Online Sales Are Transforming the Market for Native Artists

When Marlo Kiyite was 19 and pregnant with her second son, she and her husband, Fitz, moved in with her cousin in Gallup, New Mexico, trying to make ends meet. Her cousin was an artist, a well-known carver of pocket-­sized animals that the Zuni Pueblo^[2] call fetishes, and one day, she suggested ­Kiyite give it a try. “I said, ‘Hey, anything at this point,’” Kiyite remembered. “So I started carving.”

She learned how to cut, clean, and decorate the figures, which the Zuni believe carry the spirit of the animals they represent and offer protection and strength. Kiyite found the work difficult at first, but over the next 40 years, she and Fitz would develop their own unique style of stone fetishes, long and flat with small jet eyes, sometimes with a subtle smile. It was after their son was born that they decided to start selling their work in town.

Gallup ran on the arts: Many businesses purchased jewelry, textiles, and carvings from nearby Native artists and resold them to tourists. Kiyite went from shop to shop, holding her heavy tray of dozens of pieces steady so none fell over. Finally, at Turney’s Trading Company,^[3] the owner inspected each item, considering, then offered just over $100 for the lot.

Kiyite knew that trading posts often bought low to sell high, and she had asked for a better price, but still she felt giddy: Someone else valued what she had created. After all, she was a brand new carver, still lacking the name recognition of more accomplished artists like her cousin—there was something wonderful about learning a new skill, and then being able to enter a marketplace that was competitive yet open to all. This work wouldn’t make anyone rich, but it did offer a little cash, and in the moment, that was what she needed.

The creative economy is vital to Native communities, especially in the Southwest. An estimated one-third of Navajo Nation members make and sell art for a living, and in Zuni Pueblo, as many as 85 percent of households include a working artist. Yet for more than a century, Native artists have been subject to a marketplace that undervalues their work and rips off their designs. Each year, manufacturers sell millions of dollars’ worth of cheap knockoffs, most of which are made abroad, which depress prices even further.

For a while, Kiyite didn’t worry about it much—she couldn’t. She was in survival mode and needed to sell her carvings for whatever meager prices store owners were willing to pay. “Trading posts exploit the fast-cash needs of artists,” said Rose Eason, the executive director of gallupARTS^[4], a nonprofit that offers funding and programming for local artists. Nationwide, 20 percent of Native ­Americans live below the poverty line, and in Gallup, it’s more than one-third. Had Kiyite been getting fair prices for her work, she said, “it would’ve made it easier for us to buy food, to pay for rent, to be able to have a sustainable and stable financial situation.” She never stopped carving—which she regards as a “blessing,” something that has sustained her family and given them tremendous joy—but she often worked one or two additional jobs just to make ends meet.

When in-person trading posts closed their doors during the pandemic, a new market opened up to Native artists. Looking for ways to help them continue selling, various nonprofits and arts organizations launched ­webinars to bring artists online. Reservations have long had relatively poor internet access, but as President Joe Biden’s tribal broadband program extended its reach^[5], more and more artists were able to build their own websites or social media platforms. This meant selling directly to customers—and by cutting out the trading-post middleman, finally setting their own prices.

Kiyite began to hope that e-commerce could offer an alternative to the market that she’d struggled against her whole life. If selling online was the way to have greater autonomy as an artist, she was willing to try.

Yet selling work online has also dramatically increased the risk of counterfeits, said Sheyenne Sky, who works with the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts^[6] on marketing and web development. The internet opens up a vast and unpoliced landscape for images to disseminate and get copied, not only by non-Native artisans, but also by overseas factories.

For this reason, artists often impose a “no photography” rule when they sell in person at markets or powwows—but it’s not enough. An unscrupulous business can sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of fakes, as in the case of Robert­ Haack, who was convicted earlier this year for selling imitations^[7] of famed Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma worth nearly $400,000.

To some extent, the problems of lowball prices and design theft are faced by artists the world over. But for ­Native artists, these challenges deliver a heavier blow, partly because the arts are such an important economic engine for Native communities. Jennifer ­McLerran, a retired art historian at Northern Arizona University, pointed out that Native artists are also more vulnerable to exploitation because, when they choose to create art with traditional designs, those artworks lack the copyright protections that more recently created designs can have.

Moreover, some of those symbols are sacred. “When they are misrepresented or included in a design with no reference or tribal representation, this is where the issue arises,” said Bo Joe^[8], a Diné (Navajo) and Mouache Kaputa (Ute) silversmith. “It becomes disrespectful to the tribe culture, and ­historical traditions.” This is not an entirely new problem. In the 1970s, tourists flocked to the Southwest and the popularity of Native jewelry and rugs skyrocketed, inspired partly by hippie culture. Observing this boom, manufacturers abroad began pumping out replicas. By 1985, the Commerce Department estimated that such imitations^[9] were “siphoning off 10 to 20 percent of the market”—as much as $80 million—and “underselling genuine Indian jewelry made by the Zuni, Navajo and Hopi by as much as 50 percent.” (Although a more recent Government Accountability Office report^[10] criticized these numbers as unreliable for being based on anecdotal data, there has not been a more rigorous study to date.) 

In response, Congress passed the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990^[11] (IACA), mandating that any art or craft product described as an “Indian product” actually be produced by an enrolled tribal member or their direct descendant; it also authorized federal investigations of potential violations of this law and assigned criminal and civil penalties.

But the act has been critiqued for being too unenforceable. In one famous case, a shop just down the road from Kiyite called Al-Zuni Global Jewelry was fined $300,000^[12] for importing hundreds of thousands of knockoffs from the ­Philippines and distributing them to local tourist centers. Five years later, the business remains in operation. The fine “is a joke,” Kiyite said, “because that [scheme] took money from the real artists who created the artwork. It undermined their pieces, undercut their prices, and took away their livelihoods.”

Although DOGE cuts don’t appear to have directly affected IACA enforcement, cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services have further strained the nonprofits that support independent artists and help them stand up to counterfeiters. According to gallupARTS, which had an NEH grant terminated in April, two dozen peer nonprofits have collectively lost at least $1.5 million. And with the NEH and NEA slated for elimination in President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal^[13], funding cuts for arts and culture organizations are only expected to continue.

Kiyite’s uncertainty about how to protect her work online prompted her to enroll in a website development course run by Lynn Wilson, an artist from Cherokee Nation and manager at a Native American small-businesses nonprofit. Wilson talked about how one of her necklace designs was stolen off Etsy several years ago; she ­noticed a “related design” listed by the platform that looked just like her own corn bead necklace, which invoked the story that, on the Trail of Tears, a corn bead plant sprouted wherever a tear hit the ground. Although the artist’s design implied he was ­Cherokee, Wilson was suspicious, so she messaged him on Etsy.

After a tense back-and-forth, the seller updated his “about me” section and item descriptions to clarify that he was not a registered citizen of any Cherokee tribe. But he did not take down the item. “It endangers our sovereignty,” Wilson said. “It’s not so much the copying of designs as it is the copying of our identity.”

Wilson advised the class that the best defense against forgers is a stamp of authenticity. She encouraged her students to apply for listing on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board’s official registry of Native artists^[14] and then to use this authentication in their marketing—for example, writing “Indian Arts & Crafts Board Verified Native Artisan” front and center on their homepage.

After taking some other classes on how to photograph products and how to track finances and web analytics, Kiyite and her husband tackled step one of building a digital store: coming up with their brand. On the homepage of their website, they would introduce themselves as Zuni artists who had been carving together for decades, whose work had raised a large and artistic family, and who had descended from long lines of artists—silver and pottery on Fitz’s side, silver and beadwork on hers. They hoped customers would be intrigued and maybe reach out with questions about Zuni culture.

According to Lyndon Tsosie^[15], a well-known Navajo silversmith, the counterfeiting problem is intractable. “The only way you can stop it is telling your clients and customers, ‘If you really want an authentic piece, know your artist,’” he said. “Know who you’re buying from, and know they’re making their own pieces by hand.” The Zuni Visitor Center contains a small exhibition on ­Operation Al-Zuni and challenges visitors to differentiate between real and fake items. If customers are buying from a store, they can ask who made the artwork, look for a signature, and inquire if they don’t see one. Fake ­jewelry will often contain uniformly bright “turquoise” (plastic) stone, while fake fetish carvings might have eyes that are always in the same place, cookie-cutter-like.

Online, it’s harder to ask questions and inspect items. But virtual communities have stepped in to help artists and buyers, such as “Fraudulent ­Native Art Exposed and More,” a nearly 5,000-­person Facebook group in which members ask one another questions about intellectual property and authenticity. The group’s creator and administrator is Derek Manik ­Edenshaw, a Haida and Cree multimedia artist based in Vancouver, Canada, where copyright protections for Indigenous artists are even weaker than in the United States. Edenshaw sends letters to people selling suspected counterfeits, demanding that they stop.

Meanwhile, Kiyite’s website is ready to publish—except for the images. She’s still worried that her work will be copied and reproduced by others, no matter how many precautions she takes, like trademarking her images and imprinting her initials on the bottom of each carving. Even signatures can be plagiarized.

“The style that Fitz and I have—for a long time, you didn’t see anything that was similar to ours,” Kiyite said. Before taking Wilson’s webinar, ­Kiyite had ­experimented a bit with selling on eBay. “But now, if you look, you will see artists whose pieces are similar to ours—not exact, but similar.”

She paused, thinking about those designs on display for the world to see. But the vulnerability of online sales was something else, too: highly personal, so unlike those shops she’s been selling at for four decades. On her web-­building platform, facing an endless string of decisions, Kiyite was finding the opportunity to represent herself directly, and therefore authentically.

“When it’s your own,” she said, “it’s different.”