"Authenticity " and the Contemporary Northwest Coast Indian Art Market*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The "Stretched Beaver Pelt " tag is familiar to those who have shopped in Canada for contemporary native art. The tag certifies the "authenti-city " of the Canadian Indian art object to which it is attached. A simi-lar tag, created by the British Columbia Indian Arts and Crafts Society, reassures the cautious buyer with the words, "Look for this tag, your guarantee of authentic Indian arts and crafts. " The tag also confirms that the object is "handmade by a native Indian of B.C., " and, along with the price, may carry the artist's name and tribe, the date, and a brief description of the article. But what is the authenticity which these tags claim to guarantee? Who defines it? Is there such a thing as native Indian art which is not authentic? This paper examines authenticity as it relates to contemporary Northwest Coast Indian art produced for the marketplace. Consumer expectations of Indian art will be shown to reflect the conceptualizations of "Indian-ness " that are often imposed on native art production. The contemporary revival of Northwest Coast Indian art, which began in the 1960s, is largely the result of changing social, economic and politi-cal factors within both native society and the larger non-Indian society. The last two decades have witnessed continuing Indian political activity, a new interest by non-Indians in ecology and "the people of nature, " the attempted creation of a Canadian culture by the federal government, the implementation of government funding for the arts, and increased pub-licity for Northwest Coast Indian art through books and museum exhi-bitions. An accompanying extremely important development has been the growth of the non-Indian buying public. All these factors have created a climate favouring an emphasis on native traditions and a
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".