American Indian Material Culture and the Western World

The world art market, in all of its diverse forms, treats American Indian art differently than the works produced by artists of the Western world.  Further, the world art market values, or rather devalues, American Indian works of art quite differently than the artworks of Europe.  Although some may argue that this is changing, the dissimilarity is still globally apparent in museums, galleries and sweatshops, as well as in the strip malls, courtrooms, and classrooms of America.  The reasons for this are many, but all stem from the prevailing notions non-Indians have about Indian people.  Our discussion of American Indian art then, begins with an effort to understand these stereotypes and the cultural conditions that fostered their formation.  That story can be traced to events that occurred more than five centuries ago.

The Birth of a Stereotype

Six hundred years ago, the pressure was on in Europe.  The fresh water sources were so polluted that touching water was equivalent to infecting oneself; personal hygiene among the wealthy was replaced with perfumes—heavily scented sterile alcohols.  People drank beers and ales rather than water because the brewing process sterilized the beverages.  The deforested landscape, overpopulated and overburdened by man and domestic beast, could no longer produce enough to keep pace with the hunger of the poor. 

Disease, crime, and poverty were the lot of the majority of Europeans, but those who were not victims of privation enjoyed a life of unparalleled luxury, even though many suffered from the physical effects of generations of marriages to close relatives as a way to maintain their wealth and position. 

This was the way it was in the 1500s in Europe when the bored children of the filthy rich, as well as those disenfranchised from property and status in Europe, took to the oceans of the world to go exploring.  The things these travelers saw were far more amazing than they ever anticipated, and this created a sort of cognitive dissonance between what they believed and the realities they perceived for themselves.  Western ideas about American Indian people and art are rooted in this dissonance, which has resolved itself only slightly for most non-Indians. 

            What did these travelers believe?  Simply, that they were the crowning jewel, the epitome, of creation.  Proof of this would be offered in the 1530s by religious philosopher and lawyer, turned minister, John Calvin who saw wealth in the hands of the “elect” as manifest proof of God’s favor and authors like Francis Galton, who in the later 1800s, pointed to the ability of the wealthy of Europe to hang onto position and money as physical evidence not only of superiority but of genius.[1]

            They believed that there was no more obvious or validating sign of God’s favor than possessing the wherewithal to set out upon the seas on mercenary, pirating, pleasure, and educational voyages, where one could examine not only the cradle of their own civilization, but the faraway lands of “mysterious” peoples.  Once visited, the peoples of these lands were judged, by the Christian-educated, European ruling class, as heathen and “savage,” which literally meant what the word “wild” means today – indicating a people outside of the influence of the “civilizing” governmental and economic forces, languages, religions, and other systems of social control known to Europeans. 

            What did the travelers perceive?  Arguably, the most elaborate, rich and finely wrought material culture[2] in the world.  Every skill had practitioners who elevated their technical and esthetic ability to the highest possible level, producing unparalleled work in shell, feather, stone, metal, and hide as well as masterworks of watercraft, basketry, ceramic, textiles, sculpture, books, paintings, drawings, and architecture. 

            The quality and quantity of fine work was equal to or exceeded that of any other place in the world. Atahualpa, the Incan Emperor, had life-size, solid-gold models cast of all of the animals that inhabited the Incan lands as well as a full-length cloak made of small square plates of beaten gold interlocked with golden rings.  The Aztecs, at the time of European contact, had developed a fabulously wealthy culture where the well heeled wore some of the most finely manufactured and embellished garments the world has ever seen.  Mexican libraries held hundreds of thousands of volumes in the 1530s.

            What did the travelers retrieve?  Expeditions of discovery and pleasure became common, but more nefarious voyages were underway, too.  Other branches of these royal or merchant families were involved in the exploitation of these “mysterious” populations and the extraction of their resources.  Like their relatives on pleasure cruises, the Europhones marveled at the things they saw and brought many away with them–taking them home to show those who had stayed behind and who would never believe the verbal descriptions of what was encountered in these far off-lands. These other members of the family were busy looting and pillaging any and everything that they could put aboard their ships.  Nothing, including people, was spared. 

            The books of America were all burned, but the gold and silver were melted and otherwise organized into units for transport to the treasuries of Europe.  Some ships carrying the wealth of the Americas sank; tales of their unrecovered riches spawn television adventure shows and get-rich-quick stories.  Others ships made the voyage across the Atlantic, laden with wealth Jack Weatherford says knocked the bottom out of both the African gold market and the Chinese silver market by flooding the economy of Europe with more wealth than they could ever have imagined.   More than 12 million Indians died laboring to remove gold and silver from the Americas so the churches of Europe could become gilded and the children of the wealthy could sail the world on voyages of education and discovery.

            What did the travelers conceive?  Europhone contact gave birth to drastic change in the number and variety of goods produced that can be measured in three ways.  First, whole new forms with new functions were created, as in the case of the North American Great Plains, where the reappearance and subsequent domestication of the horse prompted an explosion of new types of material culture objects, such as saddle blankets, saddle bags, and riding whips.  Another locus of inventiveness was the intersection of Native skills and European traditions that produced walrus-tusk cribbage boards in the Arctic, quilled chair backs in the Northeast, and clay oil lamps in Southern California.   

            Second, the impact of contact can be measured in the appearance and disappearance of materials from the American artists’ works.  Glass beads were unknown in America before contact, but after contact they begin to appear worked into garments, bags, pipe stems and so forth.  Account books, also called ledgers, were adopted by Plains artists to replace the plentiful hides once used to record history. Likewise, certain materials and forms may have disappeared altogether or were reduced in variety and number—the number of dyed porcupine quills worked into baskets, ear rings and moccasins has dropped dramatically since first contact.

Third, the impact is also reflected in a reduction in the production of art forms overall as the deaths of artists and their teachers mounted.  The deaths were due to murder and massacre of Indian men, women, and children, but most deaths were caused by the transmission of many contagious illnesses[3] of Western origin that attacked the vulnerable immune systems of most Indian people. 

            Disease is a great equalizer in that it does not recognize position or wealth; it only knows immunity or lack of immunity.  Of course immunity was an undiscovered concept in Europe and the deaths of huge numbers of Native Americans were interpreted by Europhones as the Christian God’s affirmation of the superiority of the Europeans.  Some Europhones died from these diseases, to be sure, but the percentage of Europhone deaths from viral and bacterial illnesses was negligible when compared to that of the Indian peoples where, in some cases, whole tribal groups were wiped out within three or four generations. Much knowledge was lost because people, the main repository for information, died and took the information with them. 

            But do not think that all was lost.  Individuals were able to collectively rebuild their communities in ways that embodied the ancient traditions, as always, adapted to the changeable nature of reality and the needs of the remaining Native people.

Collecting Curiosities

The wondrous things produced in the Americas amazed the Europhones, but on some level they understood that the objects meant very little, except as curiosities, when they were taken out of context.  What they really wanted was to recreate the feeling of the worlds they had visited, even if they had to do it in miniature.  Toward this end they built windowless rooms lined with shelves, called vunderkammer (literally “wonder cabinet”). Here they kept their “curiosities,” the naturally occurring items or material culture objects that had caused them to experience the cognitive dissonance we call wonder.  Thus was born, not only the ancestor of the modern “curio” cabinet but also of the modern museum; after several centuries of continued “collecting,” these curiosities really began to pile up around the castles.  Many needed special care to protect them from mold, insect infestation and the like.  The wealthy of Europe began to understand what it was going to cost them to keep their curiosities.

            The European interest in curiosities as things to be appreciated instead of shunned was transferred to the Americas with the Europhone immigrants.  They collected the skulls and objects that they unearthed from Indian graves.  The idea that these items were taken from graves is a very important point because it indicates two things about the attitude of the Europeans regarding American Indian objects of all sorts.

            Foremost, they believed, as do many modern Americans, in the validity of the concept expressed by the child’s taunt, “finders keepers; losers weepers”—the notion that anything unguarded can be taken fairly by anyone who comes upon it.  Second, it demonstrates the relative ease with which Europhones interacted with the bones of the dead.  In one such case, a skull unearthed in the central Woodlands has been passed from generation to generation in the same family since at least the 1850s.  Today, the skull sits in a library bookcase in the family home in central California, with little hope of repatriation.

            As repositories of curiosities, public museums are only about 100 years old, and they resulted from the release of private goods to public institutions.  Primarily they are based on the collections of individuals.  The Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum at the University of California at Berkeley, for example, began as the personal collection of the Hearst family and is now a public collection in the care of the University. 

            The new Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., began when the privately owned holdings of the collection of the George Gustav Heye Museum were transferred to the publicly owned collections of the Smithsonian Institution in 1989.   The Heye Museum had fallen on hard financial times, and the collection was in danger of total ruination, as water leaking through the roof became a serious threat.  The point is that the collections became too expensive for individuals to maintain and rather than lose them to ruin, many were donated to institutions, cities, counties, states, and even to the federal government.

            So, how did the objects in the Heye Museum and the Hearst Museum get collected in the first place?  Most cornerstones of museum and private collections are objects procured directly from Indian people.  Before 1900, the populations of American cities wanted interesting things to do, and the first museums opened their doors to rave reviews.  Among these first museums was one in New York City privately owned by P. T. Barnum, which he eventually took on the road under the name of “circus.”  Newly created public museums, too, were eager to draw crowds through their turnstiles, and the museums’ directors ordered their curatorial staffs to recreate, for the public, the feeling of being in an archaic Native American setting. 

            This spawned a collecting frenzy among individuals and institutions desiring to create “dioramas,” specifically, three-dimensional reproductions, using mannequins, of an archaic Native American event, usually something mundane, exhibiting the material culture objects acquired from a particular group.  They were full-scale displays that included hundreds of objects “bought” in Indian communities across America.  It was important to collectors that the objects be original and filled with data, for it was the data encoded within the object that made it valuable. 

            Some apologists would point to the money paid to Indians for their things to justify the holdings of American Indian art.  Until ten years ago, only a small number of Indian artists received fair value for their work; the count is now a small number plus a handful.  Before ten years ago, the purchases of those objects that were bought “fairly” were most often coerced or extorted purchases, at prices substantially less than the real value of the object.  The sellers were often near refugees but more often complete refugees on the verge of starvation and death from exposure in their own lands; the objects were essentially looted from the near dead.  The buyers were pleased with their “bargain” prices.

            Perhaps as important as what collectors wanted were the kinds of things they didn’t want.  They wanted objects that supported the stereotypes they sold to the public, so when the “authentic” Indian objects ran out in communities, the collectors went away.  They left behind the objects that showed the ugly reality of Indian life at the turn-of-the twentieth century.  They didn’t want the cast-off objects of Western origin salvaged by Indian people and used to replace the objects collected away by the wealthy and powerful.  The public didn’t want to see the tin cans used to replace the plates and bowls shipped away nor did they want to see their own cast-off clothing that Indian people wore.  The public, and therefore the institutions, were not interested in portraying the suffering of living Indian people, only in using objects to maintain stereotypes that the public found easy to believe.

The Indian Price Tag

It is important to understand that many objects were gained by foul means of one sort or another.  Many things in museum collections were acquired from burials, taken through “grave robbing.”  While we might personally look down on the activity of grave robbing, most Americans certainly are fascinated by the idea of finding buried “treasure,” and a significant number have achieved fame, made fortunes, and built careers by “exploring” and/or “excavating” Indian burials.  The rightful Indian owners were seldom given the right-of-first-refusal to move their ancestors out of the way of the juggernaut of progress nor were they compensated for the seizure and removal of these burial objects.

            Like the grave pilferers, collectors who worked among the living paid little attention to legal or moral title, and they made virtually no effort to determine if the rightful owner of an object was the seller.  Stewart Cullin and Constance Goddard DuBois, who collected for different museums at the turn of the century, each document Indian people begging them to return some object that should never have been sold; in each case the collector turned down the tearful Indian petitioners, saying, “A deal is a deal.”  Cullin went so far as to have the woman who begged for the return of a basket arrested, when she resorted to theft after he refused to sell the basket back to her.

            Most dumbfounding is how “Ghost Dance”-related objects have entered collections.  The Ghost Dance religion taught that God would return peace and prosperity to Indian America by causing a deluge to sweep away the Europhone populations after which the ancestors and great herds would be healed and resurrected.   The winter of 1890 found the Sioux people under the leadership of Big Foot confined to their encampment on Wounded Knee Creek by the military power of the United States government.  They were facing death from exposure and starvation, and most were too sick or weak or young or old to go and search for food.  The few able-bodied braved the snow and cold and went to find food and fuel.  The ones who remained behind prayed the Ghost Dance in hopes that the salvation promised by the Prophet of the religion would come before they were all dead. 

            Just before New Year’s Day American troops opened fire on the sick and defenseless worshipers, and an estimated 300 unarmed people barely clinging to life were gunned down with experimental automatic weapons by the United States cavalry.  Toddlers were chased into the brush and shot in the back.  Among soldiers there is an old tradition that demands trophy taking; anything from severed heads to weapons taken from an enemy during a battle seems to be universally desirable.  The American soldiers— more than twenty subsequently received Congressional Medals of Honor for the massacre –stripped the bodies of the Indian dead of anything that might be sold to collectors or institutions and made a little extra income.  To this day, applying the words “Ghost Dance” to an Indian object sends its value soaring, specifically because of the connection with this slaughter of so many defenseless Indian people by the U.S. cavalry.

Included in the price paid by Indian people is one cost not much noticed or worried about outside of the Indian community.  Institutions and private collectors celebrate  the importance of their amassed holdings, yet they seldom mourn for the deleterious effects collecting has had on the Indian side of the equation.  The heartbreaking loss of objects to collections has been felt in Indian communities since the first things were taken away.  The price paid for the loss of these objects and the data they embody is the greatest, aside from the loss of human life, paid by Native communities. 

            There is a more subtle and insidious damage done by collecting so many objects from Indian America than by the conversion of utilitarian objects into simple curiosities or objets d’artes.  Once the objects were collected, they were rendered mute, the volumes of data encoded in their physical bodies now lost to the new owners.  The data was still there, but the ones with the key to understanding were now those with the least access to the objects.

Finally, many collectors have taken actions that removed any foreseeable possibility of return to their communities of origin.  Thousands of the objects in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, for example, have been dusted with arsenic, so that anyone who wants to see these things must wear gloves, gowns, shoe covers, and masks so they will not be poisoned.  Hundreds of beautiful twined baskets from the Northwest Coast peoples were further ruined by being folded in half and flattened to save money on shipping by reducing the volume of the baskets.  These objects are never again to be used as their creators intended.

Identity Data Banks

            All of the material culture objects people surround themselves with are encoded with data.  The data reinforces identity one way or another.  Some objects do not carry enough information or they carry the wrong information and are thus ignored or discarded; other objects we recognize as satisfyingly valid signs of who we are. 

            To understand how much data objects carry, it is useful to employ the concept of “identity value.”  Simply put, “identity value” is the amount of information an object carries that allows a person to know who he or she is.  Typically, we surround ourselves with objects that reinforce our identities; people often want to keep family heirlooms because they have a high degree of identity value.  The more strongly (positive or negative) we feel about an object, the greater its identity value.   Artists infuse identity value into each piece they produce, whether they intend to or not; as each piece becomes suffused with value, it simultaneously begins to function as an “identity data bank.”

             This is apparent when one looks at a basket from California. More than 1700 plants that grow in California are suitable for making baskets; nonetheless, basketmakers limited the number of plants they employed to no more than a dozen.  In fact, most used only three or four plants on a regular basis.  So tightly bound were basketry materials and tribal identity that modern researchers, many of whom are Native Indian people searching for the scattered objects of their foremothers and the data they contain, use materials as a clue to establish the tribal origin of the basket. 

            A good basketmaker knew how to make baskets, not only in the style of her people, but also in the styles of others.  This might occur because a woman would marry into a tribe where she was expected to change her tribal affiliation to that of her husband’s.  She would learn to make baskets in the style of her husband’s people, even though she could already make baskets in the style of her people.  She would be taught how to load the proper identity data into her baskets, through the use of color, form, design, materials, and techniques. 

When a basketmaker produced a basket for someone of a different tribe, as sometimes happened, the basketmaker would use the combination of color, form, design, materials, and techniques appropriate to the tribal affiliation of the intended recipient.  Baskets produced for the non-Indian market had identity data appropriate to the collectors incorporated into them.  For example, basketmakers borrowed designs from Spanish coins in the 1700s, depicted the individual cattle brands of ranching families in the late 1800s, and used hearts from American and European needlework patterns in the 1940s.

            Basketmakers very clearly distinguished between their different markets and adhered to the design rules for that market.  If a basketmaker’s family used only two colors for their daily use baskets and a basketmaker decided that she wanted to use three colors, her mental solvency would most likely be questioned.   No one would be likely to praise her innovative color use; people would simply think she no longer knew who her people were and wonder about her future.  This is really not so unusual.  The same would be thought of a football player who rejected the uniform of his team and wore the colors of the opposing team.  Thus every material culture object is an identity data bank and removal from the community of origin means that data is no longer available to the community. 

History is replete with examples of a dominant culture forcing those of a less dominant culture to replace the material culture objects of their birth culture with those that reference the dominant culture[4].  Indian children, when they were sent off to government schools, were stripped of the things they brought from home; their physical appearance was altered by bobbing their hair and making them wear uniforms; they were punished if they spoke their mother tongue or played games from home.  They were denied identity data that affirmed they were Indian and were surrounded instead with the stuff of America in the hopes that they would somehow become Americans through an imagined process called assimilation.

Most modern Americans’ ancestors came here with the intention of shedding their identity and acquiring a new American one[5].  When they shed their languages, clothing, foods, and housing, religion and economics, that changed everything because with them went a mountain of identity data.  Stepping in to fill the gap, of course, is the globalization strategy, ready to extend a new identity to the self-less.  For this reason, even if the old folks hang onto the language and some favorite foods, the subsequent generations have no trouble becoming “Americanized.” 

Humans, however, have a strong desire to know who they are and to surround themselves with things that reinforce their identity, so most Americans can say of their heritage, “I’m German,” or “I’m Nigerian,” or “I’m Laotian” and point to some reminder.  But how many third generation Americans can speak easily in the language of their ancestors?  The point is that most Americans have been assimilated.  Most don’t resent the assimilation; American Indian people, however, resent the humiliation of hegemony they have suffered.  They were after all, multiple sovereign nations who successfully managed the courses of their own destinies for eons before the appearance of the light- skinned Europhones.

It is easy to understand the frustration felt by Indian people who know that all of the things that hold their identity data have been scattered to the four winds, sold by collectors and traded by public and private collecting institutions to others in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America.  Many modern artists cite the far-flung locations of objects they need to see and examine as a barrier they must overcome to continue their traditions.  Travel is expensive and this adds to the difficulty of visiting the works.

The Nature of the Art of the Western World

Now that we have a basic idea of how Native American material culture objects were lost to their communities of origin and placed into collections, we can begin to talk about their similarities and differences from Western art and the effect Indian America has on modern world and national art markets.

According to Western art historians, art making was born 25,000 years ago when someone carved the oldest known sculptural figure, a female form called the Venus of Willendorf, after the German town where she was found.  Art making really took off, though, when some ancient person/people entered a deep cave in what is now called Lascaux, France, and drew a series of portraits of animals. 

Collectors of European “art” then, believe that before the twentieth century, art was produced in the media of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and print making, exclusively. [6]   Of course, the wealthy of Europe had fine clothes and furniture and books and carriages, but those things were not considered art; neither was pottery nor metalwork.  All of these were considered to be “crafts.” 

Western works of art are not utilitarian objects; they are not meant to serve dinner upon nor to fend off enemies. They are intended to be seen.  This is easily verifiable by looking at any standard Western art-history text and looking at the art forms discussed there.   The more modern, open-minded volumes include photography and computer-generated art under the rubric of new media.  But, typically, the old standards are still based in the discussion of forms that have no utility beyond propaganda[7], except, of course, in the case of architecture.

The distinction between “art” and “craft” is a very subtle but rigid and important one and depends less on the quality of work produced than on the gender and ethnicity of the artist, the materials the artist uses, and the intended end use of the object.  The idea that there are “rules” of a sort for determining if a thing is art or craft is historically Western and based in class and privilege.  It implies a class of people so wealthy they can surround themselves with things that serve no purpose other than to be looked at. 

Some might argue that occasionally the preciousness of the materials would elevate a “crafted” object to the status of  “work of art,” as in the case of the egg-shaped cache boxes made from cast and beaten gold and both filled and encrusted with precious stones by Fabergé for the Russian royal family.  It can be debated whether the Fabergé eggs are craft or actually miniature sculptures, but, in general, the term “art” is reserved for use with drawings, paintings, statues, or prints. 

The Western distinction between art and craft then is not based in the internal processes of the artist.  It is not based in the thoughtful reflective processes of the artist, nor in the ability of artists to express with their hands what their minds envision.  This is ironic because it is the internal creative processes of Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin that are so much admired for having given life to paintings that reflect and represent these inner processes.

The distinction between art and craft in the Western world is market driven, that is, an object’s status is determined by the identity it is given and the subsequent place it occupies in the world of objects offered for sale.  Its worth is based on a classification system that assigns higher relative value to objects produced by men and particularly by light-skinned men of European ancestry.  The moral character of the man certainly has nothing to do with the value of the art.  Gauguin, for example, was a known syphilitic pedophile who single-handedly brought enormous misery and suffering to the children and families of the people of Tahiti.  In Tahiti this is still remembered, but this is not taught in art schools, and most collectors do not consider his moral character related to the value of his paintings.

The Nature of the Art of the Native American Indian World

There has always been a market for Native North American Indian crafted objects.  Craft specialization[8] was a given in every community in the Americas.  Before the arrival of the Europhones, the trade networks in America were vast and covered nearly every inch of the hemisphere.  The objects created and traded had utilitarian value of one sort or another.  None were made with display as the only purpose for their existence.  Each had a functional utility; it is fair to say that nothing was made or fashioned without a purpose in mind.

Long before the Europeans came to the Americas, Indian women made baskets for sale and trade to the surrounding tribes. Never using the style of her own tribe, the basketmaker would copy the style of the tribe of the intended recipient.  Thousands of baskets were made specifically to sell to collectors across America as wastebaskets or storage containers for hairpins to raise cash for Indian families; the basketmakers, knowing they would never see these baskets again, often coded them with data appropriate to their intended audience by adorning them with cattle brands and designs from magazines they thought would appeal to the Europhones.

The thing that was different in Indian America was that there was no concept of art as a separate activity or an object’s sole value resting in its visual appeal.  In the Western world, we have developed a culture that makes sharp divisions between art, business, church, and state.  Whatever divisions existed within Indian America, the idea of acting in a non-prayerful way or making an object less than perfectly were never among those divisions.  If a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well and with good spirit.

Most American Indian world views presumed that the people were living in the now; many languages have no words for yesterday, tomorrow, one o’clock, later, and after a while.   The people understood the importance of living in the now, in the moment.  After all, the only place we can exist is the now; we are not living in the future or the past if we are mentally healthy.

One way modern Americans can imagine how this would work in daily life is to imagine that today is the only day of your life and what you do and produce today will be used to represent who you are to the rest of the world.  What would people think of you? A few folks, put in this position, might laugh and be happy to be known as clowns; a few more couldn’t care less how they are represented; but it is fair to say that most people have enough personal pride to hope that they would leave a good enough impression to be taken seriously.  They would work carefully, thoughtfully, with respect and dignity, so that what they produce would be esteemed with the same high regard they reserve for themselves.  It is difficult for most of us to imagine a world where everyone works with high regard for themselves and their task, as a rule.

One of the things an artist hopes to do is reach a particular creative “zone” while working.  This zone is well known to athletes, where perception is altered and a certain clarity of thought is possible, or rather thought is no longer required, per se, to accomplish the activity, for the focus has turned inward.  During this time, the creative energy of the artist flows smoothly, and the work proceeds with a certain ease that is captured in the finished product, especially if the artist has fully mastered the materials. 

The high regard with which life is given to an object or more precisely form is given to a thought reinforces that this is not something to be undertaken lightly or carelessly, and this is perhaps why the range of items that get classified as art objects by collectors is, at first glance, truly curious.  Paintings and sculptures, to be sure, are considered art, but a whole universe of mundane objects is also considered “art.”  A short list of such things includes backrests, back scratchers, bed linens, boats, bows and arrows, calendars, clothing, cooking pots, cradles, decoys, dolls, fishing gear, netting shuttles, shoes, storage containers, and tools of all sorts.  A long list would probably include every single thing ever made by an Indian person, especially if the thing is from the archaic (pre 1492) or historic (1492- 1890) period.

The Western art world’s acceptance of such a wide range of media as art from Indian people is due in part to the historic museum collecting/diorama craze that sent anthropologists and traders flocking to the Indian communities of America, hungry for whatever they could find that was authentically Indian.

Economics is also a strong impetus for the categorization of a back scratcher as art.   Since art always costs more than back scratchers or clubs for killing fish, one sure way to increase the value of a mundane object is to include it in a museum collection and place it on public display; publishing information about and photos of the object will further increase its value.  

Another technique for adjusting the value of an object is to reassign its use to a more “glamorous” arena.  For example, a club used to kill a salmon has much less sales cache in America and Europe than a “war club” or “slave killer.”  American collectors are particularly known for their love of war-related objects.  Thus a new art market was born that persists to this day. 

The world art market, in all of its diverse forms, treats American Indian art differently than the works produced by artists of the Western world.  Further, the world art market values, or rather devalues, American Indian works of art quite differently than the artworks of Europe.  Although some may argue that this is changing, the dissimilarity is still globally apparent in museums, galleries and sweatshops, as well as in the strip malls, courtrooms, and classrooms of America.  The reasons for this are many, but all stem from the prevailing notions non-Indians have about Indian people.  Our discussion of American Indian art then, begins with an effort to understand these stereotypes and the cultural conditions that fostered their formation.  That story can be traced to events that occurred more than five centuries ago.

The Birth of a Stereotype

Six hundred years ago, the pressure was on in Europe.  The fresh water sources were so polluted that touching water was equivalent to infecting oneself; personal hygiene among the wealthy was replaced with perfumes—heavily scented sterile alcohols.  People drank beers and ales rather than water because the brewing process sterilized the beverages.  The deforested landscape, overpopulated and overburdened by man and domestic beast, could no longer produce enough to keep pace with the hunger of the poor. 

Disease, crime, and poverty were the lot of the majority of Europeans, but those who were not victims of privation enjoyed a life of unparalleled luxury, even though many suffered from the physical effects of generations of marriages to close relatives as a way to maintain their wealth and position. 

This was the way it was in the 1500s in Europe when the bored (weren’t they also disenfranchised to the extent that those who didn’t go into the church or inherit land were left with nothing and thus free and even desperate to jump on a ship?  I’m saying perhaps it wasn’t just boredom.)  children of the filthy rich took to the oceans of the world to go exploring.  The things these travelers saw were far more amazing than they ever anticipated, and this created a sort of cognitive dissonance between what they believed and the realities they perceived for themselves.  Western ideas about American Indian people and art are rooted in this dissonance, which has resolved itself only slightly for most non-Indians. 

            What did these travelers believe?  Simply, that they were the crowning jewel, the epitome, of creation.  Proof of this would be offered in the 1530s by religious philosopher and lawyer, turned minister, John Calvin who saw wealth in the hands of the “elect” as manifest proof of God’s favor and authors like Francis Galton, who in the later 1800s, pointed to the ability of the wealthy of Europe to hang onto position and money as physical evidence not only of superiority but of genius.[9]

            They believed that there was no more obvious or validating sign of God’s favor than possessing the wherewithal to set out upon the seas on mercenary, pirating, pleasure, and educational voyages, where one could examine not only the cradle of their own civilization, but the faraway lands of “mysterious” peoples.  Once visited, the peoples of these lands were judged, by the Christian-educated, European ruling class, as heathen and “savage,” which literally meant what the word “wild” means today – indicating a people outside of the influence of the “civilizing” governmental and economic forces, languages, religions, and other systems of social control known to Europeans. 

            What did the travelers perceive?  Arguably, the most elaborate, rich and finely wrought material culture[10] in the world.  Every skill had practitioners who elevated their technical and esthetic ability to the highest possible level, producing unparalleled work in shell, feather, stone, metal, and hide as well as masterworks of watercraft, basketry, ceramic, textiles, sculpture, books, paintings, drawings, and architecture. 

            The quality and quantity of fine work was equal to or exceeded that of any other place in the world. Atahualpa, the Incan Emperor, had life-size, solid-gold models cast of all of the animals that inhabited the Incan lands as well as a full-length cloak made of small square plates of beaten gold interlocked with golden rings.  The Aztecs, at the time of European contact, had developed a fabulously wealthy culture where the well heeled wore some of the most finely manufactured and embellished garments the world has ever seen.  Mexican libraries held hundreds of thousands of volumes in the 1530s.

            What did the travelers retrieve?  Expeditions of discovery and pleasure became common, but more nefarious voyages were underway, too.  Other branches of these royal or merchant families were involved in the exploitation of these “mysterious” populations and the extraction of their resources.  Like their relatives on pleasure cruises, the Europhones marveled at the things they saw and brought many away with them–taking them home to show those who had stayed behind and who would never believe the verbal descriptions of what was encountered in these far off-lands. These other members of the family were busy looting and pillaging any and everything that they could put aboard their ships.  Nothing, including people, was spared. 

            The books of America were all burned, but the gold and silver were melted and otherwise organized into units for transport to the treasuries of Europe.  Some ships carrying the wealth of the Americas sank; tales of their unrecovered riches spawn television adventure shows and get-rich-quick stories.  Others ships made the voyage across the Atlantic, laden with wealth Jack Weatherford says knocked the bottom out of both the African gold market and the Chinese silver market by flooding the economy of Europe with more wealth than they could ever have imagined.   More than 12 million Indians died laboring to remove gold and silver from the Americas so the churches of Europe could become gilded and the children of the wealthy could sail the world on voyages of education and discovery.

            What did the travelers conceive?  Europhone contact gave birth to drastic change in the number and variety of goods produced that can be measured in three ways.  First, whole new forms with new functions were created, as in the case of the North American Great Plains, where the reappearance and subsequent domestication of the horse prompted an explosion of new types of material culture objects, such as saddle blankets, saddle bags, and riding whips.  Another locus of inventiveness was the intersection of Native skills and European traditions that produced walrus-tusk cribbage boards in the Arctic, quilled chair backs in the Northeast, and clay oil lamps in Southern California.   

            Second, the impact of contact can be measured in the appearance and disappearance of materials from the American artists’ works.  Glass beads were unknown in America before contact, but after contact they begin to appear worked into garments, bags, pipe stems and so forth.  Account books, also called ledgers, were adopted by Plains artists to replace the plentiful hides once used to record history. Likewise, certain materials and forms may have disappeared altogether or were reduced in variety and number—the number of dyed porcupine quills worked into baskets, ear rings and moccasins has dropped dramatically since first contact.

Third, the impact is also reflected in a reduction in the production of art forms overall as the deaths of artists and their teachers mounted.  The deaths were due to murder and massacre of Indian men, women, and children, but most deaths were caused by the transmission of many contagious illnesses[11] of Western origin that attacked the vulnerable immune systems of most Indian people. 

            Disease is a great equalizer in that it does not recognize position or wealth; it only knows immunity or lack of immunity.  Of course immunity was an undiscovered concept in Europe and the deaths of huge numbers of Native Americans were interpreted by Europhones as the Christian God’s affirmation of the superiority of the Europeans.  Some Europhones died from these diseases, to be sure, but the percentage of Europhone deaths from viral and bacterial illnesses was negligible when compared to that of the Indian peoples where, in some cases, whole tribal groups were wiped out within three or four generations. Much knowledge was lost because people, the main repository for information, died and took the information with them. 

            But do not think that all was lost.  Individuals were able to collectively rebuild their communities in ways that embodied the ancient traditions, as always, adapted to the changeable nature of reality and the needs of the remaining Native people.

Collecting Curiosities

The wondrous things produced in the Americas amazed the Europhones, but on some level they understood that the objects meant very little, except as curiosities, when they were taken out of context.  What they really wanted was to recreate the feeling of the worlds they had visited, even if they had to do it in miniature.  Toward this end they built windowless rooms lined with shelves, called vunderkammer (literally “wonder cabinet”). Here they kept their “curiosities,” the naturally occurring items or material culture objects that had caused them to experience the cognitive dissonance we call wonder.  Thus was born, not only the ancestor of the modern “curio” cabinet but also of the modern museum; after several centuries of continued “collecting,” these curiosities really began to pile up around the castles.  Many needed special care to protect them from mold, insect infestation and the like.  The wealthy of Europe began to understand what it was going to cost them to keep their curiosities.

            The European interest in curiosities as things to be appreciated instead of shunned was transferred to the Americas with the Europhone immigrants.  They collected the skulls and objects that they unearthed from Indian graves.  The idea that these items were taken from graves is a very important point because it indicates two things about the attitude of the Europeans regarding American Indian objects of all sorts.

            Foremost, they believed, as do many modern Americans, in the validity of the concept expressed by the child’s taunt, “finders keepers; losers weepers”—the notion that anything unguarded can be taken fairly by anyone who comes upon it.  Second, it demonstrates the relative ease with which Europhones interacted with the bones of the dead.  In one such case, a skull unearthed in the central Woodlands has been passed from generation to generation in the same family since at least the 1850s.  Today, the skull sits in a library bookcase in the family home in central California, with little hope of repatriation.

            As repositories of curiosities, public museums are only about 100 years old, and they resulted from the release of private goods to public institutions.  Primarily they are based on the collections of individuals.  The Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum at the University of California at Berkeley, for example, began as the personal collection of the Hearst family and is now a public collection in the care of the University. 

            The new Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., began when the privately owned holdings of the collection of the George Gustav Heye Museum were transferred to the publicly owned collections of the Smithsonian Institution in 1989.   The Heye Museum had fallen on hard financial times, and the collection was in danger of total ruination, as water leaking through the roof became a serious threat.  The point is that the collections became too expensive for individuals to maintain and rather than lose them to ruin, many were donated to institutions, cities, counties, states, and even to the federal government.

            So, how did the objects in the Heye Museum and the Hearst Museum get collected in the first place?  Most cornerstones of museum and private collections are objects procured directly from Indian people.  Before 1900, the populations of American cities wanted interesting things to do, and the first museums opened their doors to rave reviews.  Among these first museums was one in New York City privately owned by P. T. Barnum, which he eventually took on the road under the name of “circus.”  Newly created public museums, too, were eager to draw crowds through their turnstiles, and the museums’ directors ordered their curatorial staffs to recreate, for the public, the feeling of being in an archaic Native American setting. 

            This spawned a collecting frenzy among individuals and institutions desiring to create “dioramas,” specifically, three-dimensional reproductions, using mannequins, of an archaic Native American event, usually something mundane, exhibiting the material culture objects acquired from a particular group.  They were full-scale displays that included hundreds of objects “bought” in Indian communities across America.  It was important to collectors that the objects be original and filled with data, for it was the data encoded within the object that made it valuable. 

            Some apologists would point to the money paid to Indians for their things to justify the holdings of American Indian art.  Until ten years ago, only a small number of Indian artists received fair value for their work; the count is now a small number plus a handful.  Before ten years ago, the purchases of those objects that were bought “fairly” were most often coerced or extorted purchases, at prices substantially less than the real value of the object.  The sellers were often near refugees but more often complete refugees on the verge of starvation and death from exposure in their own lands; the objects were essentially looted from the near dead.  The buyers were pleased with their “bargain” prices.

            Perhaps as important as what collectors wanted were the kinds of things they didn’t want.  They wanted objects that supported the stereotypes they sold to the public, so when the “authentic” Indian objects ran out in communities, the collectors went away.  They left behind the objects that showed the ugly reality of Indian life at the turn-of-the twentieth century.  They didn’t want the cast-off objects of Western origin salvaged by Indian people and used to replace the objects collected away by the wealthy and powerful.  The public didn’t want to see the tin cans used to replace the plates and bowls shipped away nor did they want to see their own cast-off clothing that Indian people wore.  The public, and therefore the institutions, were not interested in portraying the suffering of living Indian people, only in using objects to maintain stereotypes that the public found easy to believe.

The Indian Price Tag

It is important to understand that many objects were gained by foul means of one sort or another.  Many things in museum collections were acquired from burials, taken through “grave robbing.”  While we might personally look down on the activity of grave robbing, most Americans certainly are fascinated by the idea of finding buried “treasure,” and a significant number have achieved fame, made fortunes, and built careers by “exploring” and/or “excavating” Indian burials.  The rightful Indian owners were seldom given the right-of-first-refusal to move their ancestors out of the way of the juggernaut of progress nor were they compensated for the seizure and removal of these burial objects.

            Like the grave pilferers, collectors who worked among the living paid little attention to legal or moral title, and they made virtually no effort to determine if the rightful owner of an object was the seller.  Stewart Cullin and Constance Goddard DuBois, who collected for different museums at the turn of the century, each document Indian people begging them to return some object that should never have been sold; in each case the collector turned down the tearful Indian petitioners, saying, “A deal is a deal.”  Cullin went so far as to have the woman who begged for the return of a basket arrested, when she resorted to theft after he refused to sell the basket back to her.

            Most dumbfounding is how “Ghost Dance”-related objects have entered collections.  The Ghost Dance religion taught that God would return peace and prosperity to Indian America by causing a deluge to sweep away the Europhone populations after which the ancestors and great herds would be healed and resurrected.   The winter of 1890 found the Sioux people under the leadership of Big Foot confined to their encampment on Wounded Knee Creek by the military power of the United States government.  They were facing death from exposure and starvation, and most were too sick or weak or young or old to go and search for food.  The few able-bodied braved the snow and cold and went to find food and fuel.  The ones who remained behind prayed the Ghost Dance in hopes that the salvation promised by the Prophet of the religion would come before they were all dead. 

            Just before New Year’s Day American troops opened fire on the sick and defenseless worshipers, and an estimated 300 unarmed people barely clinging to life were gunned down with experimental automatic weapons by the United States cavalry.  Toddlers were chased into the brush and shot in the back.  Among soldiers there is an old tradition that demands trophy taking; anything from severed heads to weapons taken from an enemy during a battle seems to be universally desirable.  The American soldiers— more than twenty subsequently received Congressional Medals of Honor for the massacre –stripped the bodies of the Indian dead of anything that might be sold to collectors or institutions and made a little extra income.  To this day, applying the words “Ghost Dance” to an Indian object sends its value soaring, specifically because of the connection with this slaughter of so many defenseless Indian people by the U.S. cavalry.

Included in the price paid by Indian people is one cost not much noticed or worried about outside of the Indian community.  Institutions and private collectors celebrate (to themselves isn’t this a bit awkward and unnecessary?) the importance of their amassed holdings, yet they seldom mourn for the deleterious effects collecting has had on the Indian side of the equation.  The heartbreaking loss of objects to collections has been felt in Indian communities since the first things were taken away.  The price paid for the loss of these objects and the data they embody is the greatest, aside from the loss of human life, paid by Native communities. 

            There is a more subtle and insidious damage done by collecting so many objects from Indian America than by the conversion of utilitarian objects into simple curiosities or objets d’artes.  Once the objects were collected, they were rendered mute, the volumes of data encoded in their physical bodies now lost to the new owners.  The data was still there, but the ones with the key to understanding were now those with the least access to the objects.

Finally, many collectors have taken actions that removed any foreseeable possibility of return to their communities of origin.  Thousands of the objects in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, for example, have been dusted with arsenic, so that anyone who wants to see these things must wear gloves, gowns, shoe covers, and masks so they will not be poisoned.  Hundreds of beautiful twined baskets from the Northwest Coast peoples were further ruined by being folded in half and flattened to save money on shipping by reducing the volume of the baskets.  These objects are never again to be used as their creators intended.

Identity Data Banks

            All of the material culture objects people surround themselves with are encoded with data.  The data reinforces identity one way or another.  Some objects do not carry enough information or they carry the wrong information and are thus ignored or discarded; other objects we recognize as satisfyingly valid signs of who we are. 

            To understand how much data objects carry, it is useful to employ the concept of “identity value.”  Simply put, “identity value” is the amount of information an object carries that allows a person to know who he or she is.  Typically, we surround ourselves with objects that reinforce our identities; people often want to keep family heirlooms because they have a high degree of identity value.  The more strongly (positive or negative) we feel about an object, the greater its identity value.   Artists infuse identity value into each piece they produce, whether they intend to or not; as each piece becomes suffused with value, it simultaneously begins to function as an “identity data bank.”

             This is apparent when one looks at a basket from California. More than 1700 plants that grow in California are suitable for making baskets; nonetheless, basketmakers limited the number of plants they employed to no more than a dozen.  In fact, most used only three or four plants on a regular basis.  So tightly bound were basketry materials and tribal identity that modern researchers, many of whom are Native Indian people searching for the scattered objects of their foremothers and the data they contain, use materials as a clue to establish the tribal origin of the basket. 

            A good basketmaker knew how to make baskets, not only in the style of her people, but also in the styles of others.  This might occur because a woman would marry into a tribe where she was expected to change her tribal affiliation to that of her husband’s.  She would learn to make baskets in the style of her husband’s people, even though she could already make baskets in the style of her people.  She would be taught how to load the proper identity data into her baskets, through the use of color, form, design, materials, and techniques. 

When a basketmaker produced a basket for someone of a different tribe, as sometimes happened, the basketmaker would use the combination of color, form, design, materials, and techniques appropriate to the tribal affiliation of the intended recipient.  Baskets produced for the non-Indian market had identity data appropriate to the collectors incorporated into them.  For example, basketmakers borrowed designs from Spanish coins in the 1700s, depicted the individual cattle brands of ranching families in the late 1800s, and used hearts from American and European needlework patterns in the 1940s.

            Basketmakers very clearly distinguished between their different markets and adhered to the design rules for that market.  If a basketmaker’s family used only two colors for their daily use baskets and a basketmaker decided that she wanted to use three colors, her mental solvency would most likely be questioned.   No one would be likely to praise her innovative color use; people would simply think she no longer knew who her people were and wonder about her future.  This is really not so unusual.  The same would be thought of a football player who rejected the uniform of his team and wore the colors of the opposing team.  Thus every material culture object is an identity data bank and removal from the community of origin means that data is no longer available to the community. 

History is replete with examples of a dominant culture forcing those of a less dominant culture to replace the material culture objects of their birth culture with those that reference the dominant culture[12].  Indian children, when they were sent off to government schools, were stripped of the things they brought from home; their physical appearance was altered by bobbing their hair and making them wear uniforms; they were punished if they spoke their mother tongue or played games from home.  They were denied identity data that affirmed they were Indian and were surrounded instead with the stuff of America in the hopes that they would somehow become Americans through an imagined process called assimilation.

Most modern Americans’ ancestors came here with the intention of shedding their identity and acquiring a new American one[13].  When they shed their languages, clothing, foods, and housing, religion and economics, that changed everything because with them went a mountain of identity data.  Stepping in to fill the gap, of course, is the globalization strategy, ready to extend a new identity to the self-less.  For this reason, even if the old folks hang onto the language and some favorite foods, the subsequent generations have no trouble becoming “Americanized.” 

Humans, however, have a strong desire to know who they are and to surround themselves with things that reinforce their identity, so most Americans can say of their heritage, “I’m German,” or “I’m Nigerian,” or “I’m Laotian” and point to some reminder.  But how many third generation Americans can speak easily in the language of their ancestors?  The point is that most Americans have been assimilated.  Most don’t resent the assimilation; American Indian people, however, resent the humiliation of hegemony they have suffered.  They were after all, multiple sovereign nations who successfully managed the courses of their own destinies for eons before the appearance of the light- skinned Europhones.

It is easy to understand the frustration felt by Indian people who know that all of the things that hold their identity data have been scattered to the four winds, sold by collectors and traded by public and private collecting institutions to others in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America.  Many modern artists cite the far-flung locations of objects they need to see and examine as a barrier they must overcome to continue their traditions.  Travel is expensive and this adds to the difficulty of visiting the works.

The Nature of the Art of the Western World

Now that we have a basic idea of how Native American material culture objects were lost to their communities of origin and placed into collections, we can begin to talk about their similarities and differences from Western art and the effect Indian America has on modern world and national art markets.

According to Western art historians, art making was born 25,000 years ago when someone carved the oldest known sculptural figure, a female form called the Venus of Willendorf, after the German town where she was found.  Art making really took off, though, when some ancient person/people entered a deep cave in what is now called Lascaux, France, and drew a series of portraits of animals. 

Collectors of European “art” then, believe that before the twentieth century, art was produced in the media of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and print making, exclusively. [14]   Of course, the wealthy of Europe had fine clothes and furniture and books and carriages, but those things were not considered art; neither was pottery nor metalwork.  All of these were considered to be “crafts.” 

Western works of art are not utilitarian objects; they are not meant to serve dinner upon nor to fend off enemies. They are intended to be seen.  This is easily verifiable by looking at any standard Western art-history text and looking at the art forms discussed there.   The more modern, open-minded volumes include photography and computer-generated art under the rubric of new media.  But, typically, the old standards are still based in the discussion of forms that have no utility beyond propaganda[15], except, of course, in the case of architecture.

The distinction between “art” and “craft” is a very subtle but rigid and important one and depends less on the quality of work produced than on the gender and ethnicity of the artist, the materials the artist uses, and the intended end use of the object.  The idea that there are “rules” of a sort for determining if a thing is art or craft is historically Western and based in class and privilege.  It implies a class of people so wealthy they can surround themselves with things that serve no purpose other than to be looked at. 

Some might argue that occasionally the preciousness of the materials would elevate a “crafted” object to the status of  “work of art,” as in the case of the egg-shaped cache boxes made from cast and beaten gold and both filled and encrusted with precious stones by Fabergé for the Russian royal family.  It can be debated whether the Fabergé eggs are craft or actually miniature sculptures, but, in general, the term “art” is reserved for use with drawings, paintings, statues, or prints. 

The Western distinction between art and craft then is not based in the internal processes of the artist.  It is not based in the thoughtful reflective processes of the artist, nor in the ability of artists to express with their hands what their minds envision.  This is ironic because it is the internal creative processes of Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin that are so much admired for having given life to paintings that reflect and represent these inner processes.

The distinction between art and craft in the Western world is market driven, that is, an object’s status is determined by the identity it is given and the subsequent place it occupies in the world of objects offered for sale.  Its worth is based on a classification system that assigns higher relative value to objects produced by men and particularly by light-skinned men of European ancestry.  The moral character of the man certainly has nothing to do with the value of the art.  Gauguin, for example, was a known syphilitic pedophile who single-handedly brought enormous misery and suffering to the children and families of the people of Tahiti.  In Tahiti this is still remembered, but this is not taught in art schools.

The Nature of the Art of the Native American Indian World

There has always been a market for Native North American Indian crafted objects.  Craft specialization[16] was a given in every community in the Americas.  Before the arrival of the Europhones, the trade networks in America were vast and covered nearly every inch of the hemisphere.  The objects created and traded had utilitarian value of one sort or another.  None were made with display as the only purpose for their existence.  Each had a functional utility; it is fair to say that nothing was made or fashioned without a purpose in mind.

Long before the Europeans came to the Americas, Indian women made baskets for sale and trade to the surrounding tribes. Never using the style of her own tribe, the basketmaker would copy the style of the tribe of the intended recipient.  Thousands of baskets were made specifically to sell to collectors across America as wastebaskets or storage containers for hairpins to raise cash for Indian families; the basketmakers, knowing they would never see these baskets again, often coded them with data appropriate to their intended audience by adorning them with cattle brands and designs from magazines they thought would appeal to the Europhones.

The thing that was different in Indian America was that there was no concept of art as a separate activity or an object’s sole value resting in its visual appeal.  In the Western world, we have developed a culture that makes sharp divisions between art, business, church, and state.  Whatever divisions existed within Indian America, the idea of acting in a non-prayerful way or making an object less than perfectly were never among those divisions.  If a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well and with good spirit.

Most American Indian world views presumed that the people were living in the now; many languages have no words for yesterday, tomorrow, one o’clock, later, and after a while.   The people understood the importance of living in the now, in the moment.  After all, the only place we can exist is the now; we are not living in the future or the past if we are mentally healthy.

One way modern Americans can imagine how this would work in daily life is to imagine that today is the only day of your life and what you do and produce today will be used to represent who you are to the rest of the world.  What would people think of you? A few folks, put in this position, might laugh and be happy to be known as clowns; a few more couldn’t care less how they are represented; but it is fair to say that most people have enough personal pride to hope that they would leave a good enough impression to be taken seriously.  They would work carefully, thoughtfully, with respect and dignity, so that what they produce would be esteemed with the same high regard they reserve for themselves.  It is difficult for most of us to imagine a world where everyone works with high regard for themselves and their task, as a rule.

One of the things an artist hopes to do is reach a particular creative “zone” while working.  This zone is well known to athletes, where perception is altered and a certain clarity of thought is possible, or rather thought is no longer required, per se, to accomplish the activity, for the focus has turned inward.  During this time, the creative energy of the artist flows smoothly, and the work proceeds with a certain ease that is captured in the finished product, especially if the artist has fully mastered the materials. 

The high regard with which life is given to an object or more precisely form is given to a thought reinforces that this is not something to be undertaken lightly or carelessly, and this is perhaps why the range of items that get classified as art objects by collectors is, at first glance, truly curious.  Paintings and sculptures, to be sure, are considered art, but a whole universe of mundane objects is also considered “art.”  A short list of such things includes backrests, back scratchers, bed linens, boats, bows and arrows, calendars, clothing, cooking pots, cradles, decoys, dolls, fishing gear, netting shuttles, shoes, storage containers, and tools of all sorts.  A long list would probably include every single thing ever made by an Indian person, especially if the thing is from the archaic (pre 1492) or historic (1492- 1890) period.

The Western art world’s acceptance of such a wide range of media as art from Indian people is due in part to the historic museum collecting/diorama craze that sent anthropologists and traders flocking to the Indian communities of America, hungry for whatever they could find that was authentically Indian.

Economics is also a strong impetus for the categorization of a back scratcher as art.   Since art always costs more than back scratchers or clubs for killing fish, one sure way to increase the value of a mundane object is to include it in a museum collection and place it on public display; publishing information about and photos of the object will further increase its value.  

Another technique for adjusting the value of an object is to reassign its use to a more “glamorous” arena.  For example, a club used to kill a salmon has much less sales cache in America and Europe than a “war club” or “slave killer.”  American collectors are particularly known for their love of war-related objects.  Thus a new art market was born that persists to this day.

The Survival of Modern Indian Art

            The challenges facing living and future Indian artists are enormous.  Oren Lyons, an Onondaga Chief, once used the metaphor of going down a river with one foot in each of two canoes to describe Indian interaction with the Western world; he pointed to how tricky it is to keep one’s balance and stay on one’s feet while traveling in two canoes.  This can be used as an appropriate metaphor for describing the multiple challenges facing Indian artists.

The first obstacle facing modern artists is to find a teacher to instruct them in the old techniques.  Compare the number of classes offered at institutions of higher learning in American Indian art history and Euro-American/Western art history; some schools still do not offer anything but Western art history.  Then, look at the programs where students learn how to make art, and you will see that while there are many programs that teach how to paint on canvas, paper, and board, there is virtually no one teaching feather work, wooden-bow making, or rug weaving in any style. 

            Another set of problems facing Indian artists revolves around having an Indian identity.   The art market demands that Indian art contain the stereotypical imagery that buyers expect.  In other words, if an Indian artist wants to paint skyscrapers and computers or even abstract designs their work will seldom be sold under the label of Indian art.  The standard for Indian art is that the imagery must contain signs of “Indianness,” such as feathers, wolves or Indian princesses, recognizable to even the most uneducated collector.  Works that do not contain these tokens of Indianness are usually not shown or relegated to the back of the gallery. 

Even if an Indian artist can break through this barrier, others, like Federal law await them.  The Indian Arts and Crafts Act signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in November 1990 was designed to protect Indian artists from cheap imitations from Asia and Indonesia, and from unscrupulous non-Indians who posed as Indian artists.

Simply, the law says that any artist who sells their art under the label of “Indian art” must be an enrolled Indian.  Seems simple, doesn’t it?  It is, until you consider that the legal status of Indians is controlled by the federal government and is based on the listing of Indian peoples’ names as set down by the government recorders.

 If a family was present during this recording period, they were considered to be “enrolled Indians.”  If a family was not in town on the day that the list was made, even though they may not have a single non-Indian ancestor, they were not enrolled and lost their legal status as Indian.  In other cases entire tribes were legally “terminated” and lost their Indian identity as far as the government was concerned. 

The law does allow a loophole, but it is not a loophole that all can squeeze through.  If an unenrolled Indian wants to show their work under the label of Indian art, they must find an elder willing to certify their Indianness. 

            Although, the challenges are many and the struggles will continue, there is good reason for optimism when considering the future of American Indian art.  The Indian population of America is again increasing.  This is a critical thing because it means that there are more Indian people to advocate for solutions to these problems.  It also holds the promise that Indian people will one day be sufficiently credentialed to teach American Indian art history and production techniques in our schools.  They now have the potential to attend classes in museum studies and become curators of Indian collections.  Finally, Indian people are making great strides toward the control of the publishing industry that produces the art books that make and break artists’ careers. 

This development points to the strength and resilience of Indian culture and stands as a testimony to the viability of Indian art as a genre of its own.  As Indian people take greater control of their artistic future we can expect that the work will only become stronger and that left in Indian hands the future of Indian art looks very promising indeed.