frame it as.”
Wherever it’s been located, AICH has always been a space where multiple Native communities have come together to support each other — be it through basic health care or mental health services, a food pantry, job training, connections to housing, or celebrating and creating art and culture.
This year, it’s meant hosting 30 Indigenous designers and 120 Indigenous models, as well as all Indigenous-led hair, makeup and production teams — representing more than a hundred tribal nations or Indigenous communities, from as far as Fiji and Australia — for the second annual Indigenous New York Fashion Week.
It was a full circle moment for Liana Shewey (Mvskoke) and Korina Emmerich (Puyallup), co-founders and co-owners of Relative Arts NYC, the East Village studio and community space that produces the event. The duo first met at an AICH event back in 2018; the nonprofit has moved twice since then.
“I was definitely in awe of the amount of space they have now to do different events, performances or gallery shows,” Emmerich says. “Coming from where we met in this little janky-ass place on Eldridge Street, to see where it is now is so exciting.”
Events like these are a big component of the long-term vision to get AICH to a place where it can finally secure a permanent home. Ten percent of Indigenous New York Fashion Week ticket sales this year went to AICH.
“It just feels like taking a space that is so deserved and needed,” Shewey says. “Of course the longest-running urban Indigenous-run space would be continually displaced for their entire existence. This is perfect for fashion week. This is perfect for AICH. This is perfect for growing what they’re doing.”
Indigenous New York Fashion Week is produced by East Village studio and community space Relative Arts NYC. (Photos by Oscar Perry Abello)
AICH’s journey
AICH’s new home reflects its glory days as both a service provider and Indigenous cultural hub.
For decades, AICH received significant federal funding through the Indian Health Service for its health programs and the Department of Labor for its job training programs. It launched an HIV/AIDS project in 1990, and hosted a conference on HIV among two spirit Native Americans in 1991.
Over those same decades, AICH also operated performance spaces and art galleries that hosted exhibitions of nearly every well-known Native American artist as well as many that are still under the radar. Back in 1975, it hosted the first show by Spiderwoman Theater, North America’s first Native feminist theater troupe and the longest-running Native American women’s theater company.
“Arts are very important to Native Americans,” says Frances Grumbly (Akwesasne Mohawk), who has been a part of AICH since inception, and currently serves as board treasurer. “We’ve always been creating, one way or another, whether it be basket weaving, painting, moccasin making. It’s part of our soul to create.”
From 1989 to 2005, AICH operated a theater on the eighth floor at 404 Lafayette Street, with an art gallery and gift shop downstairs. The theater was known as “The Circle,” with the nonprofit’s office spaces arranged around a circular space used for serving meals or holding classes during the day and re-arranged into a performance space in the evening. AICH was forced out from that space at the end of 2005 to make way for a luxury condo redevelopment that never actually came to fruition. The building is now part of NYU’s campus, filled with offices and a fitness center.
AICH moved its 40 or so staffers down to a space in the Financial District, at the very southern tip of Manhattan. For a few more years, it kept up its health and workforce programs, youth programs, its gallery, and a performance space.
Things started taking a turn in 2012. First, AICH was forced to move again due to a rent hike. Then, that same year, it lost a long-running Department of Labor grant worth $1 million a year — about a third of AICH’s revenue at the time.
More devastating news came in 2017, when the nonprofit lost its long-running Indian Health Service grant. AICH reported zero revenue on its 990 tax filings for 2017. The organization lost its own space and moved into an office shared with another nonprofit on the fourth floor at 39 Eldridge Street in Chinatown — but at least it still had space for smaller events. Volunteers and donations from board and staff held the organization together by a thread over the next couple of years.
AICH started rethinking its model to be less reliant on federal funding. In 2019, a group of non-Native New Yorkers came to AICH’s leadership with an interest in supporting Native communities — not out of a sense of charity, but as a form of reparations.
“It was a group of settlers that had intergenerational wealth,” Tarrant says. “They approached us to say that they would give the money to Indigenous folks and then Indigenous folks could say what they wanted to do with that money.”
That group partnered with AICH to launch the Manna-hatta Fund in October 2019. The fund encouraged non-Native New Yorkers to donate at least $24 a month — alluding to the apocryphal story that Dutch colonists led by Peter Minuit bought the island now called Manhattan from its Indigenous inhabitants for $24 worth of trinkets.
AICH decided what to do with the money, which it mostly re-granted to other Native-led organizations, like the American Indian Law Alliance. By the time it closed in October 2025, the fund had raised a total of $2.5 million. AICH has since been transitioning Manna-hatta Fund donors into supporting AICH itself.
As the organization’s finances started improving through individual donors and support from foundations, AICH renewed its efforts to find a permanent home.
Patricia Tarrant, shown here on the far left, the executive director of the American Indian Community House. (Photo courtesy AICH Facebook page)
Finding a home – and a new focus
When Tarrant returned to AICH in 2021 as executive director (she had worked there from 2006 to 2018) the organization was starting to shop around for a space.
Logistically, they needed a space in Midtown Manhattan — close to all the city’s subway lines plus regional transit hubs. “Our community’s not in one specific area of New York City, we’re spread out,” Tarrant explains.
New York City is home to the country’s largest urban Native population, more than 180,000 individuals, and it’s a growing share of the city’s population. But aside from Brooklyn’s former Little Caughnawaga, an enclave of Mohawk ironworkers and their families that existed from the 1920s to the 1970s, New York’s urban Native population has never really clustered in one particular neighborhood.
Tarrant toured about a dozen different Midtown locations. Some were storefronts, which had the benefit of being more visible and accessible. But that access would come with worry over securing the space after-hours. Plus, many Midtown storefronts lacked space for the art exhibitions, sewing classes, film screenings, and other events that AICH wanted to host going forward.
The more spaces Tarrant saw, the more she became convinced that AICH wasn’t quite positioned yet to acquire a permanent home. It needed more time to rebuild.
“It started as purchasing a building,” Tarrant says. “But at the time we had only two staff members, and we didn’t think we could have the capacity for that. We started looking into more renting spaces and building up the capacity for our staff to have that goal of, in the end, acquiring a space.”
Tarrant had grown up around the organization in its glory days. Her late mother, Victoria Yellow-Wolf Tarrant, worked in AICH’s Health and Wellness Department during those years at The Circle; Tarrant’s older sister managed AICH’s gift shop.
She knew it would never be exactly the same as it had been then. The Indian Health Services funding for New York City was now with the New York Indian Council, and newer groups like Urban Indigenous Collective were now providing some of the mental services that AICH previously provided.
“We were realizing … that AICH doesn’t have to be this ‘end all, be all’ organization that it used to be,” Tarrant says. “We thought the culture aspect and the youth programming wasn’t already being fostered in other organizations. We want to shift towards that more.”
So their team started focusing on spaces that would fit their vision of AICH as a Native cultural and community hub with a focus on youth programming. “We used to be a drop-in center,” Tarrant says. “Having a place to be in community has always been a part of AICH’s history and that’s something I want to maintain and bring back.”
On the sixth floor of a 105-year-old building on West 39th Street, just around the corner from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Tarrant found what she needed. It was the entire floor, and it was mostly open space.
The landlord offered to cover buildout costs. Taking inspiration from The Circle, Tarrant worked with AICH’s development director — a trained landscape architect — to create a floor plan to build offices around the outside of the space, leaving the middle open and flexible like it was back at 404 Lafayette.
The floor plan included extra office spaces that AICH itself doesn’t need right now, but is offering to sublet to other Native-serving organizations or allied groups. It’s another piece of the long-term vision: If AICH is to ever acquire a permanent home, it will most likely be renting out office space in that building to other organizations. Now it could also learn how to operate in that potential market, just as it’s learning the business of event rentals and co-programming with others.
“It’s about collaborating,” Tarrant says. “We’re still learning and we’re still trying to build up our consistent base of programming, but I think we’re in a good place right now where we can fill in those broader gaps. It’s been needed in the Indigenous community – somewhere you can fit more than 20 people in a space.”
New possibilities
As it happened, AICH’s new location in the Garment District was particularly fitting for a fashion show.
“There’s so many different smaller businesses in the Garment District that you can make connections with,” says Emmerich, co-founder of Indigenous New York Fashion Week. “I’m up there all the time, just shopping at the notion stores. Anything I need, I can just run up to the Garment District and get it.”
Everything about Indigenous New York Fashion Week was planned to maximize opportunities for new connections. Twenty-two designers were first-timers to this year’s event, as were many of the models.
It was the first ever runway show for Jona Guisbert, co-founder, designer and creative director at Quispe Azul. His brand works with Quechua communities in Ecuador’s Andes Mountains who hand-weave garments using traditional pedal looms.
Guisbert grew up in Queens with an Ecuadorean mother and a Bolivian father. He first began to connect with his Indigenous roots when he moved to the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago. After he returned to New York, a friend who had modeled for Indigenous New York Fashion Week last year encouraged him to apply to show a collection this year.
“It was a really meaningful way for us to be able to share all the work that we’ve been doing over the last couple years,” Guisbert says. “In my mind, this is something that happens maybe at year 10, so it definitely was unexpected. The way this opportunity for us even came about was just through rebuilding my Andean community here in New York.”
Most other New York Fashion Week runway shows work on a pay-to-play model, with designers typically paying show producers anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 to participate. At Indigenous New York Fashion Week, designers pay nothing to participate.
Sponsors and ticket sales cover production costs, which Shewey and Emmerich estimate to be around $327,000 this year. They were able to pay models and hair and makeup teams more than last year, closer to industry standards.
“We’re creating an economy of Indigenous creatives,” Shewey says. “That first meeting at AICH was just a taste of what was possible. From there, it was organizing and meeting more and more people who were driven with the same passion and vision for liberation. Coming together and realizing that we’re all just trying to get free.
“And here we are now. We have our own little chunk of the East Village. We get to create on our own terms and put on big events on our own terms and gather on our own terms.”
This article is part of The Bottom Line, a series exploring scalable solutions for problems related to affordability, inclusive economic growth and access to capital. Click here to subscribe to our Bottom Line newsletter.
Oscar Perry Abello is Next City's senior economic justice correspondent and author of The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy (Island Press). He also writes Next City's free economic justice newsletter, The Bottom Line.
Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance, impact investing, economic development, housing and more for media outlets such as Shelterforce, Impact Alpha, Yes! Magazine, City & State New York, The Philadelphia Inquirer, B Magazine and Fast Company. Oscar is a child of immigrants descended from the former colonial subjects of the Spanish and U.S. imperial regimes in the Philippines. He was born in New York City and raised in the inner-ring suburbs of Philadelphia. Reach Oscar anytime at oscar@nextcity.org or follow him on your favorite social media platform at @oscarthinks.
Follow Oscar .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Add to the Discussion
Next City sustaining members can comment on our stories. Keep the discussion going! Join our community of engaged members by donating today.
Already a sustaining member? Login here.