Columnist Susan Snyder: Real love goes into real crafts

Sunday, June 4, 2000 | 8:53 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Little brown boxes were lined up like soldiers along the display case at Frances Begay's Boulder City jewelry shop.

Address labels showed destinations in Texas, Illinois, Colorado, California, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. American Indian jewelry apparently is hot. Begay has a website and sells stuff on e-bay.

"We ship it all over," Begay said as she taped shut another box bound for Texas. "When I'm not out here, I'm back there polishing and grinding."

The Navajo woman operates and stocks her store with the help of her youngest son, Erick Begay, and Val Tsosie, a Navajo friend to whom they taught the craft.

The trio make most of the jewelry sold at the shop, which sits in a small strip center on the town's north edge. The rest of the jewelry, pottery, kachina dolls and rugs they sell come from American Indian artists on Arizona's Zuni Reservation or around Santa Fe, N.M. Frances Begay chooses those things in person.

Their items aren't cheap. But they're honest-to-goodness Indian-made at a time when a lot of what's sold out there isn't -- even when the tags say so.

Last month a group of American Indian artists told a U.S. Senate panel federal officials are not enforcing a law that says items sold as Indian-made must be made by Indians. They estimated half of all Indian-style items sold in the United States are fakes.

Mass-produced imposters are cheap and easy to sell. But buyers are not only being duped, they're cheating generations of artists who make their livings creating the real thing.

"It happens all the time. We'll have rugs in here, and somebody will come in and say, 'The guy down the street has these for $30. How come yours is $600?' It's because his is Mexican and ours is Navajo," Erick Begay said.

Same goes for the pottery. Buyers who see fakes sold for $20 at a "trading post" don't understand why a similar pot costs $200 at a place such as the Begays'.

It's craftsmanship. Authentic ones are made by hand with coils of clay, the same way they have been made for eons. Erick Begay says most potters still dig their own clay.

"I know one old lady who goes down to the riverbed and grinds it up herself," Frances Begay added.

Frances Begay grew up in Holbrook, Ariz., at the edge of the Navajo Reservation. Relatives taught her jewelry-making, and she began making and selling it to support her four sons. While living in Santa Fe, she joined other native artists who sold their wares in front of the historic Palace of Governors.

Erick made his first pendant when he was 6 years old. His mother sold it to a woman from back East, teaching her son early on that this was not only their heritage but a ticket to financial independence.

Tsosie, 33, learned to make jewelry about seven years ago after asking the Begays to make a piece for her brother. They offered to teach her instead.

Tsosie's fingertips are blackened from cutting and polishing stones and silver. She lives in Las Vegas, but home will always be the Navajo Reservation. Her art is part of that.

"The older Navajos say creation is the most important part of life," she says. "That's what this is."

And you get what you pay for.