While artists are busy crafting new works and joining the wider world of art, scam artists wait in the wings to steal their concepts.
There are establishments where fans of Native art can feel comfortable their money won’t be wasted on fakes. But with no reliable statistics on the economic impact of Indigenous art to support their work, the agency that’s charged with tracking down the scofflaws and supporting artists finds itself with a woeful lack of resources, necessitating creative ways to leverage what little funding it has.
Scammers cashing in big off Native art
Indigenous art is big business, but nobody really knows how big. As artists create beadwork, paintings, monuments or installation pieces, questions remain about the financial footprint these thousands of hands make.
Federal agencies are also challenged to define the economic impact to tribal communities of the arts and crafts created on kitchen tables, spare rooms, garages or actual studios.
The Federal Trade Commission referred The Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network, to the Interior Department. The Interior Department searched but could not produce any accurate assessment. The U.S. Census includes arts, entertainment and recreation in its economic census, but like the National Endowment for the Arts, does not break it down by tribal communities.
A 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office offered possible reasons for the lack of data. The study found that “no national sources contain the data necessary to make reliable estimates.” Conducting such a survey on the size of the market and the level of misrepresentation would be expensive and still may not produce reliable data.
NATIVE ART, NATIVE ARTISTS
Few private studies exist to gauge the economic impact of Native arts, although some unverified sources estimate Indigenous art sales at approximately $1 billion.
The First Peoples Fund issued one of the most comprehensive studies in 2013. Although the venerable Native arts organization only surveyed five states, president and CEO Justin Huenemann said the results reflected a larger state of affairs in Indian Country.
About 30% of Native people are practicing or potential artists and the study reported a disturbing fact: Nearly 70% of these artists earn household incomes of less than $10,000, far below the poverty line.
But making art is also an integral part of tribal life.
“We found that close to three-quarters of reservation communities were engaged in some sort of art as supplemental income, whether it’s a mom making earrings at the kitchen table or selling at a local place or just to make a few dollars,” Huenemann said.
‘Buy from Indians’ at Native-owned storefronts, galleries, trading posts
Even though most galleries and shops are still owned by non-Natives, Indigenous-owned businesses are slowly emerging on the scene. A few galleries like Hopi artist Dan Namingha’s Niman Fine Art and Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero’s eponymous gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and some trading posts along Interstate 40 in Northern Arizona have been in operation for decades.
Others have sprung up from humble roadside stands to compete with bigger stores in Old Town Scottsdale. One gallery in San Diego’s posh Gaslight District is owned and operated by a Luiseño Payómkawichum woman who’s also a one-woman Native arts promoter.
Geronimo Trading Post, Holbrook, Arizona
On Interstate 40 east of Holbrook, Arizona, toward the power plant at Joseph City, a tipi perched on a rock outcropping. It draws travelers to a frontage road and around a small hill to the Geronimo Trading Post.
The exterior belies its start as an attraction along old Route 66. No less than nine other tipis, adorned with Native-inspired images like the eponymous image of the Apache warrior the store is named for, the bugle-playing Kokopelli, lizards, Navajo holy people known as Yeis, thunderbirds and bears.
A Navajo hogan sits at one end of the L-shaped building. The main attraction, an 80-foot-long petrified tree, lies in pieces across one end of the parking lot.
More petrified wood pieces are available inside the store where visitors are greeted by a cigar store Indian sporting Plains regalia, along with other touristy items like handcrafted arrows, drums, green glass saguaros, imported baskets and Minnetonka moccasins.
But there’s more to the story. Handcrafted jewelry in silver, turquoise, coral and opals gleam under lights. Authentic basketry dangles from hangers above. A small but nice selection of Navajo rugs is on display.
Willard Slim and Bertha Gorman inherited the store, built in 1972, from a family member who died in 2023. “We’re just learning how to run the store,” Gorman said. “We didn’t know what all was involved when we took it over.”
Slim said quite a few Natives stop in and buy things, like the family of Gwich’in Athabaskan people from north of Fairbanks, Alaska, who purchased jewelry.
Native Art Market, Old Town Scottsdale, Arizona
Three girls perform a prayer dance in front of Native Art Market in Scottsdale on Nov. 21, 2020.
Unlike Slim and Gorman, Denise Rosales has spent her life making and selling beadwork and other art. “My grandma took me to roadside stands, where I sat on a blanket making jewelry,” said Rosales, a Navajo.
Her home in the Navajo Nation abuts the southeastern border of Grand Canyon National Park. “I had a little pouch and sold bracelets for a dollar,” she said.
Later, the family would drive to Cameron, where she spent her earnings on a popsicle and groceries.
Rosales moved to Phoenix in 2005 for a job, but when she approached local farmer’s markets and art markets to set up a booth to sell jewelry, she was turned down. “The Gilbert art market was the only one who let me in,” she said.
And she didn’t want to sell to trading posts or galleries because she would get only pennies on the dollar. “Why should I do that when I can get all the money?” Rosales said.
So she and some family members pooled their resources and started an outdoor art market in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community-owned Pavilions Shopping Center. Next, she opened a brick-and-mortar location. The Native Art Market is in Old Town Scottsdale across the street from Gilbert Ortega’s long-established store.
About 50 artists signed up to sell their work in the gallery, Rosales said. That number has swelled to more than 400 Native artists from 42 tribes. Rosales is currently searching for a second gallery location.
But that may have to wait since she acquired the store next door and opened The Frybread Lounge. The eatery doesn’t serve just frybread, but a variety of Indigenous foods designed by Darryl Montana, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who earned his foodie chops at the James Beard Foundation award-winning restaurant Owamni.
EC Galleries, San Diego
Ruth-Ann Thorn grew up among artists on both sides of her family.
“My mother who’s half Chinese and half Dutch, is a pretty well-known artist,” she said. “My father is full Native American.” Both, she said, were San Francisco hippie types who were passionate about upholding Native rights.
Thorn said Native people preserve their history in story and art.
“Native art is far more than just creating something for people to look at, it oftentimes will tell the story of the tribe,” Thorn said. From patterns in basketry to painting, sculpture and even cave drawings, Indigenous peoples with no written language nevertheless contrive to preserve histories and cultures.
Thorn, a member of the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians in the Pauma Valley north of San Diego, used her childhood exposure to art when she got a job in a gallery in Waikiki in Honolulu in 1988.
“I was trying to decide if I should figure out what I wanted to do when I grow up and go back to school, which I felt was the right thing to do but which I really wasn’t super excited about.”
Her boss set her on a different road to becoming a gallery owner.
“What you should do is don’t go back to school,” he said. “You’re not going to learn what you need to know.” Instead, he advised her to continue working in galleries and gain hands-on knowledge.
Thorn learned those lessons well. She returned to San Diego and opened a tiny 500-square-foot space. “I had no degree, no business plan,” she said.
She grew her art business one gallery at a time and ended up with seven galleries in San Diego, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and Breckenridge, Colorado.
But when her father, Henry Rodriguez, became ill, she sold off all but one of the galleries to move home to Rincon and care for him. Rodriguez is doing better after battling COVID, she said, but Thorn ended up serving on the tribe’s economic development board.
Thorn also delved into a new way to promote Native artists when she created a television show, “This is Indian Country.” It’s her second series, following “Art of the City.” She said it’s her way of addressing negative stereotypes of Indigenous people, or “poverty porn.”
“To me, art is far more than just a beautiful creation, it’s the preservation of the culture,” Thorn said. “It’s who we are as the first people on the northern continent, so I’m very passionate about it.”
Ensuring Indigenous art is authentic requires a full staff to stem a tsunami of fakes
Counterfeit art smuggled from overseas is a huge concern in the Native art world. Jewelry that is painstakingly hand-crafted from ever more expensive materials is chronically undercut by cheaper imported pieces.
Pat Pruitt’s body piercing jewelry business came to a halt after being confronted with much cheaper Chinese-made items.
Other artists have contended with the same issue of art made in China, the Philippines and other countries, brought into the U.S. and offered by unscrupulous or unsuspecting dealers.
Walter Lamar, chairman of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, the agency charged with ensuring the authenticity of Native art offered for sale and supporting Native arts, said the world is a much different place than the 1930s when Collier’s policies held sway.
“The Indian Arts and Crafts Act (the 1935 law that established the board and its mission) still covers a lot of what needs to be done to protect artists,” he said.
However, protecting Native artists from being undercut by fakes is no longer simply a matter of policing galleries and markets.
Lamar’s agency must deal with e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay and Alibaba, some of the current culprits.
“A foreign company can shoot a picture of a $1,500 one-off hand-beaded purse, recreate it down to the last bead and then sell it on Amazon for $140,” he said.
Sadly, that isn’t covered by the truth-in-advertising law provided the seller doesn’t state it’s “Native made” but uses deceptive names like “Native-inspired” or “Southwestern” art. The agency must also root out fake art that’s illegally marked as made by an Indian artist.
That’s where Lamar said the agency’s educational programs come into play. The board works to raise awareness of these sellers who skirt the law and deprive Indigenous artists of income and promotes buying only from reputable dealers or directly from the artist.
The board has a $1.8 million budget to do its work, a half-million dollar increase from three years ago.
The Arts and Crafts Act was amended in 2010 to allow more federal agencies to investigate alleged violations, which helps leverage the agency’s capacity. Lamar said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the prime enforcement entity, has agents at border crossings who search for counterfeit pieces and a lab to process evidence.
“They’re working on training a cadre of agents,” he said.
Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and a jeweler testified at a congressional hearing in 2017 about the benefits and shortcomings of the law administered by IACB, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.
“Before that bill was passed in 1990, there was no legal, civil way you could go after somebody that was cheating,” he said. One part of the bill he was proud of was a provision for tribes to sue a person falsely claiming tribal membership.
At the same hearing, IACB Executive Director Meredith Stanton said that from 1996 to mid-2017, the board received more than 1,700 complaints over alleged violations.
Most of those were resolved by sending letters about compliance with the law, said Stanton, a member of the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma. Over that same period, she said, 22 cases were prosecuted. Recently, at least two more cases have been brought to court.
In 2021, The Republic attempted to obtain more up-to-date information on complaints made and resolved, but the board has not yet completed the request, citing staffing shortages.
Lamar, who’s enrolled in the Blackfeet Tribe and is a descendant of the Wichita Tribe, attributed the low prosecution numbers to the complexity of bringing those cases to court.
The IACB is also working with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to educate more artists on how to register their work under trademark law and with the Library of Congress on copyrighting designs and other intellectual property.
Such measures could give artists an extra tool to battle companies making knockoffs of their work, according to Lamar, who served in various law enforcement roles with the federal government for more than 20 years.
Longtime Native art dealer Mark Bahti, like other dealers and artists, has taken issue with the latest proposed regulations to implement IACA. Among those are new qualifications for items ranging from food and agricultural projects to media.
“There’s no sense that actual Indian artists were in the room while these new regulations were under discussion,” he said. “This should have been DOA as soon as it hit Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s desk.”
A proposed amendment to the Indian Arts and Crafts Act would allow for “non-Indian labor to work on Indian Products in limited situations” and to open up protections for Native art to Native Hawaiian artists. Some artists fear big businesses mass-producing products would benefit only those artists with the wherewithal to work with the companies, or worse yet, exploit artists’ designs.
“There’s always some white guy or white woman who wants in on any initiative designed to benefit small populations,” Bahti said.
He senses the arts and crafts board and Interior in general aren’t geared to work with or support the many grassroots Native artists. For one thing, he said, the large companies that provide services to public lands, including national parks, don’t want to deal with small vendors. That reflects IACB’s other job as the only federal agency charged with promoting the economic development of Native artists.
The board is working to promote artists through its educational programs and programs like artist demonstrators in at least one of the three museums it operates. For example, Lamar said, the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, has demonstrator space set aside for artists to showcase their process and sell their art.
‘We want to preserve that culture’
Back in northern California, one tribe isn’t waiting for the IACB to take action. Redding Rancheria Chairman Jack Potter told The Republic that the 300-member tribe’s pow-wow committee now requires potential vendors to submit photos of their inventory and will double-check their tribal affiliation. “We turned away people who are selling non-authentic items,” Potter said.
Even vendors who purport to sell Indigenous-made items from Mesoamerica will be required to show proof that people such as the Huichol made the pieces.
Some vendors had been selling at the tribe’s Stillwater Pow Wow for years and were angry at being turned away. However, Potter said that the tribe is committed to supporting Native artists and that the artists receive a fair price for their handmade items.
Potter even called out a vendor at this year’s California Native American Day at the state capitol in Sacramento in September. The vendor, who admitted he wasn’t a member of any tribe, was trying to sell an abalone and crystal necklace for $1,600. But Potter said the eight-strand necklace had only inferior abalone pieces.
“You’re not going to sell that here,” he told the vendor. “I had a 15-strand necklace I got from a known Hupa artist, Stone Wallace that I paid $400 for. You think you’re gonna cheat us California Indians at our own event?”
Potter said he plans to contact the IACB about partnering with them to combat the fakes flooding Indian Country.
“We only have a little bit of our culture left and we want to preserve that culture.”
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.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: While artists design new creations, scammers steal their concepts
