What the only peer-reviewed study says
Avery Shtykalo and Gabrielle Legault open their 2025 article with a finding about the field itself: "Our initial review of the literature on Ukrainian-Indigenous relations and the kokum scarf revealed a lack of academic scholarship on both topics… there is a distinct lack of formal research in this area." They then decline to fix a single origin: "Rather than seeking a single origin story for the kokum scarf in Indigenous communities, we recognize multiple histories, each shaped by perspectives and relationships. The notion of a single, authoritative history is itself a colonial construct, privileging written records over oral traditions and relational knowledge." (Canadian Journal of Indigenous Studies 1(1), 2025, 105 and 108.)
The object itself, in their words: "a thin piece of fabric adorned with floral designs and set against bright-coloured backgrounds," today "widely embraced by Indigenous peoples, incorporated as regalia, worn as shawls, wrapped around wrists as bracelets, and sold at Indigenous markets." Ukrainians "may know them by other names, such [as] hustyna, hutska, khutska, babushka scarf, or baba scarf." (Same article, 104.)
What nobody has published
Across the academic, museum, Indigenous-press and national-media sources we consulted, no source names the mill, importer, wholesaler, catalogue or store through which the scarves worn on the Prairies actually arrived. That is a finding of our own survey; it proves nothing about what a daybook may still hold, and it is the most interesting open question in the whole subject. Anyone who finds a scarf purchase in a homestead-era general-store daybook will have produced the first documentary evidence of it.
The florals met florals
Naturalistic floral design was established in Métis material culture at Red River by the 1830s, alongside geometric work, and Cree makers had taken up Métis floral patterns by the late 1820s — roughly six decades before Ukrainian settlement began. The Dakota Sioux and Cree called the Métis "the flower beadwork people." The flowers were on the Prairies first; any telling of the scarf starts from that. (Patrick Young, "Métis Beadwork, Quillwork and Embroidery," Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture, Gabriel Dumont Institute.)
Patty Krawec, interviewed for the 2025 article, explains the uptake this way: "The short answer is they're beautiful and they're accessible," and the pattern is "something that looks like our own geography. The florals are familiar; they look like our flowers. The colors are familiar; they look like our woodlands." She speaks of the exchange and the familiarity in one breath, as two things that both contributed.
The one exchange we can name
The photographer Sandra Semchuk, a Ukrainian-Canadian settler from Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, recalls Cree and Ukrainian women in her community trading scarves for moccasins, or giving a scarf in thanks for knowledge shared. She told this to researchers in the summer of 2023. The record does not say when the trading happened, and we will not fill that in. (Shtykalo & Legault, CJIS 1(1) 2025, 108.)
The scarf already belongs to the people wearing it
Patty Krawec: "Long before we wore them in solidarity with Ukraine, we wore them in solidarity with our grandmothers and with each other, as much a part of our culture as beadwork and moccasins." In 2018 Tala Tootoosis, founder of the #KokumScarfCampaign, asked women to post pictures of themselves in ribbon skirts and kokum scarves wearing a statement tee from an Indigenous-owned business — four years before the 2022 solidarity wave. (Rampant Magazine, 14 March 2022; Ntawnis Piapot, CBC News Saskatoon, 1 December 2018.)
The name is already a translation
In Plains Cree, kôhkom means "your grandmother" and nôhkom means "my grandmother": the possessor is built into the word. The English name carries the word for "your grandmother" inside it. (itwêwina, Plains Cree Dictionary, Alberta Language Technology Lab, University of Alberta, from Arok Wolvengrey; Chelsea Vowel, "Cree kinship terms," via the Cree Literacy Network.)