Native American Artist's Work Stolen, Copied Around the World
So, when an ad popped up recently advertising a “Navajo Tufa Cast Corn Stalk Design Bracelet” cast from 55 grams of sterling silver, it got my attention, especially because its price was an implausible $6.48.
“Because of Black Friday, we produced … a lot of items, but we can’t sell them all … now we need to pay suppliers a lot of money,” is how the Cuterise website explained the low price.
The Scam Detector website rated Cuterise “Risky. Dubious. Perilous.” But curiosity got the best of me, so I accepted the risk and ordered the bracelet. While waiting for it to ship — if anything shipped at all — I decided to learn everything I could about it.
Tufa casting involves pouring molten silver into a mold carved out of soft volcanic stone found in New Mexico and Arizona. The Navajo have been using it to make jewelry since the mid-1800s.
Tufa is fragile and can crumble after a single casting. For this reason, artists often make a “master” using molten lead instead of silver that can be used to mold and cast multiple copies.
Genealogy of a bracelet
An image search on Google Lens turned up several matching bracelets, ranging in price from $300 to $900, but none were hallmarked by the maker.
I found the identical bracelet on the eBay auction site, which named the maker: Navajo Nation artist Eugene Mitchell. I tracked down his son Reggie Mitchell and sent him the photo of the bracelet I’d ordered. He confirmed that his father made that design in the 1970s.
“Our family has been making jewelry for a long time,” he said. “I’m the fifth generation, and my oldest son Bronson is the sixth.”
And for six generations, he added, his family has helped make Gallup, New Mexico, arts and crafts dealers rich.
“Back in the ‘70s, the FBI investigated Gallup because more 100-dollar bills were circulating there than in all of Las Vegas,” he said. “Gallup produced over 200 millionaires in that seven- to 10-year time period, and the source was Native American jewelry.”
I couldn’t find any data to confirm this, so I reached out to the Gallup McKinley County Chamber of Commerce.
“While the story has circulated in and around our community for years, it is more urban legend than truth,” Chamber of Commerce CEO Bill Lee responded via email. “What I will tell you is that even in today's world of credit/debit cards, Gallup merchants still deal with very high volumes of cash.”
Reggie Mitchell remembers going with his father to Gallup, where he says a dealer “would always try to lowball the value” of his work.
“If it was two pieces of jewelry, they would give him money to make two more pieces and buy two meals,” he said. “And if they paid him, say, $100 for one piece, they’d turn around and sell it for six, seven, $800.”
It was on one of those trips to Gallup that Eugene Mitchell was robbed.
“My dad used to keep his lead masters in old coffee cans,” Mitchell said. “One day, he came out of a shop and discovered someone had broken his car window and taken the cans.”
Mitchell isn’t sure whether the master for the cornstalk bracelet was among the items stolen that day. He says his father found out later that New Mexico galleries were making rubber molds of the designs and selling copies “on the cheap.”
“And my dad would see them and say, ‘That's my work, that’s my piece!’”
After that, the elder Mitchell cut out the middleman, and today, the family sells directly to their customers.
Bait and switch
I was surprised when Cuterise emailed me delivery tracking information. My order originated in Dongguan, China, a city dubbed “the world’s factory” and was now in transit to the U.S.
Clearly, I was going to receive something for my $6.48. But what? A plastic bracelet?
Ten days later, my order arrived. The package was flat and squishy. I tore it open and almost laughed. They’d sent me a pair of cheap stretch leggings printed to look like blue jeans – buttons, rivets and all.
My amusement faded as I thought about everything Reggie Mitchell told me. The family may not be using middlemen anymore, but Eugene Mitchell is still being exploited — this time by fraudsters halfway around the globe using photographs of a bracelet he made — and lost — 50 years ago.