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Real Things and Fake Performances
The dominant culture taught me that my Indian identity meant I would make my way by manual labor or art.
Our heritage is having been victimized by theft on a grand scale, and a manual skill cannot be stolen. Art, we have learned, can be stolen almost as easily as land.
I had conversations with an Indian, since deceased, who was rightly concerned about a self-identified “Mohawk” with no tribal ties making a career out of selling fake indigenous artistic sensibility. I suppose the good news is that we are past the time when the dominant culture would scoff at Indian intellectual property claims by arguing that Indians can’t produce intellectual property.
The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 is a splendid law dealing with a whole other area of exploitation, physical things like the proverbial “Hopi kachina” made in Taiwan or “Zuni fetish” from Hong Kong. IACA has the most robust remedies I’ve seen in a federal consumer law.
And it is a consumer law. It protects tribes from having certain cultural items misrepresented but it also protects the people who want to buy Indian designed and Indian produced arts and crafts.
Anybody can visit Palo Duro Canyon, since it’s a park now, and paint a portrait of Coyote howling in…
