This question has often come up over the years. This year, we were in a position to attend and pulled into the parking lot for the Friday August 9 day of the annual event. There were a lot fewer cars than we remembered. An immediate disappointment arose when we bought our tickets and learned that the powwow had been canceled. The booths along the perimeter of the buildings had Natives selling stuff that was definitely NOT locally made. Inside, things seemed back to normal except for the fact that the interior booths were reduced to a very small number. I remember when the booths lined the entire perimeter of the great hall.
Can we blame the recession? Yes, but there seems to be a more complex string of issues. Those who run and organize the Ceremonial have been plagued by fundraising woes. I recall about five years ago they turned to the state for funding solutions. Ooops! One reality is that the number of active trading posts with powerful followings of artists and collectors has greatly diminished. Trading posts are not what they once were, and Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado AZ may soon be one of the few real remaining relics of this enterprise.
The outdoor booths at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial.
One object isn’t enough, oh no! The new collector is ready to embark willy-nilly on a hunt for objects like the ones in his/her possession. Frankly, new collectors can’t get enough exposure to these objects. If you don’t live in the Southwest, you comb through local shops, dealers, and shows. It only took one trip for me to realize that big successful enterprises like the Brimfield (MA) antique shows are NOT the place to find one’s objects of desire. A savvy dealer has been there the day before and taken anything of note. New collectors need to understand these realities before expending too much manic energy in fruitless hunts.
Sometimes hunts prove beneficial after the fact. We started visiting trading posts on the Navajo reservation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some had already stopped being genuine sources for Indian arts. Yet we discovered an affordable and fantastic rug at the Crystal Trading Post and a saddle blanket at Shonto, and learned about the historical importance of trading posts, even though their day had passed by the mid-1970s. New posts, operating like galleries are less plentiful, but when you hunt down one like Twin Rocks Trading in Bluff, Utah, it’s like hitting a bulls-eye!
