Engendering status and value in the powwow art market

Introduction

In 2006, during a conversation about powwows and the types of vendor promoters let in, a powwow vendor ¹ said to me “we’re not craftsmen, we’re artists.” I asked him how he defined the difference between the two, and he said (FN 10/22/2006) ² “price is how you tell the difference. If you have a carving without a base that’s by a craftsman, add a base it becomes art.” This brief exchange illustrates the relationality and complexity of the domain of Indian material culture, a common topic of conversation on the powwow trail. It highlights two powwow market categories—art and craft, associates price and object presentation as features that separate objects and vendors into these categories and illustrates that vendor actions, such as the adding of a base to an object, can shift objects and vendors to a different sphere of valuation.

In the eloquent introduction to the edited volume The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, Myers (2001b) called for a reevaluation of “the relationship between material culture and theory” and a focus on “the relationship between people and objects” (pp. 3, 4). Morphy (2009) has argued that objects are inseparable from their relationship to people for it is “human beings who perceive, respond to and conceptualize the objects and who make the connections” (p. 9). Central to Myers’s call is how to theorize what Appadurai (1986a) referred to as regimes of value. The notion of regimes of value conceptualizes the understanding that cultural systems do not necessarily “have shared standards of value” (Appadurai, 1986a: 14), yet it also incorporates the possibility of shared, yet competitive, value systems such as those associated with artistic and commercial production. While in the past, categories such as art and commodity were seen as distinct, separate, even antithetical, current discussions of value production (see Appadurai, 1986b; Bourdieu, 1984, 1993; Morphy, 2007; Myers, 2001a, 2002; Phillips and Steiner, 1999b; Wood, 2008) argue that they are instead relational and political. Thus, the artistic and the commercial are part of the same domain of valuation because they are constructed in relation to each other. Moreover, categories such as these are reliant on contrasts with what they are not. Bourdieu (1993) refers to this as the construction of a “negative relationship” (p. 30). The concept of regimes of value can help us understand a multiplicity of value spheres, if we look to how value is “reproduced through the complex work of reproduction” (Myers, 2001b: 6), which is done by people. This article explores the relationship between objects and people through the lens of the powwow arts and crafts market because the work of value production that occurs within links Native North Americans (Natives), ³ indigenous, and non-Native peoples and the marketing of multiple categories of material culture into a complex, fluid, and often contentious system of valuation.

Fieldwork and methodology

Throughout North America, there are over 1000 events held annually comprising, what is generically referred to as, the powwow circuit. Powwow circuit events are diverse and include powwows, Indian art shows, and cultural and music festivals (see Figure 1). The size and focus of an event—whether it highlights dance, drumming, or arts and crafts—influences the number and type of vendors that constitute the market. Most powwow markets consist of two groups: those who sell material culture, usually arts and crafts, and those who sell food. Sellers of material culture usually outnumber food vendors, and the two market segments are often located in different areas of the powwow grounds. My research focused on those who sell material culture on the powwow trail, thus references to the market in this article do not include the important participation of food vendors.

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Figure 1.

Mashpee Wampanoag Powwow Summer 2007 (photo by author).

This article draws upon ethnohistoric (Dirlik, 1999; Krech, 1991; Lurie, 1961; Meyer and Klein, 1999) and ethnographic research methods to investigate the relationship between historically constituted discourses and structures and contemporary powwow market practices. In the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been an analytical shift away from cultural description to a greater focus on processes of differentiation and the multiplicity of subjectivities (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Kearney, 1996; Trouillot, 2003). Central to this shift was a call for experimental studies that could “represent the embedding of richly described local cultural worlds in larger impersonal systems of political economy” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 77). To accomplish this, one must identify key markers of the larger system, which are integral parts of the “construction and constitution of the ‘inside,’ the cultural unit itself” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 77). Following Bourdieu, these aspects of the larger system can be thought of as forms of capital valued within the local cultural domain. Moreover, one must identify the hierarchical nature of the capital forms competed for and the power structure inherent in the formation of this hierarchy.

The article begins by revisiting the early development of the Indian art field of cultural production during the first half of the twentieth century to illuminate capital forms and hierarchical relationships that have developed in terms of people, objects, and markets. According to Bourdieu (1993), a field is a system of hierarchically ranked objective relations, and the goal of analysis is to “construct the space of positions and the space of the position-takings [prises de position] in which they are expressed” (p. 30). The processes that create positions and the action of taking positions must be situated in relation to the space of possibilities because their distinct value is delimited by their relationship to other positions. However, to merely identify types of capital and graphically represent their hierarchical relationship reduces the tempo of life to points on a map. Such a construction fails to illustrate the dynamic and unique nature of real acts of cultural reproduction that engage the system, what De Certeau (1984) calls enunciation—the privileging of acts in specific times and spaces—that make visible the processes that engender social relationships and identities. For Bourdieu, a field is a dynamic domain where competition and power engage each other because social agents within the field have real interests in the different possibilities available to them, and they deploy every strategy to influence their positionality. Within the field, it is not only the material production of a work that is relevant but also the production of the value of the work through discourse. Discourse constitutes value in the field through its own judgments, but it also seeks to legitimate its claim to confer such value and deny the legitimacy of others. However, as Bourdieu (1993) argues, a criterion of membership in a field is the ability to produce effects within it. Polemics, therefore, become recognition for to combat adversaries is to consecrate them. Moreover, negative valuation becomes critical to the perpetuation of value within the field and signals relationality and power. The employment of contrasts, such as the negative relationship, constitutes boundaries and categories and, thus, are real acts of cultural reproduction that privileges one set of places, peoples, and objects—capital—and thus marginalizes others. The ethnohistoric focus grounds the ethnographic analysis by illuminating the constituencies and processes that have delimited the position of objects, people, and markets in the field of Indian art.

Foundational categories, such as art and authenticity, erase the acts that have contributed to the construction of their meaning (Rosaldo, 1989; Trouillot, 2003). In the following section, I suggest the negative relationship between art and commodity, authentic and inauthentic have influenced how scholars have researched the powwow market. My own research attempts to shed light on the processes that reproduce or deny the hierarchical relationships constituted in the Indian art field of cultural production. My fieldwork data were collected through participant observation at 22 events on the powwow circuit and semistructured interviews with powwow arts and crafts market participants between July 2006 and October 2007 and since then, during less formal periods of observation. This multisited research project (see Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995) developed much like the powwow circuits of market vendors, over the course of the year as new sites were identified by participants with whom I worked, and as time and finances allowed. Data collection methods included mapping individual markets, observing powwow market practices, working powwow vendor booths, casual conversations, semistructured interviews, and a review of powwow publications such as event websites and market contracts. Through a discussion of the social production of difference between vendors through discourse and the powwow art contest, I will argue that powwow artisan-vendors draw upon the value-producing processes associated with the larger Indian art field, specifically the use of contrasts such as the negative relationship, to enhance the value of themselves and their products within the powwow market. In doing so, they reproduce or reinscribe similar hierarchical positions constituted in the larger field. The ensuing competition and occupation of particular positions, therefore, make them important stakeholders and gatekeepers within the powwow domain and the larger field of Indian art. These relationships have so far been unexplored in the literature.

The field of Indian art and the negative relationship

In this section, I discuss the time period between World War I and 1950 during which the foundational discourses of the Indian art field of cultural production developed to illustrate how the field was constituted through contrasts such as authentic/inauthentic, tourist/collector, curio/art, and original/mass-produced that rely upon a negative relationship. These contrasts developed in systems of power and inequality that resulted in the construction of hierarchical regimes of value.

In the early twentieth century, several factors coalesced in the American Southwest including Indian poverty, anthropological inquiry, social reformism, national identity formation, and the arts and crafts movement in identifying Indian material production as the economic answer to the “Indian problem” and the American answer to a lack of cultural antiquity and fears of unrestrained consumer capitalism. As a result, selected forms of Indian material culture underwent reclassification and revaluation from ethnological specimens to works of “primitive” art (see Berlo, 1992; Dubin, 2001; McLerran, 2009; Meyn, 2001; Mullin, 1992, 2001; Rushing, 1992; Schrader, 1983). This revaluation focused on tribal peoples considered racially and culturally different from the dominant society that were appropriated as the first Americans in a process of nationalistic decolonization from Europe. Tourism facilitated by the intercontinental railway systems, particularly the Fred Harvey Company in the Southwest, separated individual artists from tribal collectives, but not from tribal identities, for consumption by the elites of the East and West (see Brody, 1971; Howard and Pardue, 1999; Traugott, 1999). This new field of Indian art was constituted through the promotion of contrasts that sought to recontextualize Indian material culture and locate the authority to define Indian art within the hands of those with the power to legitimate their own tastes and deny the taste of others. While many of the individuals involved in the development of the Indian art cultural field considered their work part of their genuine philanthropic support of Indian political, economic, and cultural rights, I focus on their patronage and the exhibitions and fairs that they promoted to illuminate these contrasts.

Mullin (1992, 2001) carefully traces the historical processes that influenced the early development of the field, and the role class, gender, ethnicity, and nationalism played in formulating the hierarchies of valuation associated with it. In the early twentieth century, the anthropological concept “culture” provided cultural nationalists with a foundation upon which America could be defined as different from Europe but equally important (see Sapir, 1924). Central to this differentiation was the association of taste with culture; for America to be great, it had to have culture. Many of the individuals involved in the early years of Indian art had traveled to the Southwest and saw in its landscape, architecture, peoples, and material culture a different kind of cultural taste that could be appropriated to construct a national identity distinct from Europe. Its culture was to be located in a more humble authenticity as defined by Indian culture and art primarily located in the Southwest in contrast to the conspicuous consumption associated with the replicated European aristocratic gaudiness exemplified by Newport in the Northeast.

Mullin (1992, 2001) relates this desire to contrast simplicity to conspicuous consumption to perceptions of global integration and shifts in industrialization. Increased globalization, particularly after World War I, raised concerns over political and economic homogenization. In addition, there was a shift to the privileging of consumption over production. Indian art was seen as a foil to these processes. Hand production symbolized creativity, uniqueness, distinctiveness, place, and unalienated labor, which was associated with genuine culture, in contrast to spurious culture characterized by mass-production, uniformity, alienated labor, and globalization (Sapir, 1924). These anxieties were very much related to class and fears that “the nation was being engulfed by cheaper, commercial, and inauthentic tastes” (Mullin, 1992: 400). Art, particularly Indian art, held the promise of challenging the onslaught of vulgar commercialism while fostering nationalism, and in so doing, secure the cultural authority of those elites involved in its promotion. For John Collier, an early advocate for Indian rights who became Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Indian culture, which is sustained through its arts, carried “the potential for redemption of Euro-Americans” (McLerran, 2009: 32). Therefore, the patrons of Indian arts “threw themselves into a decades-long campaign to promote ‘authentic’ Indian art and to institutionalize standards of evaluating it” (Mullin, 1992: 402). Central to this campaign was the linkage of “authentic” Indian art with the value-producing spheres of the exhibition, museum, and collector, in contrast to the “inauthentic” Indian curio and its association with trading posts, roadside stands, and the tourist. Exhibitions and the Santa Fe market were key sites where the “institutionalization of evaluations of difference” (Mullin, 1992: 404) was fostered.

When the 1931 Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts opened at the Grand Central Art Gallery in Manhattan, it was dubbed the first exhibition of “Indian art as art, not ethnology” (as quoted in Mullin, 1992: 395). This slogan set up a negative relationship between Indian material culture valued within the field of science and the aesthetic realm. However, the actual shift was subtle because cultural authenticity remained while quality and aesthetic appreciation were highlighted. Much of the work displayed at the Exposition was award-winning pieces purchased at the Santa Fe Fair or pieces from the collections of prominent individuals and major museums (McLerran, 2009). Press releases highlighted these connections to solidify the authority of patrons, collectors, and museums to determine value within the field of Indian art. Indian individuals were included in the show to ally their presence “with the romantic discourse of art rather than with commerce, with the museum rather than the carnival, with the elite rather than the crowd” (Mullin, 1992: 402).

Promoters of the new Indian art category considered the awarding of prizes and the purchasing of select pieces for much higher prices than was available to producers in tourist and trader market contexts methods to foster quality production and provided a way for their taste and authority to be central to these valuations. Amelia Elizabeth White (as quoted in Mullin, 1992: 403) made this connection in a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan regarding her intention to open an Indian art gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan:

My idea is to show people here in the East the very best the Indians make and to pay the Indians a fair price for the best. I hope in time the Indians will stop making the trashy stuff that is sold as “Indian art” along the Santa Fe road.

In the late 1920s, the increased ease of travel facilitated by the automobile and the official institution of paid vacations increased the flow of tourists into remote areas, which romantic primitivists saw as a threat to the perpetuation of distinct Indian cultures (McLerran, 2009). Patrons of the new movement believed that combating the tourist trade was important to the promotion of Indian art. Central to this was developing an alternative market that would encourage the production of objects of aesthetic value as judged by those having the cultural authority to promote their own ideas of good taste in contrast to the consumptive power of tourists. While, the Exposition and White’s gallery were designed to influence Easterner’s perceptions, local activities such as the Santa Fe Fairs allowed patrons to have a more direct influence on artists, production, and valuation.

In 1922, the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (NMAIA) was formed. The NMAIA worked ostensibly to assist native people’s transition to a cash-economy. The marketing of Indian arts and crafts was central to this mission. To this end, it worked to educate southwestern tourists to purchase higher valued art forms and not curios, sponsored lectures, and played a major role in the funding and organization of fairs where Indian arts and crafts were sold and judged (McLerran, 2009). NMAIA member and anthropologist, Edgar Lee Hewett, coordinated the early fairs, but gradually artists, art patrons, and “more sophisticated” (Mullin, 1992: 406) anthropologists gained more control over the events. “The NMAIA used arts and crafts competitions at the fairs as opportunities to influence the development of artistic forms they deemed appealing to a refined—and more moneyed—taste” (McLerran, 2009: 58). Rules for participation varied but issues of authenticity were consistent. “All articles in order to compete for prizes must be strictly Indian in material, handicrafts, and decoration” (as quoted in McLerran, 2009: 60). Fair sponsors also sought to influence valuation at events run by traders and federal Indian agents whom they deemed unprepared to judge quality work.

Much to the chagrin of many of the patrons of Indian art, their influence over the purchasing practices of tourists was minor. Although the taste of the masses was believed to have been destroyed by factory production (Mullin, 1992), Indian artists found a welcome market for products rejected by the gatekeepers to the Indian Fairs in the hotels and stores surrounding Santa Fe’s central plaza where the fairs were held. Thus, “the officially approved market in Indian ‘art’ still fueled the market in less expensive ‘junk,’ just as the popular acceptance of the practice of hanging original paintings on walls encourages sales of less expensive posters” (Mullin, 1992: 410). Therefore, two regimes of value associated with Indian material culture began to be delimited in the first decades of the twentieth century that juxtaposed “inauthentic,” mass-produced curios sold to tourists along the Santa Fe road to “authentic” culturally and geographically identifiable, high quality, and aesthetically pleasing Indian art sold to collectors through galleries and museums. As Phillips and Steiner (1999a) have argued, “the authentic could not survive without its unorthodox antithesis—the inauthentic” (p. 19). Central to this recontextualization (Rushing, 1992) was a “culturalization of difference” (Virginia Dominguez as quoted in Mullin, 2001: 3) through which Indian art patrons could exercise a form of power and authority. Indian art patrons sought a distinctive heritage from Europe and feared the consumptive power of white working class America. Through the promotion of Indian art, they sought to promote a cultural nationalism through the economic, cultural, and political preservation of Indians. Tourists were the main threat to their authority in relation to Indian art. As Mullin (1992) summarizes, it was about “cosmopolitans wanting to preserve the differences that make cosmopolitanism possible” ⁴ (p. 413).

The creation of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB) in 1935 (see Dubin, 2001; McLerran, 2009; Meyn, 2001; Prucha, 2000; Schrader, 1983) and the appointment of D’Harnoncourt as its manager (see D’Harnoncourt, 1942; Rushing, 1992) expanded upon the agenda of the Indian art patrons by carrying the merger of museum and market onto the national stage, expanding the marketability of Indian material production beyond romantic and aesthetic value to use value, and linking the preservation of Indian culture to Indian political identities all legitimated by the force of federal law. The IACB’s influence on Indian art is traced to two groundbreaking exhibitions developed under the guidance of D’Harnoncourt: The Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in San Francisco in 1939 and the Indian Arts of the United States exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in 1941.

D’Harnoncourt’s (1942) philosophy toward the promotion of Indian arts and crafts emphasized production for white audiences and the importance of combining promotion and consumption. D’Harnoncourt identified four primary areas of market demand: (1) local demand for traditional products within a producer’s group, (2) the small but influential collector’s market, (3) the souvenir market, and (4) demand for useful quality items that would fit into the dominant society’s décor. The last market had the most potential because “buyers were drawn to objects that reinforced class distinctions,” and the cultivation of taste in indigenous arts and crafts “could work to maintain hierarchical class structures” (McLerran, 2009: 27). D’Harnoncourt (1942) believed objects that fulfilled this market were the easiest to promote because they had “real value” based on “usefulness and the quality of their execution, rather than such intangibles as associations or rarity” (p. 149).

The IACB’s involvement with the GGIE instituted a new era of national governmental promotion of Indian arts and crafts. GGIE had both ideological and practical aims. The primary theme of the exhibit was the adaptability of the various Indian groups to their environment and the resultant influence on their material culture. Historic and contemporary pieces were displayed together in order to construct an ancestral link of authenticity between historical/traditional pieces and contemporary/traditional works. No recreated Indian villages were allowed nor were non-Indian traders able to sell Indian products. “Only Indians who had their nation’s approval could work on projects related to the Golden Gate presentation” (Meyn, 2001: 124). Indian artisans demonstrated their crafts among displays of model rooms to justify the contribution of living Indians to American daily lives. D’Harnoncourt designed the model rooms and demonstrations to create consumer interest to be met through the onsite pan-Indian market (Rushing, 1992). The significance of this recontextualization of Indian arts and crafts was expressed by Collier in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (as cited in Rushing, 1992: 204): “The month of February, 1939, may go down in Indian history as the end of the parasitic trinket-and-bauble era of Indian ware and the rebirth of substantial interest in genuine Indian craftsmanship.”

The GGIE Indian Market was a “controlled experiment in marketing” (Rushing, 1992: 205), where two competing market potentialities, their relationship, and valuation were tested. Within the market, there were two merchandising areas. One area, resembling a trading post, marketed lower priced merchandise based on romantic associations. The other, a modern gift shop, merchandised higher quality pieces and highlighted artistic attributes. “The purpose was to determine which kinds of objects sold only if displayed in a distinctly Indian-related setting” (Rushing, 1992: 205). D’Harnoncourt’s (as quoted in Rushing, 1992: 205) analysis of the market experiment found that

our experiences during the first six months of the Fair has shown that almost all fine articles sell faster and at higher prices if they are shown in an establishment resembling a gift shop than in a setting resembling a curio shop.

Critics raved over the GGIE, and numerous inquiries made by commercial establishments looking for sources of Indian arts and crafts justified the planner’s philosophy that redirection of value appreciation would lead to greater economic opportunities. Even before the show closed, plans were in the works for another exhibition at MOMA in New York in 1941.

According to Rushing (1992), the MOMA exhibition, again directed by D’Harnoncourt, “was a watershed event in the history of Euro-American proprietary interest in Native American art in the twentieth century” and the “model on which displays of primitive art are based today” (pp. 191, 195). The MOMA exhibition had the same purpose as the GGIE: through display, D’Harnoncourt (Rushing, 1992: 195) sought to decontextualize ancient art, contextualize historic art, and recontextualize and aestheticize contemporary art. The MOMA exhibition, however, did not have an Indian Market because the format of presentation in an established art museum precluded the creation of an onsite market, and its location in New York City enabled the participation of established businesses. The access of particular forms of Indian material culture to the halls of MOMA and the removal of the market from the display venue completed the shift in valuation from cheap curios sold on the Santa Fe road to high quality art through the reification of aesthetic value and the hiding of commodity status. Thus, D’Harnoncourt succeeded in the final enclaving of particular forms of Native material culture through the definition of whom and what constituted Indian art.

The MOMA exhibition was very popular with the press, the public, and the museum world because of the “authoritative force and persuasive power that MOMA’s institutional credibility provided” (Rushing, 1992: 193–194) and the personal enthusiasm, connections, organizational skill, and exhibition design that D’Harnoncourt brought to the project. President Roosevelt (as quoted in Schrader, 1983: 224) described MOMA at its dedication as a “living museum, not a collection of curious or interesting objects …, (which) has been conceived as a national institution.” In the political climate of 1941, the choice of MOMA for an exhibition of Indian art had the potential to highlight the “essential Americanness of Indian art” (Rushing, 1992: 206–207). Critics and Mrs Roosevelt did not miss this correlation. George Vaillant (1941: 169) likened the Indian to the American as products of different migrations that brought new manners of living; therefore, “our arts, while moving toward the future, should none the less root themselves in their native environment, and the Indians are an important part of the continental tradition.” Mrs Roosevelt (Douglas and D’Harnoncourt, 1941) wrote, the Indian’s “heritage constitutes part of the artistic and spiritual wealth of this country, but also that the Indian people of today have a contribution to make toward the America of the future” (p. 8). The legacy of the MOMA exhibition was a result of D’Harnoncourt’s success at a seemingly paradoxical revaluation of Indian art as both universal and capable of being understood aesthetically while culturally specific and functionally responsive to societal needs (Rushing, 1992).

By the early 1940s, the processes of Indian poverty, anthropological inquiry, social reformism, national identity formation, and the arts and crafts movement had culminated in the formation of a federal entity, the IACB. Under the leadership of D’Harnoncourt, the IACB put the power of the federal government behind the revaluation of Indian material culture. This market promoted an artistic individuality grounded in culturally, racially, and geographically identifiable difference, a living Native presence, that could be appropriated into a grand narrative of American identity. Central to the constitution of the Indian art field was its delimitation from what it was not. To accomplish this, a series of contrasts or negative relationships were employed that recontextualized particular forms of Native material culture and its producers from the Santa Fe road to the museum, from the Southwest to New York City, from the souvenir shop to the gallery, from the tourist to the collector, and from the cheap mass-produced curio to quality, culturally distinct, functional art.

The second half of the twentieth century saw little challenges to this dichotomy and much that has sought to institutionalize and protect those vested in the cultural and economic capital the Indian art field has sought to promulgate. The most well-known piece of legislation, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA) passed in 1990, sought to strengthen the powers of the IACB to prosecute willful misrepresentation within the field of Indian art (Prucha, 2000). The IACA defines an Indian, Indian tribe, and Indian artisan and, thus, makes political “an ethnic activity—the self-identification of an artist in the promotion and sale of his or her work” (Sheffield, 1997: 4). The act has been highly criticized for its construction of an artistic authenticity grounded in racial and political definitions of identity (see Barker, 2003; Cembalest, 1991; Shiff, 1992; WalkingStick, 1991). However, it has also been called a “paper tiger” because of its lack of enforceability (Duboff, 1992: 44).

During the formative years of the field of Indian art, processes of definition, legitimization, and consumption constituted a hierarchical Indian material culture market that continues to influence the field today. During that same time period, the same changes in the relationship between Indian peoples, dominant society, and the Federal government that created an interest in Indian culture, as discussed above, provided space for Native peoples to foster and preserve their culture in new ways, such as through the powwow. In the following section, I briefly trace the transition from older forms of Indian dances to the current powwow form and review what little has been written about the powwow arts and crafts market. I argue that the regimes of value and negative relationships discussed in the constitution of the field of Indian art have influenced analyses of the powwow market.

The powwow, its market, and the Indian art field of cultural production

In the late nineteenth century, Indian dances and gatherings were singled out as detrimental to the civilizing goals of the federal government and missionaries because they symbolized what made Indians Indian and different from whites (see Shea Murphy, 2007). In his 1883 Annual Report, Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller called for active measures to discourage all “heathenish” feasts and dances (Prucha, 2000: 158). While some dances were restricted, others such as the sun, scalp, and war were outlawed outright (Shea Murphy, 2007). Punishment for participation included withholding of rations or imprisonment (Prucha, 2000). Federal records document the “violence” perpetrated on Native peoples caught dancing; however, they also record challenges to the imposition of dance restrictions by both Native peoples and those charged with enforcement. To resist the cultural genocide implicit in the dance bans, some groups moved their dances to remote locations to avoid outside surveillance and interference. Others exploited Christianity, literacy, patriotism, white fascination with the Indian, and federal laws such as freedom of religion and assembly to create favorable sociopolitical environments for their continuance.

The popular Wild West shows and traveling carnivals that began with Buffalo Bill Cody’s show in 1883 were important opportunities where Indian dances and identity could be preserved and reproduced in relation to dominant society. These were just the types of images and shows Indian art patrons sought distance from in promoting the conjuncture of the museum and Indian material production. These shows became “surrogate[s]” for older forms of gatherings that allowed ethnic identity to be fostered and preserved through contact with whites (Ellis, 2005: 14). For many participants, shows provided a platform to celebrate Indian identity, earn a living, and travel the world. Grant Arndt’s (2005) analysis of the Ho-Chunk illustrates how Indian powwows similarly “combined Indian participation with a commercial orientation to non-Indian spectators” (p. 8). By 1928, over 20,000 people had attended a powwow in the Wisconsin Dells during its 2-month season. The Ho-Chunk powwow form, according to Arndt (2005), influenced a network of similar events throughout the upper Midwest. The Menominee Nation turned their annual agricultural fairs, which were “encouraged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs into Indian powwow-like events by 1919” (Arndt, 2005: 55). Show Indians also brought back to their communities fancier dance forms developed to entertain audiences.

In 1914, a Kiowa man hired a lawyer to fight the Indian office’s suppression of dances, and a group of Pawnee chiefs challenged the legality of the government’s interference with religious and pleasure dances. In 1917, the Pawnee agent in Oklahoma admitted that the government could not prevent dances not held on government land. Although Indian dances were officially categorized as “Indian Offenses” until Commissioner John Collier repealed the directive in 1934 (Shea Murphy, 2007), by the 1930s, “a new form of dance that was public, performative, and intertribal” (Ellis, 2005: 13), the powwow, could be found all over Indian country. Shea Murphy (2007) argues that dance has since become a means through which Native self-determination is asserted, and the powwow has become the most important, common, visible, and dynamic venue that combines Native agency and dance. Ellis (2005) argues, “the powwow has become one of the most popular and visible expressions of the dynamic cultural forces at work in Indian country” (p. 8).

When powwow centered scholarship began in the late 1950s, scholars (see Kurath, 1957; Slotkin, 1957) focused their analysis on activities in the dance circle and suggested that the powwow reflected a disintegration of distinct tribal identities and the rise of a more generic pan-Indian identity. Both were seen as negative and a result of white influence, much like the critique of material cultural production for the tourist trade. In addition, the powwow and dance were uneasily linked to the commercial: “At worst he is exerting himself to please a White audience; at best he dances himself into identification with ancestral motion patterns, and into oblivion of commercialized surroundings” (Kurath, 1957: 181). Little has been published regarding the conjuncture of dance and the market that has become customary in the contemporary powwow form. Preliminary analysis of this history through a case study of the Anadarko Indian Exposition between 1907 and 1940 (Gagnon, 2009) found that the shift in Indian agency that facilitated the transition from government-sponsored Indian agricultural fairs to Native-run powwows also resulted in a shift from agricultural produce to Indian arts and crafts promotion. The processes of valuation that played out in this transition also correspond to the categories of valuation being fostered in the development of the Indian art field at the time.

The most common inclusion of the powwow market in powwow scholarship is in the description of the spatial formation of powwows as a series of concentric circles: “Between the camps and the dance arena is a space that may be occupied by one or more food concession booths and traders’ tables” (Gelo, 1999: 45). Gelo (1999) has suggested that the location of the market at the edge of the public powwow space reflected its lack of attention to the more central powwow activities taking place in the dance arena because of its distance from the emcee’s voice. Elsewhere, I offer a reconceptualization of this valuation of the market’s spatial position and suggest that the market is central, not peripheral, to the constitution of the powwow as a Native sociospatial place (Gagnon, 2013). A focus on powwow arts and crafts vending is rare. Bourdieu (1993) has called such instances of “disinterestedness” important sites for understanding power and politics because exclusion constructs a negative relationship in order to retain the power of valuation in the hands of a field’s gatekeepers (pp. 20, 39–40). Only two works have focused their analysis on powwow markets. Campisi (1975) conducted fieldwork with Iroquois powwow vendors. He found that the discount, Indian price, was a market mechanism that acknowledged Indian identity when granted and denied it when full price was charged. Sanchez’s (1995) dissertation on powwows in Central Ohio identified the significance of the IACA of 1990 to powwow practices and its role in constructing boundaries around cultural development.

In general, powwow scholarship has marginalized the powwow market through the construction of a negative relationship that privileges powwow practices centered on the dance arena, which are constituted as more Native, and thus, more authentic. In addition, both Campisi’s and Sanchez’s arguments illustrate that powwow market practices align with the value-producing mechanisms of the Indian art field. Campisi highlights the rejection of the commercial to illuminate value, and Sanchez found that “tradition” is a significant parameter of objects being Indian made. The powwow market, which goes by various names such as Indian Market, Indian Art Market, Indian Arts and Crafts Market or Indian Traders Market, is a part of the Indian art field of cultural production because it is constituted—successfully or not—as an Indian art market by the committees that organize them and the vendors who participate in them. Powwow market vendors argue that there is no powwow without the market.

In this last section, I illuminate how powwow market artisan-vendors reproduce, and thus reinscribe, the value-producing processes associated with the Indian art field to locate themselves and their objects in a higher position within the domain of the powwow market. Just as promoters of the field of Indian art used the negative relationship to delimit Indian art from the tourist curio and legitimize its position of value, powwow artisan-vendors use contrasting discourse and the powwow art contest to construct their own value within the powwow market domain. Moreover, these processes help them manage the socioeconomic reality of the powwow market, while retaining their cultural capital as artisans.

Positioning artisan-vendors within the powwow market field

The powwow arts and crafts market is a socially stratified domain. While the term vendor is a common term that denotes anyone who is a seller in the market, some of the most salient social differentiations are between those vendors who produce their own objects, those who sell the handwork of others, and mass-produced merchandisers. In addition, one’s ethno-political identity articulates with the identities associated with object production and sale. Daniel’s (D1 3/23/2007) response illustrates how artisan-vendors differentiate themselves from other types of sellers:

I go there as an artist; I go there as a vendor; I go there as an Indian person who takes this stuff serious … and, I go there to make a living … it’s part of my role, to play that role.

Vendors who produce all of their merchandise are the minority on the powwow circuit; most vendors supplement their stock with work produced by others, both handmade and commercially produced. For example, Katherine (FN 9/24/2006) considers herself an artist and a vendor because she thinks of the work she produces as art, but she needs to be a vendor to market to the customer. The majority of Katherine’s booth contains her own handmade artistic production, priced from US$20 into the hundreds; the term vendor refers to the fact that she supplements her booth stock with inexpensive necklaces assembled from metal charms and leather, mass-manufactured jewelry made from copper and magnets believed to have healing properties, and products produced by her family. Brian (SH2 9/2/2006) also defined his role as an artist/vendor: “I make 10% and buy the rest.” Use of the dualistic identifier artist/vendor marks the valued distinction between those who make and those who buy their merchandise, but its use also references the need of sellers to take on both identities and roles within the powwow market context to be economically viable.

Artisans occupy the highest status position within the market because they bring a special quality to the exchange relationship—the ability to educate. Daniel (D1 3/23/2007) offered this explanation for the difference between an artisan and a vendor:

a vendor goes there to make money … and even if he loves to do it, or likes to do it, his main thing is to make money … A vendor, a vendor vs. an artist, an artist goes there with what I call genuine love, or not only to make money, to make it as a living, but to expose himself, to reveal himself. uh, I think it is more personal. I think it is a more personal thing … just to have someone come up and talk to you about, you can give … A vendor, goes there and that vendor may have, well he probably has, all stuff that he didn’t make, unless he’s a vendor who’s an artist, like myself. For instance, Laura [Daniel’s wife] can’t answer a question like I can answer a question. When a customer asks about an item or the title on the back of a piece, you know, so I just think it’s more of a personal thing. In every aspect. What you’re giving and what you’re receiving. It’s just more personal than just a vendor. And, it adds to the show. It is a better ingredient to the show all the way around. People would rather see, go to a show, where there are artisans.

Leslie’s (1998) discussion of Walter Benjamin’s work on the relationship between storytelling, art, and authenticity is relevant to understanding the negotiation of vendor status within the powwow market domain. According to Leslie’s analysis of Benjamin, there is an affinity between storytellers and artisans. Storytellers reconstitute experience, and artisans mold human experience into material form. Both have a connection to that which is distant, whether in time or space, but also the present as they reshape human experience by incorporating real-life human fragments into cultural artifacts, upon which authenticity rests. We saw a similar connection between the human, material, and history fostered by the early promoters of Indian art deemed important to educating the public to the value of Indian art.

Within the powwow market, artisan-vendors are the storytellers and the artisans. For powwow committees, education is a strategy employed to foster political goals. Mark (FN 10/20/2006), a vendor coordinator, said that their committee particularly likes “people who do their own work” because “they can talk and share.” One of the primary goals of his event is education, especially children because there are no reservations in their state. Thus, every time a child walks into a booth and talks to a vendor—especially an artist—someone who has made their own merchandise—they walk away with more than just an object, a transaction of knowing has taken place (FN 10/20/2006). As a customer in Katherine’s booth (FN 9/24/2006) said, “the story is the most important.” Powwow artisan-vendors draw distinctions between themselves and other vendors through the stories they tell themselves and others.

Usually, vendors who carry “touristy junk,” defined by Robert (QR1 7/27/2007) as “stuff made overseas in China, Philippines etc.,” are accorded the lowest status among sellers in the powwow market. Artisan-vendors see mass-produced materials as a devaluing influence that destroys the market for artisan products. In the context of the powwow market, the cultural status of the artisan is still primary, and I suggest, reinforced by the presence of the mass-produced. Just as the negative relationship with the curio enhanced the value of the “new” Indian art. It is the mass-produced and its seller who lose the cultural capital competition. Artisan-vendors would prefer that powwow committees not allow “junk” vendors in and blame their inclusion on artisan-vendors being forced to carry mass-produced objects to compete economically. Powwow committees, on the other hand, justify the variety of vendors they accept by referencing consumer differentiations and the paucity of artisans to fill their market booths.

Powwow committee and vendor references to the powwow’s consumer base as a factor in the need to carry mass-produced merchandise to be economically viable aligns with the analyses put forth by Benjamin (1968) and Steiner (1999). Mass-production allows art forms to enter situations, relations with persons, that the original cannot. This can leave the work of art untouched (Benjamin, 1968) or, put perhaps more directly, unpurchased, and its aura, which is its relationship to ritual, weakened. This can shift its foundation of authenticity to the political realm. This discussion leads us to consider how artisan-vendors manage the devaluing influence of mass-production through the political realm of the art contest. I suggest that it is the presence of the nonartisan-vendor and the mass-produced that sets up the conditions for the valuation of the artisan-vendor. The ability to construct the negative relationship within the powwow domain enables the artisan-vendor to not only retain their cultural capital but also employ it to sell to multiple regimes of value within that context. In addition, the participation of the artisan-vendor brings a cultural capital, an authenticity, to the overall market that helps the powwow continue its educational goal while managing the economic constraints of its consumer base.

Powwow arts and crafts contests: arenas of competitive differentiation

One way that vendor differences are engendered within the powwow market domain is through powwow arts and crafts contests. They can be thought of as

tournaments of value, complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-defined way from the routines of economic life. Participation in them is likely to be both a privilege of those in power and an instrument of status contests between them. (Appadurai, 1986a: 21)

Powwow art contests can increase the economic viability of artisans who participate in the powwow market because the cash value of prizes can cover participation expenses such as booth fees and gas. Moreover, powwow circuit art contests replicate the value-producing processes employed at the fairs and expositions of the first half of the twentieth century, such as rules for participation, which artisan-vendors draw upon to increase the value of their objects and their sales. Myers (2001b) recognized the fluidity of value construction when he suggested that objects are “subject to slippage” (p. 6). The term slippage, however, has a negative or downward trajectory connotation. An analysis of the early development of the Indian art field and the contemporary powwow art contest suggests that the employment of the negative relationship in the work of value reproduction affects peoples and objects and influences the increase or “slipping up” of value in relation to cultural identities, object value, and economic viability.

Powwow art contests often require that the participant be the maker of the object submitted. This denies access to vendors who carry the work of other artisans or those who carry mass-produced products, thus creating a “community of privilege” (Baudrillard as quoted in Appadurai, 1986a: 21) within the powwow arts and crafts market. Within the event, contest categories and the awarding of prizes set up a competition among perceived peers that intensifies their group status as artisans and separates them from other vendors. Contest categories illuminate the “ethnic aesthetic traditions” (Chibnik, 2006: 492) valued within the powwow market domain (see Figure 2). The 2006 Mohegan Wigwam Festival’s contest included Best in Show, Creative, Gold and Silver Jewelry, and Carving. The 2007 program for the Mashantucket Pequot’s Schemitzun: Feast of Green Corn and Dance listed the winners of the 2006 juried art show using a multilayered category system. First, they divided objects by method or material: Pottery/Clay, Paintings, Drawing & Graphics, Sculptures/Carvings, Baskets/Weaving, Beadwork, Regalia/Attire/Accessories, and Jewelry. Within some categories, a Traditional and Contemporary winner was chosen, in another, a Realistic subcategory was employed. In most contests, First, Second, and Third place prizes are distributed within each category if there are enough quality pieces entered. In addition, a Best of Show and Judges Choice are often awarded.

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Figure 2.

Powwow Drums (photo courtesy of Joywind and Robert Todd).

Powwow art contest categories illustrate the social differentiations important within the powwow market context. Categories focus on particular artisan skill sets while marking some forms of production more valued than others. Comparing Schemitzun’s Jewelry to Mohegan’s category Gold and Silver Jewelry can illustrate the defining potential of these categories. Schemitzun’s category appears to be the broader of the two, suggesting any artisan working in any medium who is producing jewelry can enter. This creates a peer group of artisans who make jewelry regardless of medium, though one could argue that the variety within this group could make it difficult to judge. The Mohegan category sets up a peer group of jewelers who work in gold and silver, while it denies access to those jewelry makers who work in other mediums, denying them peer status. Jewelry artisans in other mediums might be able to submit their work for judging in the Creative category, but chances are they would then be in competition with artisans working in a variety of mediums not just other jewelers, creating a peer group of creative artisans.

The choice of what category to enter a piece is an important and at times fraught decision for artisan-vendors. At one show, the art contest categories were Two-Dimensional, Three-Dimensional, and Jewelry. Artisan-vendor Kathleen turned to me and asked, “so what are mine?” (FN 9/23/2006). According to Rhonda (FN 8/27/2006), the person she shares her booth with did not win the contest they entered because of the category choice they made. Art contest judges also have a hard time judging pieces that straddle categories, such as a Navajo-style squash blossom necklace inset with wampum instead of turquoise. In addition, artisan-vendors sometimes complain about unfairness in how awards are handed out. For example, a Navajo jeweler (FN 8/26/2006) complained that he did not win anything in the 2006 Schemitzun art contest because he was “not from around here.” He supported his status by telling me that he had been at Indian Market in Santa Fe the weekend before and won for a silver belt he had made.

Today, as in the past (see Mullin, 1992), individual collectors and those who represent institutions are drawn to the work of artisans who win art contest prizes because of their perceived pedigree. Art contest prizes enhance value by moving powwow objects toward the regime of value associated with the art market, the museum, and the collector. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center often purchased winning pieces from Schemitzun’s art contest, a practice vendors (FN 9/23/2006) anticipated and commented on when purchases were not made. These types of purchases strengthen the association of artisan-vendors with the value-producing mechanisms of the art world, but at the same time, they physically remove prize-winning artwork from the powwow market, which limits the impact of this valuation on the market. Displaying award-winning artwork and their associated ribbons in one’s booth, however, enhances an artisan’s cultural capital and economic viability in the market (see Figure 3). Although less common, some refuse to display their ribbons. Sal (CJ2 10/14/2006) said, with a mischievous smile, that he leaves his ribbons home because “I don’t need to show my ribbons; I’m a poor boy from the rez,” suggesting that poverty and the reservation are characteristics valuable in the exchange context of the powwow market not his successful negotiation of the art contest.

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Figure 3.

Wigwam Powwow Juried Art Show 2005 First Place (photo courtesy of the artist, Rebecca Maracle-Aschmann).

Artisan-vendors often enter the same piece in show-after-show; therefore, it can accumulate ribbons and prize money across time and space. This value accumulation is visible through the physical display of ribbons and the often much higher than average powwow prices associated with prize-winning pieces. Appadurai (1986a) has referred to this process as an “intensification of commoditization” (p. 28). While often still available for sale, the high prices of prize-winning pieces decrease their exchangeability or alienability in the parlance of Annette Weiner’s (1992) famous work, within the powwow market context because the average powwow consumer cannot afford them. As Appadurai (1986a) has argued, the diversion of objects from their customary circuits is meaningful only in relation to the paths from which they stray. High prices for artwork are associated more with the Indian art market and their average customer, the collector. According to artisan-vendors, collectors make up only 6%–10% of powwow market consumers.

The increase in value and inalienability of powwow market objects that comes with an increase in price and an association with the art market can be read as the vendor’s “power to keep” (Weiner, 1992). As Weiner argues, the ability to control the alienability of objects is a sign of power, through the limitation of exchange—the power to keep—one’s ability to attract is empowered. Brad made this connection explicit when we were discussing how his bear claw necklace was an attention getter. “High-priced, award-winning pieces bring people in; we’ve sold items around the Bear Claw.” Successful participation in powwow art contests marks the valued powwow identity artisan, and the display of prize ribbons associates this value with particular forms of material culture. At the same time, this increase in value decreases the objects’ exchangeability within this market because the majority of customers in the powwow domain cannot afford these items, only “collectors” can. However, because the artisan and object remains in the market, the relational aspect of value is highlighted as artisan-vendors draw upon an art valuation to sell, and thus alienate, other powwow merchandise to customers in a different value sphere.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to complicate our understanding of the powwow arts and crafts market through a focus on the processes of valuation that link objects and people. While one can argue that powwow merchandise enters a commodity stage when introduced into the market, a characterization often contrasted to the category art, this characterization of powwow objects ignores much of the complexity of valuation engendered through market practices. By focusing on market practices such as discourse and the art contest that differentiate artisan-vendors from other vendors, we learn that multiple regimes of value are negotiated within the powwow arts and crafts market. Myers (2001b) suggested that the domain of material culture is complex because of the potential of objects to slippage, which makes their assignment to singular regimes of value problematic. Powwow objects and people can move up in value because artisan-vendors are actively engaged in value reproduction.

In the powwow context, sellers differentiate the cultural category artisan from the term vendor, even if individuals claim both identities. Powwow art contests draw upon processes of valuation associated with the larger art market such as ethno-aesthetic categories of production to create an artisan-vendor community of privilege within the powwow market. Members of this community can convert this value into increased sales of prize-winning merchandise to mainstream stakeholders within the field of art such as institutions and collectors. In addition, increased prices for prize-winning items and their display within the powwow market signal an artisan-vendor’s power to keep. Artisan-vendors use this power to increase sales to the majority of powwow consumers who occupy a different value sphere. This negotiation of the complexity of the powwow market enables artisan-vendors to foster an artisan status within the market, without losing the economic game.

Through participation in powwow art contests and the successful negotiation of the value-producing processes inherent in them, powwow artisan-vendors work to reproduce an aura of authenticity that links themselves and their objects to a history of valuation associated with the field of Indian art. These processes of reproduction mark artisan-vendors who participate in the powwow market as stakeholders in the cultural field of Indian art. While powwow scholarship has constructed a negative relationship with the powwow market, this in itself signals the acknowledgement of the powwow market as part of the Indian art field. Powwow artisan-vendors draw upon this hierarchical valuation to construct negative relationships with other vendors and their merchandise within the powwow market. Ultimately, through the engendering of their status, artisan-vendors mark other vendors who occupy different positions within the powwow market also as stakeholders.