Unmaking Tradition: Indigenous Artistic Revitalization and Craft Knowledge During the “Indian New Deal”

Abstract

“Unmaking Tradition” analyzes three government- and museum-sponsored projects during the 1930s and 1940s that sought to “revitalize” customary Native American arts. Amidst the WPA’s unprecedented federal investments in the arts and the Indian Reorganization Act’s reversal of assimilationist Indian policy, the interwar period marked an era of broad reckoning—both within and outside of Indigenous communities—regarding what “tradition” meant and the place of tradition(s) within modern artistic practice. This dissertation argues that craft became a central medium for Native artists and intellectuals to reframe colonial tropes of tradition, authenticity, and historical study that dominated the study and sale of their artwork. Craft revitalization, for these projects’ participants, did not denote an unproblematic return to a presumed period of “cultural purity”; rather, it was a modern impetus to redefine ancestral images and craft practices to resist ongoing intellectual and political settler-colonialism. This argument unfolds over three case studies. Chapter 1 discusses the WPA-funded Seneca Arts Project, an attempt to create a modern Seneca ethnographic collection. This chapter illustrates how copying and historical replication became modes for Seneca artists to test the plasticity of Seneca notions of tradition. Chapter 2 turns to the Hopi Silver Project, a museum’s attempt to invent an “authentic” Hopi style of jewelry, thereby sending ancestral Hopi images into economic circulation in defiance of Hopi cultural protocols. Analyzing two Hopi artists’ reinterpretation of the project after World War II, I illustrate how these artists developed aesthetic strategies to harness image circulation reparative ways. Chapter 3 addresses the Nome Skin Sewers Cooperative Association, an Iñupiaq collective commissioned by the US Army to create fur parkas and mukluks for soldiers during World War II. Fur sewing, I argue, represented a place-based form of knowledge that resisted incorporation into extractivist systems of western science and capitalism, thereby providing a basis for Iñupiaq political advocacy. Together, these chapters highlight how Indigenous participants contested these projects’ top-down directives, articulating “craft knowledge” as a living practice that defied outsiders’ desires to codify, taxonomize, and define it.