Old Town Scottsdale has sold Native American art for more than seventy years, and the result is a strange mix. On Main Street and Fifth Avenue you can buy work by some of the best living Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo artists in the country. A block away, you can buy a cuff stamped out overseas with a dyed stone in it and a card calling it “Southwestern.” Sometimes they share a case. Sorting them out just takes the right questions.
The law is on your side, in writing
The federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 is a truth-in-advertising law. It makes it illegal to offer or display for sale any art or craft in a way that falsely suggests it was made by a Native American, or by a member of a particular tribe. For the purposes of the Act, a Native American artist means an enrolled member of a federally or state-recognized tribe, or someone the tribe has certified as an artisan. The penalties are serious, and complaints go to the Indian Arts and Crafts Board at the Department of the Interior.
Two catches. First, the law covers what the seller claims, so words like “Native-inspired,” “Indian-style,” and “Southwestern” are the tell: they’re chosen because they claim nothing. Second, a spoken promise is hard to prove. What protects you is paper.
The receipt rule
Before you pay real money:
- Ask who made it. The artist’s name and nation.
- Look for a hallmark. Most serious contemporary jewelers sign their work. No hallmark isn’t proof of a fake, but it means you’re trusting the dealer.
- Ask about the stone. Natural, stabilized, reconstituted, or imitation. See below.
- Ask about the metal. Sterling silver is usually marked “sterling” or “.925.” “Nickel silver” and “German silver” contain no silver at all.
- Get all of it on the receipt. Artist, tribe, materials, stone treatment. A dealer who won’t write down what they just told you has told you something else.
Turquoise, decoded
- Natural. Cut and polished, nothing added. Rarer than the windows suggest.
- Stabilized. Soft turquoise infused with resin so it can be cut and worn. It’s common and it’s honest, as long as the seller says so. Much of the turquoise in good jewelry is stabilized.
- Reconstituted. Turquoise chalk or scrap ground up and bound into blocks with resin. Cheap, and should be priced that way.
- Imitation. Dyed howlite, dyed magnesite, or plastic. Legal as itself, not as turquoise.
Mine names — the famous ones people drop to justify a price — are claims until someone can document them. And if an entire cuff costs less than dinner, it isn’t what the tag implies.
Techniques worth knowing
Navajo silversmiths are known for stamped and cast silver, often with big stones. Zuni jewelers do fine inlay and the tiny clustered stones called needlepoint and petit point. Hopi overlay is two layers of silver, with the design cut from the top sheet and the lower sheet oxidized dark. Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, who reinvented Native jewelry with gold and inlaid stone, had his early studio on Fifth Avenue in the 1950s at Lloyd Kiva New’s craft center.
Pottery has its own tells. Hand-coiled pots are built up by hand, often from clay the potter gathered and processed. “Greenware” pots are slip-cast in a commercial mold and then painted; that’s a legitimate product, but it has to be sold as hand-painted, not handmade. Hopi katsina figures are traditionally carved from cottonwood root, and a carving made by someone who isn’t Hopi should say so. Mata Ortiz pottery is beautiful and Mexican; a good shop says so.
Where we send people
- Grey Wolf Gallery on First Avenue, since 1985, is our calibration stop. Ask them to show you Navajo stamping, Hopi overlay, and Zuni inlay side by side at prices you can afford.
- Sewell’s Indian Arts, founded in 1932 and on Fifth Avenue since 1984, is the shop the rest of the street measures itself against.
- Territorial Indian Arts on Main Street, since 1969, for older rugs, baskets, and the historic side of the trade.
- Native Art Market on Main Street is Native-owned and deals directly with hundreds of artists. Ask whether the maker has been in that week.
- Faust Gallery for contemporary work by top living artists
- Old Town Jewels on Brown Avenue has Native silversmiths on staff. Bring the inherited squash blossom with the missing bead.
Thursday evening is the time to shop the galleries, during the Scottsdale ArtWalk. The Old Town walk passes most of these shops.
Buy from the artist
The best purchase is the one where the maker takes your money. Every winter, usually in February, the Arizona Indian Festival at the Civic Center gathers the state’s tribal nations for a free weekend of dance, food, and art; check the city’s calendar for dates. The Heard Museum in Phoenix is the region’s great Native art museum, and its spring Indian Fair & Market is a major artist market; check the Heard’s site for dates.
Your neighbors on the other side of Pima Road
Scottsdale’s east edge borders the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, a sovereign nation of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples, established in 1879. Its own museum, the Huhugam Ki Museum, is free and about fifteen minutes from Old Town, with Akimel O’odham basketry and Piipaash pottery and the history of the people who dug the first canals in this valley, told in their own words. It’s weekday-only and closes for several weeks each fall, so call before you drive.
The etiquette
Ask before you photograph an artist or their work. Haggling with a dealer is normal within reason; grinding down an artist selling their own work at a festival table is not. Keep the receipt with the piece. And buy the piece you keep coming back to, not the one with the biggest markdown. The turquoise you actually love is the only turquoise you’ll wear.