Hopis Angry Over Doll Replicas

KYKOTSMOVI, Ariz. - For the past two months, Burt Poley has gotten up each morning shortly after dawn, unfolded his pocketknife and delicately cut into the large piece of cottonwood root he affectionately calls Sakwahote, or Blue Warrior.

Like most Hopi kachina carvers, Poley puts days of thought into fine-tuning each feature of the intricately carved, 18-inch-high kachina, which will retail for about $3,500.

Hopi carvers living on their reservation's rugged, stair-step mesas have become internationally famous for their hand-carved kachinas, which represent the tribe's deities.

But authentic Hopi kachinas are getting harder to find.

Five doll factories with Navajo workers have opened in northwestern New Mexico in the past four years. Every day, the facilities produce hundreds of machine-cut dolls that are based on Hopi designs and sell for about one-fifth the price of real kachinas.

As a result, Hopi craftsmen and tribal officials are angered over what they call cultural robbery. The tribe is considering plans to copyright or trademark kachinas made by Hopi artisans.

The problem is so widespread that even Arizona Gov. Fife Symington has a large, fake kachina in his office, said Loris Minkler, a cultural expert for the Hopi Tribe.

"It's unheard of for Hopis to make Navajo rugs or Cocopah baskets or Acoma pottery," Minkler said. "There's just a certain line you don't cross. It's hard to imagine the same respect not coming from the other side."

Duane Beyal, assistant to Navajo President Peterson Zah, countered, "All the Navajos want to do is earn a living so they can put groceries on the table."

Beyal said the Hopis should complain to the non-Native Americans who have set up the factories and are profiting through nonenforcement of the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act.

The act requires that for an Indian craft to be labeled authentic, all parts must be made by Indian crafts workers, and no machine parts can be used in the production.

The Navajo dolls are largely machine-made, said Steve Roberts, manager of a doll factory in Thoreau, N.M. He said a kachina that would take as much as a month for a Hopi carver to make can be turned out in 2 1/2 hours in his factory.

A spokesman for the Arizona attorney general's office said the office had received no complaints about the Navajo dolls.

But Martin Link, former director of the Navajo Tribal Museum in Window Rock, Ariz., said it was just the latest example of Navajos' borrowing from other tribes' crafts, a centuries-old practice. The loom used to make Navajo blankets came from the pueblo tribes of New Mexico, he said, while many of the early designs used on the blankets were adapted from the Spanish.

But Ferrell Secakuku, the leading candidate for chairman in this month's Hopi primary election and an in-law of Laurinda Secakuku, said there was a lot of deception going on by the Navajos, who are traditional rivals of the Hopis, a rivalry heightened by a century-old land dispute.

"I don't know if we need a restraining order from the courts, more regulation or what, but something has to be done about this," he said. "Our spiritual realm is being tampered with."