A Brief History of Indian Market
by Jennifer Marley
Every year in mid-August, my family would wake up before dawn, and help my grandmother pack up her pottery for the Santa Fe Indian Market. All the grandchildren looked forward to spending the weekend at her booth, walking around, eating, socializing with friends, relatives, and strangers. And of course, we looked forward to the spending money our beloved Grandmother would give us from the sales she made. This was before electronic money transfers were more accessible to artisans, and wealthy tourists would stroll the Santa Fe plaza with thousands of dollars in cash on them to buy art. Indian Market alone would allow my grandmother to make enough money in a single weekend to live off for months, and for the majority of her life, she made her living being a potter alone. My Grandmother is famously quoted saying that she never imagined she would make her living as a potter. She grew up making pottery with her mother in Zia Pueblo and recalls how labor-intensive and difficult the process was.
Later, when my Grandmother met my Grandfather; a San Ildefonso potter, they began a successful career together as potters, learning the techniques of San Ildefonso Black on Black pottery. This dynamic duo would break ceilings in the Indian art world creating new and innovative designs, and eventually became some of the first Pueblo potters to enter the avant-garde genre. This career would not only bring them wealth that neither of them could have imagined, but it brought notoriety that was uncommon for Pueblo people during that time, gleaning accolades from the international art community and even Richard Nixon himself who commissioned a pot from my grandmother, that still sits in the white house. These accomplishments have long been celebrated by my family and community, but as I got older I couldn’t help but notice the way the art and tourism industry impacted my family, their attitudes, mindset, and eventually financial situation.
What was the cost of being represented in the upper echelons of the art world? I recall my Grandmother and aunts being especially patient with the tourists and spectators who would pry for sensitive cultural information, make patronizing or infantilizing remarks about our family, and at worst treat us like living artifacts that exist for their entertainment. The livelihood of our family depended on making these pottery sale’s, even if it meant participating in the commodification of our culture and performing cultural authenticity to appease the white gaze that sought “the exotic.” I would come to find out that “family friends” who were among my Grandmother’s top buyers, whom we welcomed into our home for feast days, made their fortunes as oil moguls, museum directors, and scientists at Los Alamos national labs.
As the years went by my family’s fortune diminished, and every institution that my family so graciously thanked for their wealth did not hesitate to leave them behind. The fact that my mother grew up relatively wealthy during the height of my grandmother’s career, contrasted against the fact that I grew up impoverished, highlights the extractive nature of the Indian art industry. The very consumers of our art don’t care to see our suffering, only our feathers, dances, and beautiful creations. The distance that my grandparents’ career created between us and our Pueblo core values is apparent, our relationship to money and understanding of wealth would be transformed by the capitalist mindset the art industry had instilled. I challenge readers to look beyond the charm and superficial beauty of New Mexico and instead consider what the cost of producing and maintaining such a “rich” and “beautiful” regional culture is, and how it is implicated in racial capitalism and global imperialism.
Acclaimed as “The Land of Enchantment” New Mexico has been a premier travel destination for decades, attracting visitors from all over the world. Events like Indian Market, Balloon Fiesta, and Zozobra draw in visitors by the thousands, bringing in significant revenue to New Mexico cities in just one weekend. While outdoor attractions like ski resorts and public parks built atop sacred sites are marketed to outdoor enthusiasts promoting the beautiful and open landscape reinforcing Terra Nullius, or open land with no occupants. The appeal in what is marketed about New Mexico is almost always dependent on the fetishizing of the “unique and rich blend of cultures” here in New Mexico, or what scholar Chris Wilson calls the Tri-cultural myth. The Tri-cultural myth asserts that there are three cultures that exist harmoniously in New Mexico; Native, Anglo, and Hispanic. Not only does this reinforce the false notion of harmony, but it also operates to revise history, and exoticize the presence of Indigenous people here.
Meanwhile, Indigenous people continue to have the lowest quality of life, suffering the highest rates of poverty, addiction, violence both on and off the reservation, while the wealthy continue to live in leisure on stolen lands enjoying outdoor attractions, Native art and culture. I ask what role do aesthetics, visual culture, and literature in New Mexico play in reinforcing the inevitability of Indigenous disappearance? So much of New Mexico’s visual culture makes a spectacle of Indigenous arts and culture, yet Native people themselves are denied access to their own lands, be it in the art Mecca Santa Fe, or at the site of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. I argue that New Mexico’s economy is dependent on the art and tourism industry which is simultaneously dependent on Indigenous disappearance and the exotification of Indigenous culture to sustain itself. How has this given way for the perpetuation of what Chris Wilson calls the Tri-Cultural myth?
I look to scholars who write against the anthropological, ethnographic, and archeological, notions of Indigenous identity and cultural authenticity formulated in the southwest primarily in the early 20th century, and scholars that challenge the disappearing Indian myth that these disciplines often reinforce, and the relationship to the preservation of Indigenous visual culture and art that these disciplines propose are necessary for remembering, or “honoring” that which is inevitably relegated to the past, and subject to disappearance. I look at how these narratives not only assume inevitable Indigenous disappearance but how they actively facilitate it by investing in the politics of authenticity as a marker of Native presence in a specific geographic location. Further, I analyze the way the rise of these anthropological and ethnographic assertions gave rise to the Indian art industry and the tourism industry in New Mexico.
My grandmother recalls being a child in Zia Pueblo being forced to walk to the highway at the entrance of the Pueblo to sell her mother’s wares to tourists and passers-by’s for as little as five cents in the 1940s. This was just as our family began feeling the impacts of the loss of communal farmland after the Daws Act. Selling this pottery that now sits in museums for thousands of dollars for minuscule amounts of money was the only way they could afford goods like flour and sugar from the nearest mercado. This was the only choice of many Pueblo artisans who would soon find themselves traveling to the cities to sell their crafts to tourists, railroad stops in Santa Fe and Albuquerque would soon become hotspots for Native Artisans and Railroad companies would not hesitate to capitalize off their desperation.
At the beginning of the 20th century, New Mexico had not yet become a state, but the era of anthropological raids was in full swing, with ethnographers and anthropologists visiting Pueblos who saw it as their duty to “document a dying people”. Prolific figures such as Franz Boas and Edward S. Curtis would become authorities on the ever-disappearing Indians they attempted to “preserve” via their photographs and fieldwork. Once New Mexico gained statehood in 1912 it wasn’t long before Anglo settlement would rapidly reduce the land bases and force them out of their agricultural land-based subsistence economies, and into the wage economy. Tourism and crafts would also gradually replace agriculture as the primary means of livelihood for Pueblo people. The railroad has become a notorious symbol for westward expansion and manifest destiny, in New Mexico it is easy to see how the railroad brought with it the very mechanisms of capitalism and colonialism. The railroad in particular had a profound impact on Pueblo economies and culture, contributing to massive land loss, exploiting cheap Pueblo labor, and leading to the rise of the tourism and Indian art industry. Scholar Leah Dilworth argues that The Fred Harvey Company and its relationship to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway (ATSF) was the most powerful agent of tourism in the region.
Dilworth looks at Renato Rosaldo’s notion of “imperialist nostalgia” a sense of longing for that which is destroyed or relegated to the past, which The Harvey company played on to market Pueblo people as living relics, and producers of souvenirs at train stops, a move to “preserve the vanishing Indian” . But Dilworth takes this a step further and argues that Fred Harvey and ATSF were nostalgic not for what or who was actually destroyed, but for an Indian that never existed. In the interest of selling tickets and hotel rooms, they constructed a version of Indian life that reflected and spoke to American middle-class desires and anxieties. Whatever anxieties might have accompanied tourist desires, like fear that Indians might resist economic and cultural exploitation were diffused in the spectacle of Indians as “living ruins”, simultaneously appearing from the past and disappearing from the present.
Scholar Chris Wilson argues that the entirety of New Mexico’s regional visual culture and aesthetics are fabrications of “culture” best epitomized by the city of Santa Fe. Wilson states that “our very notion of culture is bound up with 19th-century industrialization, urbanization, and colonialism. Culture was assumed to be “traditional” and structural, by the anthropologists and folklorists who sought out isolated cultures, and “ethnic boosters” (such as Harvey), they sought to emphasize tradition, while anthropologists seek cultural authenticity and preservationist value historic integrity. In this way of thinking Wilson states, culture has become an ongoing process of creating plausible fictions. Wilson, looks at architecture and the influence of Spanish colonial traditions alongside the incorporation of Native aesthetics to see how it has been carefully crafted to capture the hearts of tourists. Places like Santa Fe intentionally build the “exotic” to enthrall visitors via art, architecture, pageantry, fiestas, etc. He argues that the result is a hybrid regional architecture that fails to take seriously the importance of local history. Wilson offers the term “Tri-culturalism” or “the tri-cultural myth”, to describe the way racial formation is aestheticized, and reduced to “Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo”. Tri-Culturalism is a result of the fabrication of culture created to promote tourism, but today it has shown to have profound impacts on identity formation in New Mexico, and has even been internalized by New Mexicans of various groups themselves.
The tourism industry, art industry, railroad profiteers, anthropologists, and museum directors would soon converge to fully develop the mythic culture of Santa Fe that would serve to line their pockets and fully introduce the capitalist economy to New Mexico. The point at which I map this convergence is with the creation of the Santa Fe Indian Market. Every year since 1922, Santa Fe New Mexico experiences a huge influx of tourists and Indigenous artists from all over the world attending the Southwestern Association for Indian Art’s (SWAIA) Indian Market. It is estimated to bring more than 115,000 people and over $160 million in revenues to the state and region, in fact, the city of Santa Fe is economically dependent on the Indian Market which brings in almost 20% of the city’s yearly revenue.
It was in 1922 that the Indian Fair was created by the Museum of New Mexico as part of the Santa Fe Fiesta celebration. A celebration which included a notorious celebration of genocide known as “The Entrada” a reenactment that depicted a revisionist account of the brutal reconquest of Santa Fe by Don Diego DeVarges. The Museum of New Mexico and School of American Research board members were entirely non-Native and western educated. These outsiders, led by the much-heralded grave-robber Edgar Lee Hewitt, added elements to the entrada, and the museum to make it more appealing to white tourists and visitors to Santa Fe. Hewitt, a well-known anthropologist, was known for unlawfully excavating remains and artifacts from holy Pueblo sites, and even trespassing into Pueblo residential homes without consent. Hewitt and his ilk also romanticized the Spanish colonial era through the creation of the contemporary Entrada with images of Catholic and military glory and a bygone era. According to SWAIA’s own website, In 1919, Museum Director Edgar Lee Hewett had revived the Fiesta as an annual celebration to help promote tourism. His inclusion of the Indian Fair in the Fiesta Pageant was reminiscent of previous World’s Fairs, and in particular, the San Diego Exposition’s anthropological exhibits and the Santa Fe Railway’s living exhibition, the “Painted Desert.” The world fairs, mind you, placed Pueblo people in human zoos as exhibits.
Famous snapshots of Pueblo people selling their crafts under the Palace of the governor’s portal in the Santa Fe plaza being photographed by tourists capture this time period marking the beginning of the tourism industry, to this day Native artists are made to sit on the ground under the portal to sell their crafts so to keep intact this nostalgic image, once again attempting to relegate them to the past. Though walking vendors on the Santa Fe plaza are subjected to police violence, jail time and fines, for not paying the hefty fee to sit under the portal, or for refusing to sell their wares to the predatory museums lining the plaza who will not pay full price for Native art then mark it up to three times it’s purchased price. Museums, galleries, and pawnshops are the physical manifestations of these predatory industries that have always depended on Native suffering, impoverishment, desperation, and death to sustain themselves. Yet, many of these artists hold on to their pride and dignity, and actively engage in refusal to protect culturally sensitive information, and avert the degrading gaze of those who consume their art. What is often overlooked however is the experiences, attitudes, and feelings of these Native artisans even as we critique the institutions that facilitate their exploitation.
In 1932 Cochiti Pueblo Artist Dorothy Trujillo created Tourist with a camera, a figurine made in the fashion of traditional storytellers, to poke fun at gawking tourists. Similar figurines depicting cowboys, priests, and other settlers were not uncommon and spoke to the rapidly changing landscape of New Mexico (quite literally). What is special about Tourist with a camera, I argue, is that it shows that Native artisans were not passively allowing themselves to be exploited, but that a Native formed critique of the art and tourism industry in New Mexico has existed since its inception.
Tourist with a camera, Artist Dorothy Trujillo, Cochiti Pueblo 1932
Trujillo’s Tourist with a camera, is not only a critique of the tourism and art industry, it is also a parody of the tourist itself. Everything from the clothing it wears to its astounded facial expression with mouth agape, tells the viewer that we too have our conceived stereotypes and tropes about the tourists we encounter and are not afraid to wield these conceptions right back at them. Tourist with a camera is almost meta in that the consumer itself becomes the object being sold. To me, it becomes a parody not only of the tourist but it parodies the tourist infatuation with taking home Indian figurines, or other items which depict the stereotypical Indian that puts their settler anxieties at ease. Tourist with a camera represents the Pueblo artisan reclaiming their own story through their own art, deviating from creating something that can easily be sold and appreciated by tourists and instead, holding a mirror to them. This is an especially important intervention considering how identity formation for Native people has been so deeply influenced by the art and tourism industry historically. But, these depictions of tourists and other settlers too would be challenged, as white people began to resonate more and more with the new age counter culture of the 1960s and ’70s. It would not be enough to simply consume Native art and culture, soon, this movement would have people coming to New Mexico seeking to “become Indian”.
In Playing Indian Phillip Deloria looks at the popular use of Native caricatures, sports mascots, and other instances where “playing Indian” has become a part of American “traditions” e.g. Halloween costumes, the boy scouts. He traces the phenomena of “playing Indian” back to the inception of the US, looking at the Boston Tea Party where the white protesters dressed as Indians to convey savagery, war. Mercilessness. Later he looks at how this continued with the Tammany Society and the boy scouts who took up playing Indian as a show of their closeness to nature and to assert themselves as the “New” Natives. This continued in the New Age counterculture of the ’60s where people would aspire to be Native in the name of seeking a new spiritual path or off-the-grid lifestyle. At the same time, he looks to the Image of the savage Indian represents insurgency and counters US hegemony. He points out the way the Image of the Native oscillates between positive and negative over time, in some instances, the noble savage, in others the violent and drunken stereotype. Deloria argues that these depictions have real material impacts that directly contribute to the marginalization of Native people in social, political, legal, and economic realms.
In the 1960’s the New Buffalo Camp was famously erected in rural New Mexico by primarily white middle class individuals seeking a retreat from the American culture they grew up in which consisted of individualism, consumptive excess, and immoral authority. They sought out this new age communalism in their perceptions of “Indianness”. Yet, like the many anthropologists who saw it as their righteous duty to “preserve dying cultures”, these new agers saw their lifestyle as an attempt to “revive” or become the Indians of a bygone era. Deloria’s understanding of why people decided to “play Indian”, I believe, compliments Dilworth’s assertion that the construction of a palatable Indian that never actually existed was to quell settler anxieties about Indian resistance. Deloria says, “[Playing Indian] has constantly been reimagined and acted out when American’s desire to have their cake and eat it too. Indians could be both civilized and Indigenous. They could critique modernity and yet reap its benefits. They could revel in the creative pleasure of liberated meanings while still grasping for something fundamentally American. It should come as no surprise that these people…followed their cultural ancestors in playing Indian to find reassurance in their identities in a world seemingly out of control…Indianness allowed counterculturalists to have it both ways.”
This move to “Become the new Native” can be seen as being a very much a part of the settler colonial process of elimination of the Native as scholar Patrick Wolfe describes it. Wolfe states “On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence— from the mother country.” This can be seen in the creation of New Mexico’s regional aesthetics which depends on the employment of Native motifs, But Wolfe further elaborates that this transcends the symbolic level which I believe is captured by the new age counterculture. To this day communes like New Buffalo still exist in New Mexico many of which surround the Taos Pueblo where new age counter culture remains alive and well. There is such irony in the way the new age movement poses itself as anti-capitalist yet depends on the very mechanisms of capitalism to exist, much like the fabricated regional culture Wilson describes the new age counter culture has supplemented this fabrication, attempting to incorporate itself into the contemporary regional culture. I hope this explains why we get such a specific type of new ager coming to Indian art Market eager to indulge in “The Indigenous experience”.
There is much to be said about how those “playing Indian” and new agers not only reap the benefits of Native disenfranchisement but how they interfere with the very legal frameworks that legitimize Native land and life in the eyes of the settler state. Indigenous feminists (both within and outside the academy) such as Joanne Barker critique the relationship perceptions of Native culture and authenticity have to legal frameworks which determine citizenship to Native nations, and how these frameworks operate to disenfranchise and disempower Native people and Native nations in her book Native acts.
In chapter 4 of Native Acts; In Martinez V. Santa Clara (and vice versa) Barker looks at this historic court case in which a women who is a member of Santa Clara Pueblo sues the Pueblo after being denied access to housing in the Pueblo on the basis that she had children with a non-Native man, to show how Indigenous identity and conceptions of authenticity can actually serve to facilitate elimination even within Native nations. The reason Martinez was denied housing according to the tribe is because historically Hispano and Anglo men sought to marry and impregnate Native women as a means of accessing land because traditionally all property is passed on via the matrilineal line. This tactic for the accumulation of land proved “successful” for generations resulting in land loss for Pueblos. The instillation of this patriarchal system premised on “purity” as defined by blood quantum was seen as the only option for preserving property and land within the Pueblo. That said, it becomes clear how aspirations for miscegenation and settlement on Native land as imagined by early anthropologists, and new agers alike become a very real threat to Native sovereignty, by complicating and distorting the legal means by which tribes claim citizens.
The politics of authenticity are produced and shaped within the contradictions that come out of the settler desire to simultaneously facilitate the elimination of the Native via capitalist exploitation and assimilation, while also normalizing themselves as the new natives taking up faux cultural practices and their conceptions of tribal communal living. What we then consider to be authentic amongst ourselves and within our own legal frameworks are in turn directly influenced by anthropological notions of purity that have only been further solidified by the art and tourism industry that is absolutely dependent on Native labor, from the artisans to the hotel maids, casino workers, restaurant workers, and other low wage workers who supply labor for New Mexico’s hospitality industry.
I conclude by unpacking how the capitalist relations Native people in New Mexico find themselves in cannot be separated from Bordertown violence. Bordertown violence is conceived of by activists as a continuation of frontier violence, a Bordertown, as defined by scholar Nick Estes is a geographic location near an Indian reservation and/or community. Dependent upon Native resources such as land, cheap labor, water, mineral resources, and economies; In some cases, Native people are dependent upon border towns for basic needs such as employment, food, education, access to health services, access to social services, and conducting business in general. Disproportionate wealth and living conditions between non-Native and Native people living in or dependent on border towns. Disproportionate criminal conviction rate of Native people when compared to non-Native people; and disproportionate violence against Native women.
Bordertown Justice was conceived of and put into praxis by Navajo scholar and activist John Redhouse who lead weekly protests at the Farmington police station in response to the rampant police and vigilante violence there. Bordertown violence sees that Natives are constantly pushed to the fringes in these cities that occupy their land, where unsheltered Indigenous people are pushed out of sight, and Native people, in general, are subject to racist profiling and violence by police and vigilantes alike. Bordertowns like Santa Fe, Taos, Gallup, Farmington, and Albuquerque. Bordertown violence has taken countless lives and continues to, in these cities that are dependent on Native labor, and Native money to even operate, most of these towns are derivative of early trading post stops, trading posts, and pawn shops that epitomize the exploiting Native impoverishment for access to Native arts, crafts, and even ceremonial items.
Art like Trujillo’s Tourist with a camera, and many of the politically charged art pieces we are seeing from contemporary artists has the potential to tease out how parody, and in some cases, depictions of the violent reality of history can challenge revisionist history and make very real interventions into the political and even academic discourse surrounding visual culture and culture in general in New Mexico. Scholar Stewart Hall reminds us that culture can be a terrain of struggle and that cultural production by colonized people even in a place like New Mexico can challenge the tri-cultural fabrication that has facilitated our elimination for generations now. Critical and politicized contemporary art marks a shift in Native art and representation in New Mexico, providing a provocation that challenges the romanticization of Native people in regional visual culture and the exploitative art industry which silences the voices of Native people in favor of the goods and culture they produce. Visual art in this way can even operationalize anti-capitalist critique and struggle in a way that can materially benefit Indigenous people, giving us the opportunity to engage with the art industry on our own terms, and allowing us to have agency over our identities, and what these identities will mean in terms of our sovereignty and how Native nations determine citizenship moving forward.
This year we are seeing the rise of new alternatives to the SWAIA Indian Market created by and for Native people such as the Pathways Native arts festival, The Free Indian Market, and the Resurgence festival. These new art markets, to me, represent a new movement on the horizon of visual culture, one that holds a scathing message, and a reality check for those who continue to indulge in romantic anthropological fantasies that New Mexico provides for them. But more than this it holds the generative possibility for us to remake kin with each other, the land, and non-human relatives outside of these exploitative capitalist relations. How can we move to reclaim our art, culture, and labor? Could these new art markets be the answer to dissolving the exploitative Indian art industry that has had its stronghold on us for so long?
Sources
-Barker, J. (2011). Native acts: Law, recognition, and cultural authenticity. Duke University Press.
– Bernstine, Bruce. “History.” Santa Fe Indian Market, 9 Dec. 2020, market.swaia.org/history/.
-Deloria, Philip Joseph. (1998) Playing Indian. Yale University Press.
-Dilworth, Leah. “Chapter 2. Fred Harvey’s Southwest.” Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past, by Leah Dilworth, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998, pp. 77–103.
-Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. (2007) Roots of Resistance: A history of land tenure in New Mexico. University of Oklahmoa Press.
– Estes, Nick. “Border Towns: Colonial Logics of Violence.” Owasicu Owe Waste Sni, 15 Jan. 2013, nickestes.blog/2012/12/17/border-towns-colonial-logics-of-violence/.
-Wilson, Chris. (1997) The myth of Santa Fe: Creating a modern regional tradition. UNM Press.
-Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of genocide research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409.
