None of the native languages of North America seem to contain a word that can be regarded as synonymous with the Western concept of art, which is usually seen as something separable from the rest of daily life. It might therefore be possible to argue that no art in the Western sense was produced by the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. Judging from the number of books devoted to, of museums exhibiting, and of dealers offering for sale items of 'North American Indian Art', however, we cannot simply let the matter rest there. The question that has to be answered first of all is how objects not conceived as art by their makers have come to be valued as art by their latter-day admirers. For a better appreciation of this transformation it is necessary to look briefly at the history of the encounter between Europe and the manufacturers of the New World.

In 1520, when Albrecht Durer (perhaps the most important of the German artists) saw the treasures that Cortes and his followers had brought back from Mexico, his admiration was spontaneous:

North American Indian artifacts, although made of less valuable materials than the Mexican artifacts seen by Durer, nevertheless shared the same qualities of rarity and exoticism, and were therefore of considerable interest to early European collectors. Some, indeed, ended up in the same Kunst-und-Wunderkammern collections of art (in the sense of human ingenuity) and of marvels that also contained the Mexican objects. Collections strongest on North America were found in Western and Northern Europe, while Middle and South America were best represented in Italy and Germany. They all included a broad range of rarities, both man-made (or 'artificial') and natural. North American ethnographic specimens clearly belonged to the former group, which were valued for their workmanship rather than for their aesthetic qualities. John Tradescant, in the 1616 catalogue of his objects from Virginia, New England, Canada, and Greenland (in the Museum Tradescantianum at South Lambeth, near the City of London) describes such artificialles as 'utensils, household-stuffs, habits, instruments of war used by several nations, rare curiosities of art, etc.'

With the growth of the natural sciences, thanks largely to these very collections, 'natural curiosities' began to be approached in a more systematic manner and became important tools for scientific research. The same cannot be said for the ethnographic collections, which retained their classification as 'artificial curiosities' well into the nineteenth century. Exotic artifacts were sold by dealers in natural history, rather than on the art market, in part because their acquisition was incidental to the collecting of natural history specimens. A frequent criterion was their presumed historical or antiquarian interest: 'Montezuma's battle axe' (which turned out to be from Brazil rather than Mexico), 'Powhatan's mantle' (probably neither a mantle nor ever in the possession of the famous Virginia chief), or a 'Similitude of Pontiac the Indian Chief cut in stone with his own hands' were valued highly on account of their fictitious attributions.

With the rise of ethnography as an academic study in the second half of the nineteenth century, these early artifacts ended up in separate, newly established ethnographic collections. With rare exceptions these collections were part of natural history museums, and the artifacts were still not regarded as art but as specimens. Complete series of objects, illustrating the full range of forms, functions, and techniques, were more in demand than aesthetically pleasing artifacts. Even when the term art; in its modern sense, came to be applied to objects made by native North Americans (or by other non-Western populations), it was commonly modified by adjectives like 'ornamental' or 'decorative' and seen as closer to craftsmanship than to European 'high art'. Questions regarding the priority of representational or ornamental art, or the content and meaning of designs, took precedence over formal and stylistic matters. Since this 'primitive' art was seen as the product of specific cultures, the approach tended to be particularistic. It was also recognized that in tribal societies there was no art divorced from function, and that individual creativity was of less importance than in European art.

Few anthropologists bothered to investigate the role of aesthetic ideas in the tribal world at a time when this could have still been the subject of fieldwork among the native populations of North America. With acculturation progressing at an ever-increasing pace, any of the traditional functions performed by certain objects vanished, or were served by industrially manufactured products. Meaningless artifacts ended up in museums, and with this final harvest the traditional collecting activity more or less came to an end as far as North America was concerned.

While only a limited number of objects continued to be produced for tribal use, the production of crafts for an outside market grew in importance. These 'ethnic' arts, which employed native technologies to satisfy foreign tastes, have a history almost as long as the history of the encounter of Western civilization with the tribal world. They were less restricted by traditional conventions and functions but had to meet the expectations of their White patrons. Depending on the structure of the market, there was a tremendous variation in the quality of what was offered for sale, from exquisite to very poor. Neither producers nor buyers considered these wares works of art. For their makers they were a source of cash income on the basis of traditional skills; for the tourists and visitors they were curios and mementos of past adventures. (There is limited evidence for the influence of Black Americans on Native American arts. Given the fact that slaves often fled their White masters to seek refuge among Indian tribes, it is surprising that only one classic case of stylistic transfer from African art to North American Indian art, a West African drum type found in use among the Choctaw of Louisiana around 1900, has so far come to notice.)

Around 1900, anthropologists in the American Southwest occasionally hired native informants to make drawings of native customs, especially religious ceremonies, which they were not allowed to observe themselves. At about the same time, a few liberal-minded teachers at government Indian Schools in the Southwest (particularly at San Ildefonso) and in Oklahoma (among the Kiowa) encouraged their students to draw and paint native subjects, even though this was contrary to the Federal policy of stifling all expressions of tribalism and traditionalism. These artists worked in the medium of painting, which a White public more readily recognized as potential art than beadwork or porcupine-quill applique; and they probably considered themselves to some extent artists in the Western sense.

Modern European and American artists were slow to discover native North American art when compared with the relatively early interest which African objects had stimulated in cubist art circles. In this case it was especially the émigré European Surrealists (such as Max Ernst) who saw in Native American art the sources of renewal and deeper vision that they held to be representative of the world. These artists were especially attracted to the art of the Northwest Coast because it was largely literary, and their intuitive acceptance of these works was in many ways more broadly based than the anthropologists' recognition of their particular aesthetic principles.

Other modern artists, such as the American John Sloan, were responsible for the greater acceptance of Native America-painting in wider American art circles. By 1920, for example, Sloan had learned about the native painters of San Ildefonso and arranged an exhibition of their works at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Other shows of modern Indian painting followed during the next years. Finally, after a dramatic turn-around in Federal policy, a government-funded Indian Art School known as The Studio was opened in Santa Fe in 1932. In the emerging Pan-Indian painting tradition nobody could fail to recognize art.

The traditional artifacts slumbering in ethnographic museums, however, were still largely regarded only as specimens. An exception was the Denver Art Museum, which was the first museum to exhibit these objects as works of art (in 1925). From its collections came many of the art works shown during the 1931 Exposition of Indian Tribal Art, held in New York. Organized by John Sloan and Oliver LaFarge, the anthropologist, it considered itself 'the first exhibition of American Indian Art selected entirely with consideration of esthetic value' (even if the aesthetic standards were Euro-American rather than indigenous). By showing side by side traditional crafts and watercolors by modern artists, it identified both as part of the same tradition and thus elevated the ethnographic specimens to the status of art. The general public and most ethnographic museums probably could not have cared less, but an important beginning had been made.

During the late 1940s and the 1950s the development was muted, partly because of a lack of public interest in Native American affairs which corresponded to the official assimilationist policy of the period. Most the only non-anthropologists who cared for the native material culture were the hobbyists who strove to emulate native life-styles by meticulously copying tribal products. Their efforts not only resulted in technological insights, but definitely contributed to an understanding of the aesthetic principles involved.

Since the early 1960s, the recognition of North American native art has become universal. Major shows in art museum books, a specialized journal but most of all the tribal crafts, with prices proving them to be art, attest to the successful transformation.

In a significant parallel development, artists such as Fritz Scholder have begun to flee the ghetto of the modern Pan-Indian Institute of American Indian Arts, established in 1962 at Santa Fe as successor of The Studio, devoting itself to education of artists, 'but not as Indian artists.' While Pan-Indian painting is in no sense dead, a new type of native artist has emerged who identifies himself as an Indian, but his art simply as art.