Constructing Authenticity: The Indian Arts and Crafts Board and the Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1935–1985

In 1968 Stephen Richmond, a field representative for the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB), evaluated shops across the eastern seaboard that sold Indian arts and crafts. He found several that sold Saddlecraft, Inc., products using the brand name The Cherokees.¹ The IACB promoted authentic, high-quality products that were handmade by Native Americans in tribal artistic traditions, but Saddlecraft items hardly fit the description. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) Tribal Council and BIA officials had offered an incentives package to Knoxville, Tennessee, businessman P. K. Ferree in 1956. Ferree then opened the Saddlecraft leather goods plant in Cherokee, North Carolina, which machine manufactured tourist souvenirs including moccasins and toy headdresses under the brand The Cherokees. A 1965 article declared Saddlecraft "the largest manufacturer of Indian arts and crafts in the world," even though the products were poor quality, machine-made, and disconnected from tribal artistic traditions.² In the late 1970s Eastern Cherokee artisans asked the IACB to investigate Saddlecraft as a fraudulent, inauthentic producer of Indian arts and crafts. Eventually, Saddlecraft lost its franchise fee exemption and privileged placement in the stores of National Park Service concessionaires. Yet, Saddlecraft products were made by Cherokee Indians in the town of Cherokee, the capital of the Eastern Band and a town where tourism itself had become a tribal tradition. The Indian Arts and Crafts Board judged Saddlecraft products to be counterfeit because they failed to meet the IACB's standard of authenticity.

The board's authenticity standard, however, was rife with contradictions. From the 1930s to the 1980s Cherokee artisans and white staffers from the IACB collaborated to construct a concept of authentic Cherokee arts and crafts based on the race of artisans, high product quality standards, the use of handicraft techniques, and an unbroken link to a selective past romanticized as primitive. To build the market for authentic Cherokee arts and crafts, the IACB used ironic methods such as innovative product development, elaborate marketing, formal quality control processes, and guarding the marketplace against counterfeits. The IACB's contradictory ideology and methods in constructing authenticity are nowhere more evident than in the Saddlecraft controversy. To be considered authentic by IACB standards, Cherokee goods had to be of superior quality, be handmade by Cherokee Indians, and convey a deep sense of cultural persistence, even if that sense was constructed. While some Cherokee artisans collaborated in modifying art forms to raise product prices and increase their consumer appeal, the IACB was the dominant partner in constructing authenticity from the 1930s through the late 1940s. Thereafter, Cherokee artisans asserted increasing control over the authenticity construct and continued to apply it to Cherokeemade arts and crafts. Composed from the beginning of political insiders, the IACB's ideology and methods seem convoluted, contradictory, and condescending.³ Its notion of authenticity conformed to and influenced the tastes of white consumers, reformers, and government staffers. In constructing authenticity the IACB commodified an image of a romanticized, primitive Indian uncorrupted by modern American culture. It idealized this imagined Indian for providing aesthetic genuineness in bland, industrial modern America.⁴

This article explores the ideology and methods behind the board's problematic construction of authenticity. Several scholars have examined the intersection of tourism, white expectations of Native American authenticity, and their impact on American Indian artists and communities.⁵ Others have explored the relationship between tourism, authenticity, and arts and crafts in white Appalachian communities.⁶ Others still have analyzed the importance of authenticity and commodification of native culture in the tourism industry itself.⁷ There is, however, almost no literature on the collaboration between Native American artisans and the IACB in constructing authenticity for Native American arts and crafts.⁸ This case study of the process among the Eastern Cherokees will help fill that gap.

The U.S. Congress created the Indian Arts and Crafts Board on August 27, 1935, to "promote the economic welfare of the Indian tribes … through the development of Indian arts and crafts and the expansion of the market for the products of Indian art...