By Dr. Sandra Lynch
Early in the 1970s, the Forestry Department of Colorado State University teamed up with my department, Agricultural Economics, in a joint project with New Mexico State University. We compiled a feasibility study that recommended some Navajo and Ute Indians become Christmas tree farmers, thus providing a new industry using unemployed resources on the two reservations.
The proposed development program was part of thinking by agricultural economists that a little fertilizer, improved irrigation, and massive inputs of capital would cure the miseries of poverty. Data were collected about planting distances, growth rates, soil, and rainfall. Tree species were plotted against market demand and transportation costs into key consumption areas. Seeding, planting, pruning, harvesting, and opportunity costs were factored against a ten-year history of Christmas tree prices in twelve markets. Private and public investment sources willing to invest in such a venture were found.
A thousand-page treatise with graphs, simulated econometric profit models, and recommendations was sent to the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. Presentations were made before the Navajo and Ute tribal councils. The extension service was commended, a couple of graduate students received master's degrees, and a few professors were advanced to tenure. Ten years after publication, no Christmas trees grew on American Indian lands.
The little detail omitted from the beginning was the question: "Could Navajo and Ute Indians become Christmas tree farmers?" None of the economists considered the question: "What is possible with these people?" The Navajo economy has not responded well to delayed gratification (future profit) schemes. Among Utes, where so many government-inspired projects have been started and abandoned, there was little enthusiasm to plant trees.
Herein lies the distinction between the science of economics and the work of economic anthropology. Navajos and Utes did want the jobs and money the Christmas tree enterprise would bring to their reservations. The project stalled because it was not the task of economists to pursue a number of important questions such as: Who would be the farmers? How would their tribe choose them? Which Indian families living on the land would the trees displace? One of the most important questions was: How long will the BIA support this program when tribal and national elections change and upset Indian policy every four to eight years? All of these questions were embedded in the social and political institutions of the tribes and the federal government.
My recent dissertation, Chasing Midas's Moccasins, is about American Indian artists and their relations with the market institutions surrounding their careers. It is an anthropological study attempting to find out how this part of the human world works. As anthropology, the study looks at how people respond to challenges posed by the environment-both natural and human-and how solutions are negotiated. The advantage American Indian art, as enterprise, has had over Christmas trees is this-it is a business embedded in the social fabric of southwestern Indian tribes. It also has more than a hundred-year history of being embedded in the national economy. That is why there is American Indian art virtually everywhere-but no Indian Christmas trees.
There are those who might say native art was carefully cultivated as both art form and industry by Anglo-Americans who had capitalistic as well as humanitarian reasons to improve the economies and lives of American Indians. The trading-post operator encouraged Navajo weavers to turn poor blankets into Arabesque rug designs to please the tastes of eastern American collectors. Wives of government officials encouraged use of native dyes to soften the appearance of foreign patterns. Dorothy Dunn's art deco tastes promoted the Bambi School of two-dimensional drawing. All of these influences created an American Indian art history-or tradition.
What has often been overlooked is the fact that white social workers and technical instructors were not at the station when the first train pulled into Gallup. When the trains pulled into the station, brown hands offered upward the first tiny pot. No white Indian-art trader stood over the potter who made the first matched pair of Wee Willie Winkie candlestick holders copied from a book of Mother Goose rhymes. It was Indian enterprise that opened the church relief package and found the child's book and grasped a market potential. Invisible Indian industry was hidden against the dry southwestern desert. The workshop was the adobe or stone house-block or hogan, and production came off the kitchen table, a tree-hung loom, or tree stump.
Indians saw and understood the opportunity and it fitted their technology, circumstances, and cultural heritage. Native arts improved by the standards of art historians and critics. The art improved because the Indian producer was motivated to receive better wages for his or her time across the kitchen table. Some artisans rediscovered their history in the shards and murals of Awatovi because there was a premium market price for art that looked different from others. Stimulated young craftsmen listened to the stories and songs of the elders so they would have stories to tell the buyers: the little extra that came with the art piece making it more interesting, more endearing to the buyer. That is not to say there were no cultural meanings embedded in artistic expression-only to say the story had market value beyond the native community. Anglos called the process of reproducing Awatovi pottery a "revival." Indians came to see it as an "identity" or "trademark" of their family or community-one they would eventually defend against other tribes, or other international suppliers.
Art was infinitely more profitable for the spirit than woodshop and domestic art schools. For some, art was infinitely more profitable than the wage work offered in the new cities or industries around the reservations. For one thing, art had almost no entry cost in terms of training or capital. The product had ample markets for the quickly done as well as the exceptionally made ones. It was no accident which native arts survived. American Indian art grew up along the major tourist railroads and highways. Where these arteries did not run, arts died. Western Apache and Yavapai weavers ceased their search for devil's claw and willow. The nickel a day they earned cleaning Phoenix houses provided a higher return than the few dollars paid for baskets that required a year to complete.
Much of the literature about American Indian art history has a tendency to cast Indians as victims of a Euro-American market. The "victim syndrome" paints Indian artists in two dimensions: not clever and without agency. This thinking has ignored any intelligence natives brought to their own production. Indian artists adapted to the market as keenly as they had to natural environmental constraints such as drought and scarce resources. Hopi-Tewa potters understood the criterion of scarcity, and produced just enough wares to be short of demand.
It is coldly calculating to look at art in terms of economics, but economic studies have value not to be underestimated. Economics may even be as useful as studying rules of composition, content, design, and cultural expression, although the measures are expressed in terms such as price, demand, and product differentiation. Since price is not related to cost, the only determinant is demand. "Art," said economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner, "is the ultimate consumer good."
American Indian art is particularly fascinating because of its historical context, its legislatively defined ethnicity, and its ongoing controversies that arise from its embedded nature within the social institutions of both Indian and white cultures.
(Dr. Sandra Lynch is the Curator of Anthropology at the Sharlot Hall Museum)
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (inn803pa). Reuse only by permission.
Indians artists saw and understood their opportunity and it fit their technology, circumstances, and cultural heritage. Native arts improved by the standards of art historians and critics. The art improved because the Indian producer was motivated to receive better wages for his or her time across the kitchen table. To see and purchase some fine examples of Indian Art, the Prescott Indian Art Market continues today at the Sharlot Hall Museum from 10-4.