Sky-Eagle flying to new heights in the fashion industry

Your fashion brand is doing well when it’s being worn on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, is featured in fashion showcases in New York and London, and is worn by Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan to the White House.

But fashion hasn’t always been a passion of Dante Biss-Grayson, member of the Osage Nation, Air Force veteran and co-founder of clothing brand . Yes, he grew up with two parents in the arts, and yes, he’s studied at art academies in both and.

But Biss-Grayson, whose Osage name is Wa-Sa-Ta (meaning “First son of the Eagle Clan”), had usually expressed his art with drawing, painting and writing.

“Design has always been in my blood, as it were, but it never translated in the very beginning into some type of clothing,” Biss-Grayson said.

Though fashion would become important in his life in 2019 shortly after his daughter, Ella Sky Eagle (his company’s namesake), was born, Biss-Grayson made moves toward his future endeavor after he returned to the US after about 12 years abroad, four of which he was on active duty.

Biss-Grayson discovered that an “appalling” number of veterans commit suicide each day — according to the , the figure was 17.5 in 2021 — and wanted to honor them by painting an “abstract expressionism” series with butcher knives.

He was also dealing with his own diagnosis of PTSD and needed a way to externalize his own trauma.

“I was just like, ‘How do I get that message out to the world that we need to inspire people [and] hopefully inspire action?’” Biss-Grayson said.

Then, Ella was born, and right after, the pandemic struck.

“All this confluence of different actions and movements is when I started dabbling into fashion,” Biss-Grayson said. “Definitely [Sky-Eagle Collective] was kind of a side hustle, as they call it these days, and it was mainly a healing process [for me].”

He started the Sky-Eagle Collective with his wife, Yanti, to celebrate Native-American culture and heritage by incorporating contemporary designs into the apparel and drawing attention to issues that are often overlooked. He also wanted to bring attention to a specific group: Biss-Grayson’s fellow Native-Americans veterans.

shows that 19% of Native Americans have served in the US military (14% for all other ethnicities), and for every 100,000 Native veterans, 46.3 died by suicide in 2021 (36.3 for White veterans). And that’s on top of the “whole litany” of issues all Native Americans face, such as lack of healthcare, infrastructure and access to water and electricity.

“And it’s this whole group of risks that highly impacts the ability for these [Native] communities to have healthy lifestyles and to receive their veterans back home,” Biss-Grayson said. “Because once they come back home, they just get back into the same cycle of high risk.”

Still, Biss-Grayson is proud of the warrior and volunteer spirit Native Americans have in their DNA that empower them to serve their country, and his Sky-Eagle Collective has set out to create a new narrative for Native-American fashion.

Through the clothing brand, he brings awareness to veteran-focused organizations such as the and Biss-Grayson said he’s producing a fashion show in Santa Fe that will feature Native veterans.

“I kind of see how this fashion [brand] is for these new warriors in this modern world,” he said.