The faking of Native American art objects has proliferated as their commercial value has increased, but even a century ago experts were warning that the faking of objects ranging from catlinite pipes to Chumash sculpture was rampant. Through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, Janet Catherine Berlo engages with troubling and sometimes confusing categories of inauthenticity in Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions.

Based on decades of research as well as interviews with curators, collectors, restorers, replica makers, reenactors, and Native artists and cultural specialists, Not Native American Art examines the historical and social contexts within which people make replicas and fakes or even invent new objects that then become “traditional.” Berlo follows the unexpected trajectories of such objects, including Northwest Coast carvings, “Navajo” rugs made in Mexico, Zuni mask replicas, Lakota-style quillwork, and Mimbres bowl forgeries.

In the foreword to the book, Joe Horse Capture (A’aniiih), Vice President of Native Collections and Ahmanson Curator of Native American History and Culture at the Autry Museum of the American West, calls Not Native American Art “a must-have for those interested in the complexity of the creation of Native art by both Native and non-Native artists.”

Berlo shares more about the book in the Q&A below.

First, can you touch on your background and share some of your first encounters with fakes, replicas, and forgeries of Native art?

While my PhD is in pre-Columbian art and archaeology of Mesoamerica, I fell in love with Native North American art soon after I started teaching in 1979. When I first encountered nineteenth-century Plains ledger drawings, which were just beginning to be talked about then, I knew immediately I had to learn more about these. Pretty soon, Latin America was in my rearview mirror, and I was fully engaged in studying and writing about Indigenous arts of North America.

In the 1980s scholars of pre-Columbian art were seeing a lot of fakes on the market, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that we fully began to recognize that the field of North American Native art was full of them too. One drawing book, alleged to be “rare Hidatsa drawings,” was offered for sale at a major auction house in 1997, even after I—and other experts—warned them that these were not authentic nineteenth-century drawings. This was a real eye-opener for me. The aims of the art market and the aims of scholars and Native people are very often at odds. The market often cares less about authenticity than about profit.

For several decades now, Northwest Coast carvers have been trying to educate the general public about the value of their work, and that to carve particular clan images is a privilege and a right. It is not available to just anyone, whether they are making a one-of-a-kind object or putting a crest on a manufactured T-shirt.

Janet Catherine Berlo

How did your research for this book take shape?

Because of my experience with the “rare Hidatsa drawings,” which I am sure were drawn by a twentieth-century Mexican collector and artist purely as an entertainment, not as a forgery, I decided to organize a panel on fakes and forgeries, called “Not Native American Art,” (which came to be the title of my book) at a meeting of the College Art Association in 2008. After the panel, I asked the then editorial director of the University of Washington Press if she would be interested in a volume of edited essays on the topic, to which she replied, “No. I would be interested in a book written by you on the topic.” That put the idea in my head, and I kept throwing interesting information in a file for future use. By 2012 this became one of my main research projects, though it took me a long time to finish the book. Everywhere I looked, there were more objects and issues to write about. My colleagues have been teasing me for years that surely there will be volumes one through four of this book!

You note in the introduction that the book isn’t a polemic against non-Native makers of Native-style art. Rather, as a historian, you’re seeking to understand the social contexts within which these objects are made. Can you share examples from the book that touch on the motives of non-Native makers?

I write about a married couple in southern Arizona who used to make exact replicas of ancient Mimbres pottery, using the same clay and firing methods of ancient potters. They were motivated by love of the materials and by trying to solve certain technical problems of how such vessels were formed, painted, and fired. They sold their work as replicas, but they also created a body of very specific knowledge about the technical aspects of this work to be kept in a museum in southern Arizona.

I also write about a European man who married into a Lakota family and became intensely interested in the quillwork and beadwork made by elderly women he came to know quite well. In neither case were these makers trying to fool anyone or present their work as Native-made. But they were deeply interested in the materials, the meaning, and the artistry of such works.

What are some questions and considerations unique to Native art that arise from replication?

More than in most areas of the world, many Native North American cultures have strict customs—or even rules—about who may make certain images. “Copyright,” so to speak, may be held by an individual, a family, or a clan. There are protocols to follow if others seek to use particular images. Some images are sacred and are not for use by outsiders at all.

How has tourism impacted the global appropriation of Native art?

Tourism, globalization, and the internet have had a huge impact on everything that is made in one culture for sale in another, be it West African masks, Indonesian textiles, or Native North American beadwork. Copies abound, and these range from machine-made replicas to hand-carved or hand-woven versions made half a world away.

Just last month I was shopping for a Middle Eastern carpet, and as I was looking through the stacks, the shop owner said to me, “This one is a copy of a Navajo design. It is made in Nepal by Tibetan weavers.” In fact, it did not look very Navajo at all! I didn’t tell him that I have a passage in my book about that very thing, but I did say, “Designs go all around the world, don’t they? You may know that at the end of the nineteenth century, some Navajo weavers were making their own versions of Middle Eastern carpets, because traders thought those designs would sell well in urban areas of the eastern United States.”

So these issues are not new. I was surprised to find in my research how often an expert in 1910, for example, would say about catlinite pipes or ancient pottery: “Of course there are so many fakes now; it is hard to know what is authentic.”

With an increase in cultural awareness around questions of authenticity, as well as the rise in value of Native objects in the arts marketplace, you say in your book that there is more urgency today around issues of forgery or misattribution. What do you hope readers take away from your book?

First of all, I hope that the very different examples that I discuss in-depth will show readers that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to these issues. A Northwest Coast mask made by a carver in Indonesia in 2010 who has been given one book to copy from and told that the middleman will buy as many as he can carve is quite different from a mask made by an expert non-Native carver in Washington State who has worked side-by-side with Native carvers for decades. These two situations should be understood as different phenomena. For several decades now, Northwest Coast carvers have been trying to educate the general public about the value of their work, and that to carve particular clan images is a privilege and a right. It is not available to just anyone, whether they are making a one-of-a-kind object or putting a crest on a manufactured T-shirt.

The role of historians and art historians is to look at actions and objects made and used in very particular ways at different moments in time. And it is important for us to understand the diverse meanings that accrue to actions and objects in varied times and places.

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Janet Catherine Berlo is professor emerita of art history and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. She is editor of The Early Years of Native American Art History and coauthor of Native North American Art, along with many exhibition catalogues over the last four decades.