Inside the world of Indigenous art fraud

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Often, when settlers visit places with long Indigenous histories, they are floored by the beauty of the artwork. And often they want to take some home to support the community and to support the artist, of course. But let’s be real, it’s also a way to acquire a unique memento of a vacation or a visit. Unless, of course, it’s not unique at all. Today we’ll meet an Indigenous artist who has taken on a side job fraud detective. It has been getting easier and easier to copy designs from Indigenous artists to print goods with those designs or even have pieces of artwork created whole cloth based on the original and sell them to anyone willing to buy. Whether that is a tourist listening to a long story about the duplicate’s origin or just someone browsing an online T shirt store with no clue. They’re purchasing artwork stolen from an Indigenous creator. So, yeah, fraud detective in the Indigenous art world, a tough job, but there are things we could do to make it easier to help protect the cultures and the artists that produce these compelling pieces. It’s just a matter of whether or not anyone will bother to do it. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Jason Hunt is an Indigenous artist specializing in traditional Kwagiulth carvings. He is also, as I mentioned, a fraud detective. Hello, Jason.

Jason Hunt Morning.

Jordan Thanks so much for joining us today.

Jason Hunt Thanks for having me.

Jordan I want to start by asking you if you’ve ever seen your own art reproduced fraudulently.

Jason Hunt Yes, I’ve had a few incidences, but the biggest one for me was the incident on a slot machine with one of the symbols being used on the machine itself. Turned out to be one of my masks on the same machine. There was another design on it that I knew was a derivative of my father’s design, but the one that was mine was basically just a copy and paste of my mask.

Jordan What was it like seeing it on a slot machine?

Jason Hunt A little bit shocking. It’s kind of just out of the blue. My wife and I were in a casino in Vancouver, and she was sitting there playing one, and I went over and sat down with her and having a coffee or whatever and started looking at it, and, hey, wait a minute. That’s my mask. It’s a little bit shocking. And they start, well, where did it come from? How did it get there? I remember where I sold the mask. How did it get from there to this person? And he start doing some digging, and the trails sort of went cold. There was one connection from one person to the manufacturer itself down in Nevada, and that’s kind of where my questions stopped getting answered, so I knew I was close to the mark.

Jordan That was going to be my next question, which is, like, what do you do in a situation like that? Did you try to get in touch with the manufacturer of the product and then say, hey, where did you get this design? Who designed it for you, and try to trace it back from there?

Jason Hunt Yeah, pretty much. I got a hold of the company itself and started talking to their well, it turned out to be their lawyers and all that kind of thing. And I contacted the person that I originally sold the piece to. And you start being like an amateur detective, right? You’re going, well, how did this happen? And you start connecting dots along the way and figure out where it went from here to there. And then once it got to that point where I was talking to lawyers, things kind of got to the point where there wasn’t really not much else you could do with it. I don’t have the money to take on a multi billion dollar company. There’s really not much you can do once you get to that point, unfortunately.

Jordan And we’ll get to the lawyers and the copyright in a few minutes. But first, if carving is your day job, I guess, is it fair to say that you’ve kind of made this your night job trying to track this kind of stuff down?

Jason Hunt Yeah, it’s pretty much part of the course of my business. I’ve been carving for a living for 30 years now. Pretty much from the get go, this has been the side gig is trying to wrangle. All the fraudulent stuff started out with mostly ebay and things like that were pretty prevalent at that time. And as we’re rolling along now, it’s quite a bit easier to basically take designs off than that or wherever and stick it on to redbubble and earth forever.

Jordan And some of these print on demand sites, right? So those are the ones that are basically all day, every day you’re battling. How prevalent is this in Canada in the big picture? I mean, let’s take some of the West Coast towns that have long indigenous histories in the land nearby. How common is it to see fraudulent designs and artifacts in the tourist shops?

Jason Hunt Extremely. Basically, anybody walking around in Vancouver, Victoria, Bam, Jasper, any of the touristy places, you’re going to come across fraudulent work. And by fraudulent, I’m describing it as reproduction pieces that aren’t being sold as reproduction, they are being sold as authentic.

Jordan What kind of pieces? Can you give me an example or two?

Jason Hunt Yes, it runs the gamut. I mean, for carvings, it goes from smaller little pendants and things like that to full on mass totem poles, basically everything you can think of. And some of it has been reproduced in a sort of generic fashion where it’s like, here’s a mask that’s a raven or whatever. Quite a bit of it is specifically taken from other artists.

Jordan So you’ll walk around, you’ll see a Robert Davidson mask that got reproduced by somebody else and is claimed as their own. And it’s not being sold as a Robert Davidson mask or with any connection to the original artist?

Jason Hunt No, it’s basically, this is my piece, and this is original and all that kind of thing. So it’s very frustrating. There’s a gallery outside of Vancouver that’s owned by a First Nations fellow that promotes himself as a professional cover. All the pieces on the site are made by him and all this kind of stuff. But the reality is that every single piece that’s represented in the gallery is created in the Philippines or Indonesia and brought over a crate.

Jordan You just touched on what I was about to ask, which is, where does this stuff come from? Who’s making it?

Jason Hunt Yeah. It’s mostly Philippines and Indonesia. Most of the galleries, I would assume, are buying it by the crate load. When you walk into a gallery, there’s a hundred or more pieces that are all just fake like this. I mean, you’re buying them in numbers, right? You’re not buying one or two.

Jordan So you come from and you mentioned in your original answer, you come from a family of artists. You’re the nephew of Richard Hunt, who is a legendary artist on the Northwest Coast. What does this kind of fraud being so prevalent due to the culture that this art represents?

Jason Hunt I mean, I think a lot of people who buy or collect indigenous art, you know, do it in good faith because they find the culture and the artwork. So mesmerizing? Yeah, I mean, I feel like in the scheme of things, it’s watering it down. Right. I actually was talking to somebody here. I run an Airbnb here in town, and I have guests that come in sometimes. They come across to my studio and all that. And one of them was saying last night, he’s like, you know what? We’re looking at buying a piece. But we know that there’s so much of the fake stuff out there, we don’t know how to judge what a real piece looks like. And we don’t want to put the money into buying something that we aren’t 100% sure about. So how do we know? How do they know? Is there any easy way to tell? Well, there’s a few red flags that if you know what you’re looking for, like here on the coast, most pieces are carved in red cedar, yellow cedar, maybe a little alder, things like that, like local woods. But the fraudulent pieces are almost 100%. They’re made out of mahogany or something like that. It’s hard for me to expect a tourist to be able to pick that up. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing about it is, there’s so many different aspects to fraudulent art even that is 100%, because we had a group on Facebook that basically is just dealing with fraudulent art. And a little while ago, we came across a name and an artist that a few of us were kind of looking at going, who is this person? Because they’re so prevalent, like there’s so many pieces, they like, how is it possible that this one guy, part of all this stuff, started looking into it a little further and it turned out that the artist didn’t actually exist. It was a made up name with a made up biography. And basically it was a guy in Vancouver that was hiring a group of I think they were from the Philippines, but there was like five of them, and he was firing them to carve pieces in red cedar and then made up the name of a fake artist.

Jordan Wow, that went on for a good twelve or 15 years before anybody caught on. What happens when you catch on? That’s what I want to know. So you find a slot machine using your design, or you figure out in this group that this artist doesn’t exist. What actual recourse is there legally? Like, what are the next steps to get these people to stop when you catch them?

Jason Hunt Well, I mean, in different scenarios, like for myself, it was basically just an impossibility. I couldn’t go and take on a corporation like that. For the guy that was basically hiring on people and doing this, the galleries that he was selling to because he was selling wholesale, we’re talking hundreds, if not thousands of pieces to reputable galleries that thought they were buying a legitimate artist’s work from this guy. So I think the last thing I heard about it is that they were going to take him to court. It’s been radio silence since then, so I don’t think anything has happened to that. How often does it happen that these things go to court and the person loses and there’s actual recompense? I’ve never even heard of it getting to court. Wow. It’s almost next to impossible. You have to prove so much that it’s your piece, even though we have laws that you would think, like common sense would tell you that copyright should be easy to go after somebody on it, but it’s really not. It’s pretty intensive financially. And to prove that the piece is yours and all sorts of things like that, there’s so many roadblocks to it.

Jordan So there is a senator right now lobbying to convince the government to use copyright laws to more specifically protect First Nations artists. Is that true? Can you explain that a little more?

Jason Hunt From what I gather, she is trying to basically make some of the laws more enforceable.

Jason Hunt I see.

Jason Hunt And some of the punishments just easier to actually go after some of these guys because right now, even if they get caught, it doesn’t mean anything. On part of our little group there, we had a lady named Lucinda Turner, who unfortunately passed away a month or two months ago now, but she was sending out cease and desist letters, basically on the daily she sent out. Basically, I think it was over 1000. It was like 1200 or something.

Jordan Wow. And she would get these things taken down and off the sites and all this kind of thing, which was fine, but there’s no punishment for any of the stuff that people were stealing. So they would take it down. They would just create another business name or whatever and it would be up the next day. So you get no help from Red Bubble or wherever. All these different places, they don’t actually have any mechanism to stop any of this?

Jason Hunt Well, I mean their argument I’m sure is that they’re not even really selling it. They’re just providing the design for whoever wants to put something on a shirt. Yeah, they’re basically putting the onus on whoever is selling the shirt to be a good person but not steal a design. But do they get banned from the site even? Not even that. So I mentioned earlier that you come from a family of artists and there are people in your family who are established. But as these frauds become more commonplace and with sites like the ones you’ve mentioned make it easier for them to be widely distributed, what does it do to the young artists who are trying to make a name for themselves and differentiate themselves from everything that’s already flooding these stores? I would think it’s probably pretty onerous. I just got back from a little road trip and I was up in the Rockies and went into some galleries in Jasper. The first thing I see is a couple of fake masks and all that. And you think they’re going to be cheap, but they’re not. It’d be a twelve inch mat sitting there for $900. And you’re like if you’re a starting out kind of carver, you’re basically competing with those. It takes away a good chunk of the market for sure. When you just happen upon those things, do you tell the people running the galleries or would that just be exhausting because you’d be doing it all day? Yeah, you could do it all day and at the end of the day they just probably just yell you out of the store and tell you to take out. I mean, they don’t care. There’s no repercussions for it. And at the end of the day they just look at it as it’s a sale maybe. And I’m not sure how they look at it, to be honest, but obviously they’re doing it for a reason. It sells right and they have easy access to it.

Jordan Is Canada the only place that struggles with this? What do they do about this in the United States?

Jason Hunt For the US. They enforce their rules on authenticity a lot more than we do here. It’s relatively common to hear about people being charged in the states. Alaska, it happens not regularly, but every once in a while I come across a story of a gallery owner or something like that where they put out fake pieces and they get charged. I’m not trying to ask this to sensationalize, but what’s the most bizarre story you’ve encountered while trying to track down this kind of stuff? The fake artist one was a pretty when that one first came through, I was like, man. I was like, Holy cow. You’re getting pretty creative when you’re just creating fake people. But there are two, like, the biggest in the carving part of it. There’s two of the biggest culprits are in Vancouver. They’re pretty egregious, really. One fella, he regularly is down on the steps of the Van Cooperate Gallery, and you’ll have 20 or 30 masks sitting with him that he says that he carved. And he’s not a First Nations fellow to begin with, but he has a whole story about how that works and everything, but he’s there all the time and he’s been doing this for years. The other one is there’s a guy sort of mentioned this earlier at his gallery just outside Vancouver selling all this big stuff with a whole bio that tells you about how many words he’s gotten and all this kind of thing. And I’m assuming that both of these cases have been raised, at least with somebody or someone’s tried to do something. There’s really not much you can do at the moment. There’s not much you can do. But in both of these cases, both these guys take designs that have already been made by other carvers and they get it reproduced overseas and they just call it their own. Right? Right. So, I mean, in some cases, it’s the exact same amount. Like, you’ll look at a Don Julian’s piece or something like that that are very well known carvers, and you’ll see they have it in different sizes and they have it in all sorts of different whatevers, but it’s the same piece because they took it from the same picture.

Jordan So what does Canada need to do? Do we need to put new laws on the books? Do we just need to get serious about what we have? Like, what would make a real difference in force?

Jason Hunt The laws that we have would be great, but maybe something else needs to be added in so that we can make it a little easier to go after these guys. But I also feel like maybe some kind of like a watchdog organization of some sort. It really came to hit home when Lucinda passed away, and now it’s basically a free for all. And she was the only stop gap. She was the only one that was sitting there every day and putting out these letters and trying to get things stopped. And now that she’s gone, it’s like it’s just open season. What can the average Canadian, whether they’re Canadian who wants to buy indigenous artwork or just somebody who’s listening, that’s wrong? What can they do? I guess support. When things start moving down the other direction, things are slow moving. So I don’t expect things to happen today. Everything always takes forever, right? I mean, just voice support for things along the way. And if people are thinking about buying a piece, like do some research into who they’re buying from and what the piece is in this day and age and even in history, it’s very rare that an artist doesn’t sign their peaks. If you hear a story of long lost masterpiece sitting in an attic, blah, blah, all this kind of thing, we don’t know who the master carbon is. And all this, those are all red flags. People fall for those way too often.

Jordan How many people and, I mean, there’s no real answer to this, but has it ever happened to you when somebody who really loves this stuff wants to show off a piece to you or show off their collection to you, and you see it, and you’re just like, oh, I’m sorry. I got to tell you, that’s fake.

Jason Hunt All the time. And honestly, most of the people that have bought something like that, when they hear that it’s not legitimate piece, they generally don’t want to hear it, really. They want to hear the corroboration that they picked out some masterpiece it was sitting in somewhere, but they don’t want to hear that their pieces not legit. That happens all the time. How do you navigate that with them? I have to tell them pretty much. I mean, most of the time, I can send them pictures of pieces that are very similar to the one that they bought. In some cases, the exact piece that they bought, because a lot of the reproductions are not done just once, done hundreds, thousands of times. Well, I guess I can wish you luck, but it sounds like I mean, it sounds like it’s an avalanche and something needs to change. I didn’t know this problem existed. I assumed that there were crappy fakes out there. Right. Like, I assume there are crappy tourist fakes at the really cheap tourist shops, but what I don’t assume is that there are full carvings being done in another country and brought over and sold in, like, legitimate galleries. Yeah, it used to be a little more like you get the tourist trinkets and stuff like that that people kind of expect to be reproductions and all that, but now it’s so much easier to get stuff produced overseas.

Jordan Right.

Jason Hunt So now it’s become I think a lot of the sellers are like, why would I sell it as a reproduction for 10% of the price that I could get? If I sell it as authentic, I can get way more money. So the incentive is there for them to create a story.

Jordan Well, Jason, thank you for sharing yours with us, and hopefully people be on the lookout for this.

Jason Hunt Yeah, it’s an uphill battle for sure, but I’m hopeful that we’re edging things along in the right direction.

Jordan All right, fingers crossed. Thanks again.

Jason Hunt Thank you.

Jordan Jason Hunt, indigenous carver, fraud detective. That was the big story. For more head to the bigstorypodcast CA. Of course, you can talk to us anytime on Twitter, at thebigstoryFPN, or by email. Hello? At thebigstorypodcast CA, you can find this podcast. Wherever you get podcasts, you know the drill apple, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, podcasts, Castbox, etc, etc. Wherever you find it, leave a rating and leave a review. And if you want to listen on a smartphone speaker, just ask it to play The Big Story Podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Have a great weekend. We’ll talk Monday.