Traders and collectors long defined Native art. Young artists want to reclaim their vision

Liz Romero had purchased a selection of beaded wallets from a Native wholesaler, planning to sell them in her small art shop and display some of them at a local powwow in October. She had been assured they were authentic, the work of Native artists.

But they were bogus, counterfeit. Romero got the bad news at the powwow from several people who saw the items, including the chairman of her own tribe, the Redding Rancheria in northern California. She immediately removed the wallets from her table.

Romero buys handmade items from Native artists across the West and she'd bought these — the wallets, some earrings and necklaces — from a Native artist from Bloomfield, New Mexico.

“I never thought to question him on the wallets,” she said.

Romero did some research and found that the wallets, offered for sale on Amazon, are made by Indians, but not from the U.S. — from India. Adding insult to injury, the Amazon wallets were priced at $35, and she said she paid $70 to the purported artist.

Romero said the earrings she accepted as authentic turned out to be offered on Temu, another aggregator site.

She told her story on Facebook and refunded buyers of the counterfeit items, absorbed the cost and placed them in a section of her store reserved for imported and non-Native-made items.

“The sad part,” she said, “is that my little business thrives off a good deal or a purchase that would make me money and this is the second time someone’s got me.”

What happened to Romero happens often to Native artists, many of whom rely on sales of their creations to put food on the table, pay for gas and utilities and clothes on their kids’ backs.

But contending with the tsunami of cheaper, fraudulent art is just one challenge in a world where Native artists must navigate a knot of sellers, dealers, museum operators and other gatekeepers who have long tried to define Native art, pushing artists to make what sells.

Apache artist Douglas Miles calls it the “Native American Industrial Arts Complex,” which is currently locked in a struggle between the natural growth of arts over the years and the pressure on Indian artists to continue producing salable, traditional pieces — even if it's not the art they want to make.

The quiet revolution spreading across Indian Country’s art world

From kitchen tables strewn with beads, basketry materials or wood shavings, to Laguna Pueblo artist Pat Pruitt’s huge studio packed with computers loaded with graphics software, CNC milling machines, drills, lathes and welding equipment, some artists question how their art is perceived by collectors, galleries, museums and the public.

They ask how the art scene evolved to where it is now and why so many artists don’t have the same regard and access to mainstream galleries and museums as their non-Indigenous peers. At the same time, they’re dealing with a flood of counterfeit pieces that undercut their prices and their incomes.

Artists question why gatekeepers, primarily non-Indians, dictate what is shown in museums and offered on shop shelves. They increasingly ask who determines what is “art” versus “craft.” And they chafe at lingering ideas among some in the business about whether art is “Indian enough.” Some artists’ work was initially rejected for this reason.

Some are moving toward marketing and presenting art through new venues such as direct marketing, supported by some nonprofit arts and entrepreneur support groups.

Others continue using the market-museum-gallery circuit because they have bills to pay and kids to put through college, or simply because it’s the path they know and are comfortable with.

They also question the integrity of some longtime non-Indian businesses like the well-known Gilbert Ortega shops. Native artists winced two years ago when Gilbert Ortega Jr. accosted Native performers in front of his store in Old Town Scottsdale, Arizona, during a Super Bowl promotion.

But a growing number of artists are moving away from these traditional pathways to carve their own roads to success.

Artists such as Pruitt, photographer Cara Romero, multimedia artist Anna Tsouhlarakis and the Katoney brothers — weaver Marlowe and Yancey, a muralist and tattoo artist — wield ever-evolving materials and techniques to create new forms or reinterpret old forms and motifs. They are bursting through the “box” of what some collectors, curators and more traditional artists believe Indigenous art should fit into.

And at least one, Passamaquoddy basketmaker Jeremy Frey, literally set the box ablaze, emerging to achieve international acclaim.

From ‘no word for art’ to one of Indian Country’s biggest industries

At the Heard Museum in Phoenix last March, artists unloaded beadwork and baskets, paintings, pottery and photography, jewelry, stone and wood sculptures, textiles and delicate works in glass.

Artists or consigners completed entry forms while workers ensured each piece or set was in one of eight categories, ready for judges to examine, discuss and sometimes dissect that evening.

It was juried competition day at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, the country’s second-largest Indigenous arts showplace.

Each artist had applied in advance with detailed photos of their work to be adjudicated. Once they passed, they paid a booth fee ranging from $250 to $1,200. With travel and lodging costs, artists often pony up as much as $3,000 for a two-day window to show their works and make enough money to last until the next market.

Winning a ribbon, and the check that goes with it — the top prize this year was $25,000 — boosts the artist’s career and their bottom line.

The Heard Fair and other major Indian art markets, museum shops and galleries, mostly overseen by non-Indians, have long accounted for a major portion of Native artists’ annual revenues.

But while pursuing the hundreds of pieces for sale outside the galleries, visitors to the Heard can see Ancestral Pueblo pottery from the Four Corners decorated with cultural motifs like rain, clouds and family symbols. Cotton strands spun and dyed with natural dyes nearly 1,000 years old are artfully draped over the small storage pot in which they were rediscovered, left behind by the people who prepared them as they searched for a more reliable source of water more than 800 years ago.

Another display of the first peoples of the Salt River Valley, the Huhugam, features pottery nearly as old, as well as small effigies. One piece with inlaid turquoise chips showed how the ancestors of the O’odham adorned themselves.

But one thing these and other Indigenous peoples have in common: They have no word for “art.” These pieces expressed cultural values, visualized beneficial weather or environmental conditions or depicted spiritual purposes.

What was once created for utilitarian, cultural or religious purposes caught the eye of settlers eager to visit “Indian Country,” creating a market for what is now called art.

First American Art Magazine, one of the first such publications owned and operated by Native people, published a timeline of Indigenous art history in the Americas that denoted how the Native art world has changed over the centuries.

From cultural touchstone to commodity

After contact and colonization, Spanish settlers brought the practice of silversmithing to the Southwest in the late 19th century. Two of the best-known early jewelers were Atsidii Sání, believed to be one of the first Diné silversmiths, and Slender (or Slim) Maker of Silver, the patriarch of the Peshlakai family who’s known as the first artist to have an assembly line of silversmiths more than 10 years before Henry Ford.

Navajo, Zuni and other Native silversmiths who took up the trade first worked in silver melted down from coins. They later added turquoise, sparking a sea change in how people around the Four Corners created items for sale or to build wealth out of silver and stones. Zunis had worked with cut stone earlier on and quickly adapted to the new techniques.

The Spanish-influenced jewelry soon joined more traditional pottery, weavings and carvings as a way for Native people to obtain canned food, metalware, and even horses and buggies.

At the same time, Native people started producing jewelry and other items for sale, and trading posts run by government-licensed traders sprang up in and near tribal communities. Traders learned to operate on a barter system, according to the book “Fred Harvey Jewelry, 1900-1955” by the late Dennis June, himself a longtime trader. Indians wanted not only durable goods but brilliantly dyed commercial yarns and, of course, silver coins that could be melted down for more jewelry.

Lorenzo Hubbell, who operated a trading post in Ganado, is said to be the first to encourage Navajo women to make rugs instead of blankets since he had a storeroom of colorful commercially made wool trade blankets and didn’t need more. Weavers quickly started creating Oriental-style rugs in traditional Navajo motifs, and a new art form was born.

Some trading posts were operated by families, and at least one maintained the tradition. The McGees and their in-laws have been running trading posts for more than 100 years since acquiring the Keams Canyon Trading Post from Lorenzo Hubbell.

Joyce June, Dennis’ widow and her cousin, Bruce McGee, used to run the hills around Keams Canyon. Her parents moved to Hopi after marrying and lived without running water or electric service.

After Joyce met and married trader Dennis, the Junes opened up their own gallery in Scottsdale’s Old Town district. Dennis became fascinated with Fred Harvey-era jewelry and researched his book for 10 years, she said.

“He bought a collection, which is what started it all,” Joyce said. “There was always a question about the souvenir jewelry. And so this book explains how it was all produced.”

Dennis died in 2021, and June kept the gallery going until April.

Like June, Bruce McGee grew up surrounded by Native people and the art they created. “I blame Joyce’s dad for getting me into the business,” McGee said. “He was my mentor.”But William McGee, Joyce’s dad, only had daughters and he wanted a son. He persuaded his brother to name his new son William B. McGee, known as Bruce for short. Bruce and his cousins, including June, split their childhoods between the Hopi Mesas and the city of Mesa.

“I wish every kid could grow up like I did,” McGee said. “Race wasn’t an issue. There was no difference between one person and another.” His mom put on banquets and programs in the community, and some Hopi ladies became “grandmas.”

Race became an issue when the McGees moved to Holbrook. “The kids teased me because I had this accent,” he said. But McGee’s first exposure to the trading post business came shortly after he married.

“My dad had me working with him at the Piñon Trading Post even though I couldn’t speak a word of Navajo,” he said. Dad worked the young McGee hard and pressured him to do well.

“We opened when the sun came up and closed when the sun went down.” If a local resident needed supplies after closing time, McGee was expected to open the store.

So, McGee asked if he could make another trader, Billy Malone, his boss instead. The experience changed his life. He learned the trade from the patient Malone, which led to a more than 70-year career in Indian art, including directing the Heard Museum Shop.

McGee retired from the Heard this year.

Fred Harvey’s ‘Indian Rooms’ and the start of Indian markets

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the Santa Fe Railway stretched its metal fingers across the nation, giving birth to not only rapid transcontinental travel but to a growing middle-class pursuit: tourism.

Restaurateur Fred Harvey’s hospitality empire, which grew to include not only restaurants but also hotels, guided tours and retail, launched its Indian Department in 1902. The Indian Rooms and the Fred Harvey Indian Building in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offered a variety of Native pieces from Navajo weavings to Pueblo pottery, Native jewelry and other pieces. Indigenous art collector and dealer Herman Schweizer was given the task of stocking the venues with enticing items.

Indigenous artisans and entrepreneurs readily adapted to the influx of visitors including the Laguna Pueblo, whose land was bisected by the railroad. Laguna artist Pat Pruitt said Laguna pottery became more elaborate and commodified almost instantaneously.

“The railroad singlehandedly created an environment and an industry just by its presence,” he said. “Our people were able to design, develop and produce ceramic ware that had symbology on it that was representative of who we are. We didn't really think twice about it, it just happened, and no one questioned it.”

Back in Albuquerque, Schweizer dealt with customer complaints that the heavy silver and stone jewelry prized by Navajos and other Southwestern Indigenous peoples as portable wealth was too heavy for slender tourist necks and wrists. Schweizer approached his silversmith sources and asked them to make their pieces lighter, with thinner silver stock. The big hunks of turquoise preferred by Navajos shrunk in size or disappeared entirely.

He presented silversmiths with a line of preferred stamped designs like arrows, thunderbirds, tipis (although no Southwestern tribe ever used the conical hide homes), snakes and arrowheads.

Collectors can be particularly startled by one symbol in the “Harvey palette” of stampings: the nohokos, or whirling log, also known as the swastika. Once the Nazis appropriated the symbol for well-being and protection, Native people mostly quit using it until recently, when they felt it was time to reclaim their symbols.

The birth of the ‘Native American Industrial Art Complex’

“One of the biggest problems is that we Native people allowed white collectors, curators and academics to define our work in the 1920s and '30s,” said Douglas Miles, an artist and designer who heads up Apache Skateboards.

Miles’ statement is rooted in the actions of agency heads, art impresarios and museum staff in the 20th century.

John Collier became head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1933 when the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression. Tribes were in even worse shape, and Collier, a social justice advocate, instituted several reforms to federal Indian policy. One of those policies involved the role art played in sustaining Native cultures that previous federal administrations had suppressed.

“Collier was really concerned about the fact that ceremonies or dancing were being suppressed,” said Jennifer McLerran, scholar, curator and author of the book "A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943."

Collier held a romanticized view of Indigenous cultures and was also familiar with the Meriam Report, which detailed the federal government’s failures in dealing with tribes and the dire conditions in tribal communities. The report also tied arts and handcrafts to ceremony and religion.

Although Collier was extremely interested in supporting cultural continuance and wanted Native peoples to determine their own destiny, McLerran said, he also wanted them to remain in their traditional communities and carry on with their Indigenous ways of life.

Tourism posed an issue with Collier. “Through the 1910s and 20s, the Hopi Snake Dance was huge,” she said. People flocked to the mesas to observe the dance. “He became very concerned about how American tourism was affecting the spiritual and ceremonial life, especially of the Hopi and a number of Pueblo groups.”

Tourism also had a significant impact on the quality of art produced by tribal people. Just as the Fred Harvey Company learned, “tourists wanted small objects they could travel with and could easily acquire, that weren’t very expensive,” McLerran said.

At the same time, art curator Rene d’Harnoncourt, who worked with folk artists in Mexico, was interested in generating better quality art to offer collectors.

Collier was also friends with the Hubbell trading family, known for their marketing expertise. Son Roman Hubbell was the mastermind behind creating the world’s largest Navajo rug, now on display at the Affeldt Mion Museum at the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, to attract tourists to the family’s Winslow trading post.

“Hubbell was trying to generate this very, very upscale wealthy market in the 1930s,” McLerran said.

Collier was instrumental in establishing the Indian Arts and Crafts Board within the Department of the Interior in 1935 to promote and preserve Native material culture. d’Harnoncourt came on board as an administrator.

While at the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, d’Harnoncourt organized one of the first national exhibits of Native arts at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939. And, in 1941, d’Harnoncourt and Denver Art Museum curator Frederic H. Douglas mounted the exhibit “Indian Art of the United States” at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

McLerran said these grand displays and marketing events were both good and bad for Native art.

“The exhibitions were successful in generating niche markets for particular things,” she said. But the public didn’t talk about expertise or technique, responding instead to the stereotypical “fur, the feathers and all that kind of thing.”

One non-Native art teacher also contributed to that stereotyping. Dorothy Dunn, who had studied several Native cultures, opened the first studio school at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932.

Dunn taught a technique she developed, the “Studio Style.” She believed that Native artists could all be gathered into one universal style. Paintings from this period are distinguished by their flat appearance, with no depth of field or any other realistic depictions, and opaque earth tones.

While Collier and d’Harnoncourt were developing art as an economic driver, museums came into play as centers of Native art and as repositories for what many social scientists feared were “vanishing” tribal cultures. Classically trained curators started studying Native art and became known as experts in the genre.

The two largest Indian markets in the U.S. — Santa Fe in 1922 and the Heard Indian Fair and Market in 1958 — were founded by non-Native museums. The Santa Fe Indian Market was first sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico, while museum volunteers started the Heard Indian Fair.

Other major Indian markets are also run by museums, including the Autry, the Eiteljorg and the Abbe.

These moves plus pressure from non-Indian collectors and gallery owners with a Eurocentric point of view led to the current system, the “Native American Industrial Art Complex,” Miles said. “Non-Natives step in and define our cultures and interpret our creative process,” he said.

Native art galleries put “elite” art on display. And, gallery owner and Indian studies student Mark Bahti said, museums are primarily interested in similar art, “art that knocks your socks off.” The quest for only premier art leaves most artists who produce good quality but not world-class works with little if any support system to sustain them and their families.

Miles said the current system is a “a machine that takes and sells art to others and each other.” The system is a millstone on the business, he said, but it’s hard to escape because it’s the only game in town.

“It creates roadblocks and gatekeepers.”

And, most importantly, said Miles, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, “It all takes from Indian and collective agency.”

Artists break the mold of 'Indian' art

But in the mid- and late 20th century, as the market for Native art and the Indian markets that drew collectors grew, some Native artists sought to paint, sculpt or carve their own visions and explore more contemporary genres alongside their non-Indian peers.

Some, like Charles Loloma, created jewelry with intricately cut, non-traditional stones like lapis, sugilite, pearls and diamonds. Others migrated to abstract imagery.

But these artists and their works weren’t always welcomed by collectors, dealers and curators.

In 1958, Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe entered a Native art competition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Howe, who was called Mazuha Hokshina (Trader Boy), was a graduate of Santa Fe Indian School. He had been taught Dunn’s “Studio Style,” but he abandoned it for a more personal and abstract style.

Art critics agree Howe’s style was punctuated by dynamic motion, bright colors and pristine lines. Nevertheless, the Philbrook rejected the work, “Unimi Wacipi (War and Peace Dance),” saying it wasn’t “Indian” enough.

Incensed, Howe wrote a letter that reverberated across Indian Country and the art world:

"Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting that is the most common way? We are to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child and only the White Man knows what is best for him... Well, I am not going to stand for it. I only hope the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains."

Howe went on to become an internationally acclaimed modernist painter who kept his roots planted firmly in Dakota territory.

Others soon followed Howe’s lead.

When the Santa Fe Indian School, and the Studio Style it taught, closed, a residential high school and later a university dedicated exclusively to Native arts took over the campus.

The Institute of American Indian Arts opened in 1962 with a group of master Native artists including Cherokee artist Lloyd Kiva New in charge. Early faculty include sculptor Allan Houser, a Chiricahua Apache; Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder; and Hopi jewelers Charles and Otellie Loloma.

Many of Native America’s premier artists have either attended, taught or both at IAIA. The university also has a museum where it displays contemporary works of its students and graduates.

But even with IAIA’s cutting-edge incubation for new art forms and artists, there’s still resistance to art that’s not deemed “Native” enough.

'The current system is failing them'

The small market to give Pueblo artists a place to sell their art in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, has grown into the nation’s largest Indian market. Visitors and collectors attend parties, gallery openings, balls, fashion shows and museums during “Market Week,” the third week in August.

The market once run by non-Natives is now almost exclusively managed by Indigenous people as part of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, or SWAIA.

Jamie Schulze, executive director of the association, is Northern Cheyenne and Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. The group’s board chair, Dawn Houle, is an enrolled member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Montana.

Schulze said the market is working to incorporate new arts while still honoring traditions.

“We redid our standards for 2025,” she said.

Even as older artists feel like they’re being pushed out in favor of fashion shows, digital art and other innovations, Schulze said the association is "meeting the challenge of adding new innovations in a way that still honors traditional forms. The market itself still holds to its standards.”

But for those artists who want a change, at least two other alternative markets sprang up in town to supplement the Santa Fe market, which itself features more than 1,000 artists.

For Schulze, the biggest takeaway is the joyousness she sees around town. “We see young artists entering the market for the first time that are doing well,” she said.

Houle is optimistic about the future of these markets but with a pragmatic eye to ensuring their financial stability.

“You have to keep the doors open,” she said in response to criticism over the association accepting sponsor dollars from fossil fuel companies. She said at least 20 tribes own oil wells.

“We’re assessing who are good partners with whom we could have reciprocal relationships,” she said. And “everybody is making money off the Santa Fe Indian Market,” pointing to studies that said the region enjoyed a $120 million economic impact over Market Week.

While markets, galleries and museums are gradually opening up to new art forms and younger artists, this year’s major market award winners came from traditional forms.

Hollis Chitto, a Mississippi Choctaw who also has Laguna and Isleta Pueblo heritage, won the Best-of-Show award at the Heard for a beaded bandolier bag, a form that dates back centuries. The Best-of-Show winner at Santa Fe was a reproduction of a weapon set carefully crafted with natural materials like knapped flint, turkey feathers, yucca cord and juniper branches commemorating the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 by Acoma Pueblo artist Dan Vallo.

But while some artists make nearly their entire incomes from the grueling process of qualifying and entering these markets, others are left behind if their work doesn’t measure up to what judges, many of whom are collectors themselves, deem as what gallery owner Mark Bahti calls “knock your socks off” art.

“The current system is failing them because the current system loves the high-profile people,” Bahti said. By “the system,” Bahti referred to museums, galleries, Indian markets and even the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, the only federal agency charged with the economic benefits and cultural development of Native people.

He said the Indian art system likes artists who are on the “retail side” of a museum; those whose work lights up a room or who are famous and charismatic. “But it’s the people who are there day to day that they need to reach out to,” Bahti said. And, he said, Indian arts programs need to heed the advice of artists on the ground. “They need to understand that the answer originates where the people are.”

Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on X @debkrol.

Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Native art has a rich history; this is what its future looks like