Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

This cult of authenticity brought about a dramatic shift in attitudes toward Native Americans. The same year that Jarvie made his close copy of an Anasazi pot, Gustav Stickley’s magazine, the Craftsman, proclaimed, “The only handicraft this country knows [is] that of the Indian.” Every other aspect of American culture had been imported from somewhere or other. Only Native traditions had sprung from this soil, this land. And only in Native communities, undisturbed by industry and the other trappings of modernity, was craft still intrinsic to everyday life. Already in 1904, Stickley had visited an Indian School at Fort Yuma, California, where he urged instructors not to impose “the white man’s way” on the children and to respect traditional Native skills such as basketry and pottery.3