\u201cMany things would fool me. I can\u2019t be an expert on the art works of scores of Native nations,\u201d admits Berlo, a professor emerita in the Department of Art and Art History<\/a> at the University of Rochester<\/a>. But a Northwest Coast Native mask made in Indonesia?\u00a0\u201cWell, that\u2019s relatively easy.\u201d<\/p>\n As the commercial value of Native American art has increased dramatically over the last decades, so has its forgery<\/a>.<\/p>\n At one point, a top international auction house approached Berlo, an expert on Native American art and visual culture, for her opinion on a notebook of complex 19th-century Native American pencil drawings. There was just one small problem.<\/p>\n Berlo knew it was a fake. She was also convinced that the late Mexican caricaturist, Miguel Covarrubias, in whose estate the notebook was discovered, had never meant for it to be sold as authentic but had merely entertained himself by making his own version of Native art.<\/p>\n An \u201caccidental fake,\u201d as Berlo calls it.<\/p>\n The auction house Sotheby\u2019s, meanwhile, thanked her politely and then contacted other experts. Curators at the Smithsonian Institution agreed with Berlo\u2019s assessment. Eventually some non-academic, a known collector, spun a whole fantasy around the notebook. And up it went for auction as the real McCoy.<\/p>\n \u201cAnybody in art history who deals with major auction houses gets disillusioned very quickly,\u201d Berlo says.<\/p>\n Of course, forgery and mimicry aren\u2019t new phenomena. Renaissance artists regularly imitated<\/a> classical originals. Take for example Sandro Botticelli\u2019s famous Birth of Venus<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>in which the goddess covers her nakedness with her hands. That particular pose\u2014cribbed from classical sources\u2014was so widely copied in the Renaissance that it had its own name, \u201cVenus pudica.\u201d<\/p>\n Following decades of research and interviews with curators, collectors, restorers, Native artists, and replica makers, Berlo has traced the historical and social contexts of forgeries, imitations, replications, and appropriations by both Native and non-Native makers. The result is her newest book, Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions<\/em><\/a> (University of Washington Press, 2023).<\/p>\n \u201cAn excellent question,\u201d says Berlo with a sigh. Recently, the FBI called to ask if she could lead a Zoom conference for a group of special agents. She told them they\u2019d be disappointed.<\/p>\n Those hoping for hard-and-fast rules won\u2019t get them from Berlo, who says she\u2019s not interested in being able to declare authoritatively, \u201cThis is how you tell which one is fake. And, no, real moosehide doesn\u2019t feel like this.\u201d Instead, she\u2019s digging into the bigger cultural issues.<\/p>\n Her book is an invitation to ponder the tangled history of Native art. Thoughtful and nuanced in her writing, Berlo seeks answers in the gray areas, acknowledging that what constitutes \u201cgenuine\u201d versus \u201cfake\u201d when it comes to Native American identity and Native objects is often not clearcut.<\/p>\n Honored by the Native American Art Studies Association in 2023 with its lifetime achievement award<\/a>, Berlo says she tried to show that \u201csomething that seems very simple, is in reality complex and complicated, not something to make a snap judgment about.\u201d<\/p>\n After a more than four-decades-long career<\/a> in art history, she wrote her latest book also in the hopes that younger generations of scholars won\u2019t rush to immediate judgment and condemn automatically \u201cas cultural appropriation\u201d when non-Native people are involved in creating Native-style art.<\/p>\n Replica-making by non-Natives, Berlo points out, can entail painstaking training with Native crafts people, researching tribal histories, becoming expert in various techniques, and attempting to ensure the preservation of knowledge and traditions.<\/p>\n She tells the story of Paul and Laurel Thornburg<\/a>, non-Natives who make \u201cauthentic replicas\u201d from scratch. The Arizona couple has experimented with various aspects of making so-called Mimbres pottery\u2014specifically, the pre-historic ceramic clay bowls featuring decorations of geometric patterns and natural life that were produced by the indigenous peoples of the Mimbres Valley<\/a> in New Mexico about a thousand years ago.<\/p>\n Every aspect of the couple\u2019s craft conforms as closely as possible to ancient Mimbres-making practice, Berlo observed\u00ad\u2014from finding the right white clay, to firing bowls in open pits, to assessing the advantages of oak over cottonwood as fuel. Their experimentations, instructions, and results of nearly 40 years of reproducing Native pottery are carefully recorded in photos and notes that the couple intends to donate to the Arizona State Museum.<\/p>\n That begs the question\u2014is Native art automatically a forgery if it\u2019s made by a non-Native artist, even if it conforms to all the original procedures? Is careful reproduction a kind of illegitimate appropriation? Opinions differ widely, often depending on age.<\/p>\n \u201cFor many of my colleagues under 40, it\u2019s cut and dry: You\u2019re either Native or non-Native. It\u2019s either right or it\u2019s wrong,\u201d she says. \u201cBut life is not that simple.\u201d<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the issue of Native artists\u2019 making replicas themselves. Is that considered forgery, too?<\/p>\n Take, for instance, the example of the Seneca people of western New York who replicated their ancestral arts<\/a> during the Great Depression, under the auspices of the 1935 Works Progress Administration<\/a>, a government employment and infrastructure program created by President Franklin Roosevelt.<\/p>\n \u201cThe impetus may be principally economic, and arise from outside the community,\u201d Berlo writes, acknowledging that \u201caesthetic pride in the work of ancestors is not incompatible with a desire to earn a living through one\u2019s art.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, borrowing ideas and using techniques from other cultures is nothing new. \u201cIf people only knew history, says the pedantic scholar in me, they would see that these actions are so old, and happen all around the world,\u201d says Berlo, who has authored, coauthored, and coedited a dozen books, including four textbooks and a memoir, Quilting Lessons: Notes from the Scrap Bag of a Writer and Quilter<\/em><\/a> (Bison Books, 2001). Hardly anybody would argue colonialism didn\u2019t involve stealing and usurping. \u201cI\u2019m not saying, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s good.\u2019 But it\u2019s always been that way,\u201d she notes.<\/p>\n Native American arts have long been enlivened by outside influences and additions. \u201cEveryone thinks of beadwork, when they think of Native American art,\u201d she says. But beads were introduced from Venice more than 200 years ago. \u201cNo one would say that beads are now not \u2018traditional\u2019 in Native art.\u201d<\/p>\n While cultural sensitivities have evolved over the last two decades, leading to greater awareness of cultural appropriation or misappropriation (such as reducing Native culture to a Halloween costume or party theme), gray areas nonetheless persist.<\/p>\n Tracing the long history of non-Natives \u201cplaying Indian\u201d and replicating Native American art comes with a whole host of underlying motivations, many of which have no harmful intentions but, rather, are signs of admiration, Berlo contends. Often the answer lies in the eye of the beholder.<\/p>\n \u201cThe long-standing Anglo-American desire to recall and embody a mythic Native past is a troubling one, rooted in a deeply violent and racist past, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of American history recognizes,\u201d Berlo writes in her chapter \u201cCultural Cross-Dressers: A Long History of Imitating Indians.\u201d Describing her visits to non-Native groups who engage in various reenactments of either fictional or historic Native events, Berlo discovered that while some of the participants \u201cdid have romanticized ideas,\u201d many more demonstrated \u201cso much knowledge and respect.\u201d<\/p>\n The role-playing phenomenon is not limited to America. Germans, Berlo notes, love imitating a romanticized version of Native Americans, a tradition that predates even the (often inaccurate) adventure tales of widely read German author Karl May (1842\u20131912). According to Berlo, many Germans have been fascinated by North American Indians since the first translation of James Fenimore Cooper\u2019s Leatherstocking Tales<\/em> nearly 200 years ago. Today, one would be hard-pressed to find a German who doesn\u2019t know the dashing Apache chief Winnetou<\/a> and his white \u201cblood brother\u201d Old Shatterhand, May\u2019s most famous fictional characters.<\/p>\n Since the early 1990s, the German town of Radebeul (May\u2019s last residence) has hosted an annual outdoor festival during which locals, dressed in pseudo-Native garb, participate as extras in the reenactments of the author\u2019s famous stories. An even larger, live outdoor drama, the Karl-May Spiele<\/a> in Bad Segeberg, has been running \u201cIndian\u201d theater performances every summer for the past 70 years.<\/p>\n Lakota artist and scholar Arthur Amiotte, one of Berlo\u2019s friends and past coauthors, has worked as a consultant for the Karl May Museum. \u201cHe\u2019s very relaxed about all of this,\u201d Berlo says.<\/p>\n At one point, her research took an unexpected turn.<\/p>\n In coastal British Columbia, Canada, Berlo met a Native American who admitted to buying \u201cIndian\u201d quilled bags<\/a>, used by his family for ceremonial dances, from \u201ca white guy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a cosmopolitan world,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s no one-size-fits-all if you really take seriously the fact that Native cultures have interacted with so many forces in culture and history over the past 500 years.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Diptych](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/inline-not-native-american-art-janet-berlo.jpg\")
What is \u2018real\u2019 Native American art?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Peplica](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/inline-native-american-art-replica-quilled-leather-pouch.jpg\")
The paradox of \u2018authentic replicas\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Archival](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/inline-native-american-art-replicas-seneca.jpg\")
The spectrum from admiration to appropriation <\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Archival](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/inline-not-native-american-art-replicas-appropriation.jpg\")
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