[ACC24045]

I know many native communities like the Pueblo peoples and the communites of the Pacific Northwest coast depend on outsiders buying their arts and crafts. They’ve been using their art to promote understanding and appreciation of their cultures for centuries. What just about all native people (and probably other groups) don’t care for are:

1)Inferior and counterfeit knockoffs of their cultural crafts. Always look for an ‘Indian-Made’ label and the tribal ID number of the artist. Also, make sure the ‘Indian’ is not referring to sweatshop workers in India. (I’m serious, some less scrupulous dealers do this.)
2)’Art’ that promotes a sterotypical view of native people, everything from reproductions of the famous Charles Curtis photos (which usually were staged photos using clothing borrowed from museums to make natives look more ‘primitive’), to a lot of ridiculously cornball romanticized New Age and Old West-style art, to the trashy and deeply offensive things like cigar store ‘Indians’ and sports mascot memorabilia.
3)Things like sand paintings, kokopellis, totem poles, medicine pouches and ‘tribal’ tattoos. These all have sacred meaning in native beliefs and are being bought, sold and used in a casual, frivolous and disrespectful way.
4)’Art’ that misrepresents itself as something it is not. For example, ‘dream catchers’ actually were crab catchers until a white businessman got the idea of adding feathers to them and selling them to tourists and making up a phony legend to go along with them. A lot of New Age people also sell ‘shamanic crafts,’ pseudo-native items for use in pseudo-native ‘ceremonies.’

But if you use the art to learn, and learn respect for the people you got it from, then go right ahead. If you do it because of some insulting notion that we are ‘exotic’ or ‘foreign’ to you, frankly you still don’t understand what is right in front of you, not the art or the artists.

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Name : ACC24045, Race : Mexican and American Indian, City : W Lafayette, State : IN, Country : United States, 

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