Native American Antiques

Thousands of years before America was “discovered,” Native Americans were creating objects for everyday use that would one day be considered works of art. The earliest of these were arrowheads, baskets, and pottery. Such items were originally intended for use in hunting and storage, respectively, but today they are collected for their fine craftsmanship and beauty. According to the archaeological record, Native American baskets, be they coiled, plaited, or twined, have been produced in what is now the United States for more than 10,000 years. Whether they were made for food storage, winnowing, or even to carry water, these baskets were built to last. In the Southwestern United States, baskets were made of tough fibrous materials such as willow, cottonwood, sumac, and redbud, with yucca root, cedar bark, and maidenhair fern stems added for color. During the 19th century, the art of Native American basketry almost died out, as metal cookware and containers pushed fibrous alternatives aside. In addition, the time-consuming practice of gathering materials, preparing them, and then doing the weaving itself was next to impossible for Native Americans uprooted from their historical homelands and forced onto remote reservations. But by the 1890s, as railroads were beginning to bring settlers and sightseers to the American West, new markets opened for baskets by Pauite, Apache, Yavapai, Pima, Chemehuevi, Kawaiisu, Havasupai, Pueblo, and Hopi makers. While the forms, materials, and construction techniques of these baskets mostly remained traditional, the decorations were often dictated by non-native retailers and dealers, who knew what their non-native customers wanted. The result was a handmade, traditional basket, whose graphic decoration had been designed for tourists. Another Native American art form that transformed in order to appeal to non-natives was jewelry. For much of Native American history, jewelry meant shell beads, as in the white and purple beads made from clam shells by Algonquin and Iroquois tribes in the northeastern United States—when enough of these beads were strung together to form a wide belt, they could be used as currency called wampum. In the Southwest, members of the landlocked Hohokam were forced to trade for shells with people who lived along the coast of the Gulf of California. These shells were then etched with an acid derived from local cactus. Other groups such as the Mound Builders who were part of the Mississippian cultures incised designs on shells, which were then wore as amulets or pendants. The sterling-silver jewelry that today is so associated with Native American arts did not arrive until the middle of the 19th century, when Navajo artisans, who were already working with copper and brass, learned silversmithing techniques from nearby Mexican smiths. Soon, these artisans and their descendants were combining silver with local turquoise to establish an aesthetic that became a signature of Native American culture, even if it was not precisely indigenous. As with Native American basketry, Native American jewelry was heavily influenced by non-native traders, who knew what would sell best in the curio shop of the nearest Harvey House along the route of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. One early and venerable style was the squash-blossom necklace, which was so popular with tourists that Navajo artisans were soon having to import inferior-quality turquoise after local sources of the good stuff had been mined out—the best pieces vintage and antique pieces were labeled with the name of their source mine. Other tribes that have made names for themselves in the jewelry trade include the Pueblo, Zuni, and Hopi. The Navajo also excelled at wool weaving, which they learned from the Pueblo in the late 17th century, when the Pueblo fled Spanish incursions on their ancestral lands for the safety of life among the Navajo. At first, Navajo weavers confined their output to blankets, but beginning in the late 19th century, Navajo artisans added rugs to their fiber repertoire when they realized that many of their non-native blanket customers were using their blankets as rugs anyway. Accordingly, Navajo weavers began making their rugs heavier, added borders, and even ditched tradition geometric motifs for pictorials of horses and cowboys—the myth of the West woven by the vanquished. Durable yarn imported from Pennsylvania and colored by aniline dyes soon produced what we think of today as the quintessential multi-colored Navajo blanket or rug, but as with a lot of Native American products, the popularity of these pieces had ebbed by the 1920s. Another important area for Native American art and antiques is the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Canada, where Native Americans are referred to as people of the First Nations. Once upon a time, indigenous people who lived in the northernmost regions of North America were collectively called Eskimos, but since 1977, that moniker has largely been replaced by the word Inuit, which is still sometimes spelled “Innuit” and includes people and cultures that also self-identify as Inupiat, Yupik, Inuvialuit, and Kalaallit. To the west, in Alaska, are the Aleut, while southeastern Alaska and southwestern Canada are home to the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian. For collectors, the output of these people is usually in the form of soapstone figurines and wood carvings, although basketry has also been a much admired product of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.